I’ve been looking for some cite info, but I’m not getting far. (Damn customers!) I heard about the simpleton issue on a PBS special. I have heard nothing about Dolphins and can’t quite make the connection… was the Pope a Bears fan?
I got this information from a book called “Galileo and the Dolphins”. I don’t know how reliable the information is, however, it states that the French word for dolphin is dauphin, the same word used to refer to the heir of the French throne, who at the time was a Protestant.
Can anyone comment on this?
RMentock and I discussed this very subject in 1997 on the usenet group alt.fan.cecil-adams. We mostly discussed smoothness, as opposed to out-of-round, but he contacted Brunswick and learned that their spec is that any diameter of a cue ball can vary no more than 0.002 inches from that ball’s average diameter (nominally 2.25 inches). That’s a ratio of 0.0009.
The Earth is out-of-round by about 24 miles out of 4000, for a ratio of 0.006. So the Earth is approximately ten times more oblate than a cue ball. Still, I think, if you held a defective cue ball that’s exactly as out of round as the Earth, you’d never notice.
Though I expect it wouldn’t take an expert player to know it was off after shooting a few games with it.
Yes, though I don’t think the following is going to clear anything up …
The complaint about the “dolphins” is mentioned in exactly one document: a long letter dated August 7th 1632 from Filippo Magalotti to Galileo reporting on a conversation he’d had with Niccolo Riccardi about the Dialogo. Magalotti was a well-connected - one of his relatives was married to the Pope’s eldest brother - friend in Rome. Meanwhile, as Master of the Sacred Palace in the city, Riccardi was responsible for licencing the book. As a result, there’d been a long series of back-and-forth negotiations between him and Galileo about the drafts and what had to be changed or included to allow the book to appear. Having now seen the book in print, Magalotti says that Riccardi is worried that “great offence had been taken at the emblem” on the frontispiece and wants to round up all the copies he can. (All the translations from the letter will be from Giorgio de Santillana’s version.)
Magalotti’s entire tone in this part of the letter is bewilderment and he obviously thinks that Riccardi must be taking the piss or something. He’d barely noticed the emblem on the copies he’d seen and thought nothing of it. Completely unsure of what the problem is, he recalls that it’s “three dolphins holding each other’s tails in their mouths, with I know not what motto.” He tried convincing Riccardi that the emblem had nothing to do with Galileo and was merely the printer’s usual trademark that he included on all his books. Riccardi has said that if he can see it on other volumes from the same printer, he’ll accept this.
The first question, obviously, is what is the emblem and motto? You can see it at the bottom of the frontispiece, though you can’t make out the details on that page. It also appears, rather more clearly, at the bottom of the title page. Now, I have to say that to my eye - and looking at better reproductions of it in print - those look like plain fish, rather than dolphins. The various Galileo scholars that I know of who’ve commented on the issue all agree. They’re fish.
As far as I can tell, the motto is “Grandior ut proies”. Great when thrown forth?
The next question is: can we finger Landino, the printer? Well, yes, since there’s “G.B.L” incorporated in the bottom of the wreath. His initials. (I don’t know if anyone has ever checked his other productions to see if this is, as Magalotti suggested, on them as well.)
That leaves the big puzzle. What the hell was the reason for the “great offence”? I think we can rule out a suspected reference to the Dauphin. They’re not dolphins. The only reason to bring them into the issue is that those as what Magalotti mentions. But he admits that he hasn’t seen the book for a while and had never paid attention to the emblem. It may just be that Riccardi thought they were dolphins and thus mentioned them and that’s what’s put the thought into Magalotti’s mind, but that’s assuming that we can read an otherwise obscured glimmer of truth through confusion by both of them.
The nearest Magalotti - who, remember, is baffled by what Riccardi’s problem is - comes to giving a clue is the following remark: “I though I could assure him that Signor Galileo was not the man to hide great mysteries under such puerilities and that he had said what he meant clearly enough.” One or two writers have taken this to indicate that Riccardi was reading some occult reference into the motto. Meanwhile, Mario d’Addio has suggested that he saw it as “a hostile allusion to the ecclesiastical authorities”.
Frankly, nobody seems to have come up with a plausible explanation of what was bothering Riccardi. Personally, he comes across as the minor bureaucrat caught up in an affair that’s blowing up in his face for reasons beyond his control and he’s panicing.
Incidentally, the only explicit instance of a contemporary suggesting that Urban was being insultingly identified with Simplicio was, again, Riccardi. His complaint on that score is again known of via a conversation with Magalotti, reported in a follow-up letter a few weeks later.
I’m not sure whether this is what you want confirmed, but yes - the French word for dolphin is un dauphin, the same word as used to be used for the eldest son of the French king.
Ok, my 2¢:
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Actually, if you start with the assumption that the Earth is flat, then the math says that the sun is 4000 miles above the stick that has no shadow at noon.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Anyway, given that the Earth IS round, Eratosthenes did get a pretty close estimate of the circumference of the Earth. -
To debunk the old “people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat” idea, you need look no further than that classic work of medieval cosmology, the Comedy of Dante Alighieri. It takes as a pivotal plot point in it’s second section (“Purgatory”) that in the “antipodes” (the hemisphere of the Earth opposite Europe, i.e., the southern hemisphere) that it would be daylight there when it is night in Europe, the noonday sun would be towards the north rather than the south, etc.
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The oblateness of the Earth actually does have a real-world consequence. If the Earth were a perfect sphere, a satellite launced into orbit would circle the Earth indefinitely in the same plane that it was originally launched into. (The Earth would rotate under it of course, but that’s different). However, since the Earth has an equatoral bulge, this has the effect of rotating the plane of a satellite’s orbit, and the direction of apogee if it’s an elliptical orbit, by an amount depending on the orbit’s inclination to the equator. In short, if you want to plan the ground track of the satellite, you must take this precession into account.
…which was, by the way, invented by Washington Irving in order to glorify Columbus.
Not about everything, though, for instance the tides. That coupled with obstinacy led to some of his problems.
I discussed out-of-round as well. 
OTOH, that Brunswick spec is for their better ball, and the rules allow a lot more leeway, .005 I think, but still not enough.
As HooDoo Ulove notes, the earth is oblate, rather than prolate. Not very oblate, as the billiard ball discussion shows, but it’s a matter of 20 kilometers difference in radius from pole to equator. The difference in radius of the so-called pear shape is only around ten or twenty meters.
Worse, it’s not even much of a pear shape. The pear shape is from the third degree spherical harmonics, one of which is a pear shape, but there are a few third degree spherical harmonics of the earth’s shape that are even bigger than its pear shape. But the pear shape is the only axially symmetric one, so it was the only one measured in the early sixties.
Thought experiment time…
Assume a very different universe in which the Earth acually is flat, and the sun a ball of fire which passes overhead daily. How would things look different to the inhabitants of this world?
Differences that I can think of offhand:
No horizon. The distance you can see is limited only by interveneing terrain and atmospheric haze.
No time zones. The entire world should experience day and night at the same time. Although observers on different parts of the world may see the sun in different parts of the sky, depending on its height above the world.
No coriolis effect. Which means that large storm systems won’t naturally rotate. Weather patterns may be very different.
How else would the world look different?
You are not considering clearly the difference between a finite and an infinite flat world.
You have also not considered the issue of gravity.
Nonsense. It’s well known that a magical field strong enough to allow such a world would slow down light, and sunlight would reach different parts of the world at different times. So there will be time zones.
In the absense of such a magical field, a flat world the size of Earth would collapse instantly under its own gravity.
Explain. Obviously, gravity would work differently in such a world; presumably it would be a uniform field with a universal up and down, rather than a field which pulls towards the center of the earth and falls off with the square of distance. The hypothetical flat world would not nessecarily have to be infinite in extent; it could be considered as a finite flat plane suspended in space, surrounded by nothingness, or bounded by the celestrial crystal sphere outside of which the sun passes. An infinite flat would would raise the question of where the sun goes during the night; does it vanish into an underground tunnel or cavern, or does it simply shut off or cease to exist?
I remembered this was later mentioned in a staff report from several years back, and I realized that there was something wrong with CurtC’s numbers.
It’s actually a bit more than 24 miles out of 8000 miles, on the diameters, so the tolerance is 8000 +/- 12 miles, which gives a ratio of .0015. That’s worse than that “better” Brunswick ball, but still within the rules tolerance. So, it probably would take an expert player to notice the difference.
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