Galileo Starry Messenger Essay

In Galileo’s The Starry Messenger, the speaker is Galileo himself. He asserts that he is the speaker by using the personal pronoun “I”; this approach to a scientific report is very upfront and emphasizes that he is the one that made these discoveries. The way he uses his tone of voice is intentional, he is publicly stating that these are his findings and he is showing confidence in an idea that was not generally accepted. This passage is relatively close to the beginning of this report. In this paragraph, he is describing how the surface of the moon is in fact not a smooth surface but is much more akin to Earth, and is even made of the same materials. This is one of the first findings he presents in this piece and it is a crucial one to start

Going against the Ptolemaic model of the universe, especially in the way Galileo articulated it, was highly offensive. However, in this statement, he is showing how confident he is of this hypothesis and he is willing to prove it with his experiments and figures. The passage also denies the idea of a “perfect” heavens and the notion that the moon is made of quintessence. It directly disproved the Ptolemaic view that the heavens are a perfect entity. He does this by describing how the moon looks at different stages of the moon cycle; you can see different variations as the sun casts shadows across the face of the moon. He describes it in depth by saying “The large spots in the moon are also seen to be less elevated than the brighter tracts, for whether the moon is waxing or waning there are always seen…” (Galileo) Additionally, he refers to the illustrations that depict this phenomenon from different points in the moon cycle. These illustrations were vital to helping the everyday person at the time conceive the abstract concepts he wrote

Few people were literate aside from those that ran the church and were in power, so they would be the ones teaching about science. However, what Galileo wanted to do with this piece was to make it as accessible as possible to the public. It is written in simple language and contains diagrams and illustrations that would be easy for people to understand. It also allowed people to replicate his experiments or understand how he did them so that they knew how verifiable his findings were. It was also so simple and easily understandable that the church couldn’t misconstrue it and use it to their own advantage, so they saw this as a serious threat. It also made those who were not in power more equal, as they became more knowledgeable and understood as much about the universe as anyone else. They would no longer have to rely on the church for knowledge due to the sheer accessibility of the language of this