Article ID: CBB001210192

Magnification: How to Turn a Spyglass into an Astronomical Telescope (2012)

unapi

According to the received view, the first spyglass was assembled without any theory of how the instrument magnifies. Galileo, who was the first to use the device as a scientific instrument, improved the power of magnification up to 30 times. How did he accomplish this feat? Galileo does not tell us what he did. We hold that such improvement of magnification is too intricate a problem to be solved by trial and error, accidentally stumbling upon a complex procedure. We construct a plausibility argument and submit that Galileo had a theory of the telescope. He could develop it by analogical reasoning based on the phenomenon of reflection in mirrors---as it was put to use in surveying instruments---and applied to refraction in sets of lenses. Galileo could appeal to this analogy and assume Della Porta's theory of refraction. He could thus turn the spyglass into a revolutionary scientific instrument---the telescope.

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Authors & Contributors
Giudice, Franco
Alcime Steiger
Bolton, Catherine
Émilie Dauphiné
Lupieri, Edmondo
Tabatabaei, Seyyed Hadi
Concepts
Telescopes
Instruments, astronomical
Astronomy
Science and religion
Cosmology
Instruments, navigational
Time Periods
17th century
16th century
Renaissance
19th century
18th century
Places
Italy
Europe
London (England)
Florence (Italy)
Germany
Iran
Institutions
Royal Astronomical Society
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome)
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