Word: galileo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...past five years, man has used the sophisticated instruments of the space age to learn more about the moon than he did during the 360 years that followed Galileo's pioneering look at the lunar surface through a telescope in 1609: Unmanned spacecraft have crashed into the moon, orbited it, measured it, and photographed it from every conceivable angle, giving man his first view of the lunar far side. Ingenious soft-landing spacecraft have dug into its soil and even chemically analyzed it by remote control...
BEGINNING WITH Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and Newton and his famous apple, there has been more fiction than truth in the popular conception of how scientists discover what they discover. And the conception of what motivates them to discover anything at all is equally mythical...
...choice of a first play, Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, to launch the new theater was symbolically correct. Houston is the nation's space center, and on opening night 30 of the U.S.'s 52 astronauts were present. They journey among the stars that Galileo peered at through his heretical telescope...
False Messiah. As Galileo, Tony van Bridge is far from the ravenous sensualist of thought that Brecht had in mind, a man as avid for "a new idea as for an old wine." He nibbles fastidiously at a part that calls for gorging. This glutton of the mind is an intellectual mercenary. He will retract theories, integrity and self-respect so long as he is paid off with his life. Knowledge is an appetite for him and not an unstained banner of loyalty to scientific inquiry or a mandate to kill the belief in God. He is the typical Brechtian...
...Galileo's 17th century use of the telescope to study the heavens spawned a host of moon stories. The Man in the Moone, written by Francis Godwin, Bishop of Llandoff, and published in 1638, offered a hero who was carried to his destination on a frail raft pulled by swans. Unaware of the vacuum in space, the traveler had no difficulty breathing on the trip, but he did find that his weight lessened as he left the earth. That remarkable scientific insight by Godwin preceded Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity by many years...