Eileen Reeves

An account of the crucial period between the development of the telescope in The Hague and when Galileo acquired the device less than a year later. Reeves seeks to revise the traditional interpretations of this period, focusing on what seems to have been Galileo's initial misunderstanding of what the telescope was and on certain distortions (intentional or otherwise) that kept knowledge of the invention from spreading as quickly as it otherwise might have done. A brief but extremely interesting study.… (more)