Galileo Galilei

New to Penguin Classics, the astonishing story of the Copernican Revolution, told through the words of the ground-breaking scientists who brought it about. 'How great, then, must be the incomprehensible space all the way to the furthest fixed stars? How wide and immense must be the depth of that fantastical sphere?' In the late fifteenth century, it was believed that...

This 1967 edition of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is a revision of a 1953 edition. It includes a foreword by Albert Einstein, which is presented in en face German and English versions. The translation itself is based on the definitive National Edition prepared under the direction of Antonio Favaro and published at Florence in 1897. The...

Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius is arguably the most dramatic scientific book ever published. It announced new and unexpected phenomena in the heavens, “unheard of through the ages,” revealed by a mysterious new instrument. Galileo had ingeniously improved the rudimentary “spyglasses” that appeared in Europe in 1608, and in the autumn of 1609 he pointed his new instrument at the sky,...