In philosophy this piece is also known for containing towards the end an influential early statement of the primary-secondary quality distinction (roughly, the view that qualities like color, odor, taste, hot/cold, sound ('secondary qualities' as Locke later calls them) are subjective in some important sense in which qualities like shape, size, motion, ('primary qualities') are not):

> Now I say that whenever I conceive any material or corporeal substance, I immediately feel the need to think of it as bounded, and as having this or that shape; as being large or small in relation to other things, and in some specific place at any given time; as being in motion or at rest ... But that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and of sweet or foul odor, my mind does not feel compelled to bring in as necessary accompaniments. Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness.

Galileo refers in this to a book he had published earlier, the "Starry Messenger". It is well worth reading.

Galileo had just build the first ever telescope and he describes what he has discovered: there are incredibly more stars than can be seen by the naked eye; Jupiter has satellites; there are mountains on the moon and he has figured out their height from the length of their shadows... The book is full of the quiet excitement of a man who has discovered a new world, and seen what no man had seen before.

https://archive.org/details/siderealmessenge80gali/page/6/mo...

No surprise that Galileo made enemies while some of his thoughts on math are spot on, he really underestimated Sersi throughout the work, who himself was a math professor.

On the nature of comets - looks like Sersi was nearer to the Truth compared to Galileo

Galileo was definitely a hostile/belligerent character.

Plus, a lot of his claims turned out to be pretty wrong, yet he stated them with such absolute confidence, which didn’t help his case at all.

In comparison people like Da Vinci, Newton were more politically/socially savvy. They knew how/when/where to communicate (relatively speaking)

This says it's an abridged translation. I wonder what the original was called; "Assayer" is an English word, and Galileo would have been writing in Italian or Latin, neither of which I think would pose much difficulty in reading.

Il Saggiatore, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assayer.

> The Assayer (Italian: Il Saggiatore) is a book by Galileo Galilei, published in Rome in October 1623. It is generally considered to be one of the pioneering works of the scientific method, first broaching the idea that the book of nature is to be read with mathematical tools rather than those of scholastic philosophy, as generally held at the time. Despite the retroactive acclaim given to Galileo's theory of knowledge, the empirical claims he made in the book—that comets are sublunary and their observed properties the product of optical phenomena—were incorrect.[1]

Original text, printed in 01623, in Italian, at https://archive.org/details/ilsaggiatorenelq00gali, at least until the Archive is destroyed. (Pirate your PDFs while they're hot!) There are some other scans, but they are much inferior. The scanner comments, "First issue, second state. Without the poems by Johann Faber and Francesco Stelluti in praise of Galileo." This was scanned just three months ago from the collection of the University of Toronto. It's 250 pages, so this 56-page abridged translation is very abridged indeed.

The first sentence from the abridged translation is found on the 11th page, after the dedication to the new Pope:

> Io non hò mai potuto intendere Illuſtriſſimo Sig. onde ſia nato, che tutto quello; che de’miei ſtudi, per aggradire, ò feruire altrui, m'è convenuto metter’in publico; abbia incontrato in molti una certa animoſità in detrarre, defraudare, e vilipendere quel poco di pregio che,ſe non per l’opera, almeno per l’intenzion mia m’era creduto di meritare.

Italian has evidently changed a lot less than English since 01623, because Google Translate renders this as follows, which seems almost entirely in agreement with Drake's translation:

> I have never been able to understand, Most Illustrious Sir, where it came from, that all that I have had to make public of my studies, to please or hurt others, has encountered in many a certain animosity in detracting, defrauding, and vilifying that little bit of respect that, if not for the work, at least for my intention, I believed I deserved.

Where it differs, I'm a little bit puzzled as to why Drake chose the translation he did—aggradire seems clearly to be "hurt" (the English cognate is "aggress", or current Spanish agredir) rather than "please", as Drake renders it.

Ha, and I thought LKML could be spicy!