Air Water Syringe

Nearly four hundred years ago, in a patchwork of fiefdoms individual we now call Italy, a revolution of ideas is hard to take place. The traditional way of understanding how the world works - through a combination of divine revelation and abstract reasoning - had begun to come under attack by a new race. These people called themselves "natural philosophers" because the word "scientific" has not yet been invented. To see how the world worked, they did not sit down and talk. They went out and looked. It was not an approach that was likely to appeal to the Church, home of the received wisdom, or with its instruments - the inquisitors whispering with their hotline back to Rome. Now, a natural philosopher had fallen very ill these inquisitors and was forced to cease its investigations on the structure of the heavens. His name was Galileo Galilei, and our story begins with him.

Convent of the Minerva, Rome
June 22, 1633

Me, Galileo Galilei, son of Vincenzo Galilei the end, Florence, aged seventy years, questioned in person before the tribunal, and kneeling before you, the most eminent and reverend Cardinals, Inquisitors general against the heretic depravity throughout the whole Christian Republic. . . were made by the Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and immovable and that the earth is not the center and moves:

Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of the Cardinals, and all faithful Christians, this strong suspicion, reasonably conceived against me, with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse and detest the errors heresies and above. . . and I swear that in future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that could provide the opportunity for a similar suspicion about me.

As the great Galileo rose knees at the end of this infamous, and forced withdrawal, he would have muttered "Eppur si muove!" ("And yet it moves!"). He knew in her heart that moves the Earth around the Sun, despite what the Inquisitors had been told. However, deeply religious, as he was, he had no taste for defying his own church. He did not want to share the fate of the unfortunate monk Giordano Bruno, who a few decades earlier, had been publicly burned for having similar views. Galileo has been the most famous philosopher in all Italy, but he knew that in itself would not save him from the fire.

And if he was now seventy years old, frail, and steadily losing his sight, he was not yet ready to die. He had damaged eyes staring through a telescope at the wonders he himself had discovered: blemishes that appeared periodically on the surface of the sun, craters on the moon moons ago, but distinct circling the planet (Jupiter who would have thought that other planets could have moons of their own?), and the stars that nobody knew existed. Now, before cataract and glaucoma finally clouded his sight, in secret if he had one last task to complete. Galileo had seen the "process" to come, he had known for some time that he could continue his study of the sky. So for a few years he had been quietly changing course, turning inward of her attention to the Earth itself. And, despite failing eyesight, he was about to change our way of seeing the substance apparently most common in the world: air.

The Inquisitors knew nothing of this. They were satisfied with his withdrawal, and decided, graciously, to spare his life. This would be allowed to return to his villa at Arcetri Florence, but he must understand that he was still considered dangerous and are therefore placed under house arrest. There would be no visitors.