LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Galileo: Galileo Project
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Summoned to Rome to account for his publication, Galileo recanted on 22 June 1633. Although depressed and humiliated by this turn of events, he soon focused on the Two New Sciences Pertaining to Mechanics and Local Motions. Published in Leiden in 1638, his last great work is in dialogue form, and again involves Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio. The product of a warring age, it is set in Venice's arsenal, the site of the republic's shipbuilding and munitions production. It has as one focus the "supernatural violence" with which projectiles are fired, presents the legendary burning mirrors of antiquity as plausible weapons, discusses at length notions of impact and resistance, is dedicated to a member of the noblesse d'épée, and refers to the battlefield death of one of Galileo's former students and fellow experimenters. That said, the Two New Sciences ... attend to nonmilitary matters such as the void, the speed of light, the principle of the balance, musical intervals, the role of scale in very large structures or animals, uniformly accelerated or natural motion, and the Platonic "creation point."
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In 1633 Galileo was compelled to abjure and was sentenced to life imprisonment, which was swiftly commuted to house arrest. The Dialogue was ordered to be burned and the sentence against was to be read publicly in every university in Italy. Imprisoned at his farm in the hills surrounding Florence, Galileo's was becoming increasingly frail and his sight was failing. Nevertheless, it was here that he wrote his most important scientific work, Discourses Concering Two New Sciences, which was published in Holland in 1638. Dealing with falling bodies and the path of projectiles it laid the foundations for modern kinematics.
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The following years saw Galileo move on to work on other projects. He watched the movements of Jupiter's moons, wrote them up as a list, and then came up with a way to use these measurements as a navigation tool. There was even a contraption that would allow a ship captain to navigate with his hands on the wheel. That is, assuming the captain didn't mind wearing what looked like a horned helmet!
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