Galle, Galle is watching a chandelier.

Galileo Galilei is watching a chandelier.

He's a young man sitting in a pew in a cathedral in Pisa, and he should be paying attention

to the mass.

But instead, he's watching the chandelier, swinging back and forth, back and forth.

And no matter how far it swings, the time it takes stays steady.

Galileo knows this because it's a perfect match for his heartbeat, and it stays in perfect

time.

This story comes from one of Galileo's students.

It may be apocryphal, we don't know, but it manages to capture Galileo well.

Galileo, the inexhaustible observer, Galileo the experimenter, Galileo the accidental heretic.

Galileo left behind many things after his death in 1642.

His legacy is, well, he's Galileo.

His works considered the beginning of modern astronomy, of physics, of what we might consider

science.

Galileo left behind physical things, too.

His compasses, the telescope he used to draw the craters on the moon, and Galileo left

behind one more thing.

Something I stumbled across back in 2007, well exploring a history of science museum in

Florence, Italy, they are among all of these magnificent scientific instruments.

There was this one small human fragment, kept in an egg-shaped shrine, and subjected to

the same treatment as a saintly relic.

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