The coordination of time in Galileo’s experiments

L' ISP, le centre centre CEFISES, et le groupe de contact FNRS OLOFOS ((Onto-)LOgical Frameworks Of Science) ont le plaisir de vous inviter à la quatrième séance du séminaire OLOFOS de cette année, dont le thème général sera :

"Scientific modelization: content and convention".

Quatrième séance: " The coordination of time in Galileo’s experiments"

Conférencier: Maarten Van Dyck, UGent

Répondant : Kévin Chalas, UCLouvain

Argumentaire : 

When Poincaré introduced his conventionalist ideas, the measurement of time was one of his prime examples. In my talk I will use the puzzles that he raised to have a fresh look at the historical development of Galileo’s research that led to the establishment of the law of fall - a law that crucially involves time as a mathematical parameter. Galileo’s attempts at mathematically modeling phenomena of motions required him to find informative ways to coordinate physical events with a postulated uniform flow of time, and this in the absence of any well-developed theory. I will show how this coordination was the result of a temporally extended process that involved the construction of multiple relations between different phenomena: the descend of balls along inclined planes, the swinging motion of pendulums, the shape of projectiles, the flow of water, and finally some basic astronomical phenomena.