We are all superhuman now

I've finished reading Galileo's Dialogue, but it will be a while before I've said all I have to say about it. First this.

While much of the Dialogue concerns philosophy -- both epistemology and metaphysics, the latter necessarily with some circumspection -- Galileo of course had the ultimate weapon, his telescope. It was no longer viable to argue from some presumed first principles to discover the place of the earth in the cosmos. Anyone who looked through the telescope would be forced to concede the truth.

For some reason it's widely known that Galileo observed the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter. But the killer observation came because he could resolve the disks of Mars and Jupiter. They appeared many times larger when opposite the sun, and hence close to the earth, than when they were near the sun, and so much farther away. That is all you need to know beyond doubt that the earth cannot be at the center of the solar system.

The church authorities, famously, refused to look through the telescope. Galileo's most important contribution to the scientific revolution was not so much his radical epistemology and his scientific imagination. These were not unique to him, although he was certainly among the pioneers. It was his application of a newly invented instrument to observation of the natural world.

Like Copernicus, who intuited the cosmos, Darwin needed only his senses and his reason to derive evolution. But we could not really understand evolution, and sweep away all objections, until biochemistry and X-ray crystallography enabled people to elucidate the mechanism of inheritance and demonstrate descent and relatedness among species directly. Although biologists still go out and just look at stuff, most scientific research nowadays depends on tools that enormously extend and magnify human senses, and now, with computers, the human intellect.

There is a massive structure of machinery and inference through which knowledge flows to us. And I admit, you have to trust it. Back in Galileo's time, people objected that the telescope was somehow distorting reality. Nobody doubts telescopes any more, but there are still plenty of people who doubt scientific conclusions. And being convinced is no longer quite as simple as looking through the telescope. Scientists don't even really understand each other's work, after all. They have to trust each other. But they do because it pays off. Applying physics and chemistry to biology and astronomy pays off. It all fits together. It works.