So I want you to close your eyes for just a second.
Picture a really massive, just incredibly ornate
lecture hall. It is 1613. We are in the Republic
of Venice, specifically at the University of
Padua. And this place, I mean, this is essentially
the Harvard or the Oxford or the MIT of the 17th
century. The wood in the room is dark. The air
probably smells like. You know, beeswax and old
parchment. And the room is just completely packed.
Students are everywhere. They're murmuring. They're
waiting. It's a really high stakes environment,
too. You have to remember, you've got students
from all over Europe in that room. German princes,
Polish nobility, the sons of Italian merchants.
They are there to learn from the absolute best.
Exactly. And for the last 18 years, the absolute
best has been a guy named Galileo Galilei. He
is the rock star. He's the man who just a few
years prior to this pointed a telescope at the
sky and realized that Jupiter has moons, that
the moon has mountains, that the Milky Way is
literally made of individual stars. He didn't
just teach the curriculum. He completely revolutionized
the entire subject. He was a celebrity in the
truest, most modern sense of the word. He was
charismatic. He was incredibly controversial.
And because of all that, he filled the seats.
But now he's gone. He got a better offer. The
Medici family down in Florence offered him a
position as the court mathematician, which meant
more money. Absolutely no teaching duties and
full freedom to just do his research. So he packed
up his lenses and his loot and he left. Leaving
just a massive gaping vacuum behind him at Padera.
A vacuum that somebody has to fill. So I want
you to imagine you were the guy they hired to
replace him. Oh man. You have to walk into that
specific lecture hall, stand behind Galileo's
actual podium, Look out at this sea of students
who basically worshiped the ground Galileo walked
on and say alright everyone settle down I am
the new guy that is the literal definition of
a tough gig that is just professional suicide
waiting to happen It really is and today we are
doing a deep dive into the life of the man who
actually took that job His name was Giovanni
Camillo Glorioso. And if you were out there scratching
your head thinking, you know, I have never heard
of this person in my life. You are definitely
not alone. Not at all. History just has this
way of putting all the spotlights on the mass
of revolutionaries and leaving the people who
have to come in and clean up after them entirely
in the dark. Which is really a shame because
Glorioso wasn't just some some substitute teacher
keeping the seat warm. He was a Titan in his
own right. He was this incredibly rigorous mathematician,
a brilliant observational astronomer. And as
we are definitely going to find out today, a
man with a very, very short fuse. Oh, the fuse.
We are absolutely going to talk about that fuse
because this deep dive isn't just going to be
about math equations and dry star charts, it
is about the scientific blood sports of the 1600s.
Blood sport is exactly the right word for it.
I mean, we tend to romanticize this era. We think
of it as this time of polite discourse, right?
Gentlemen scholars sipping wine and quietly discussing
the cosmos. Right, very civilized. But the reality
was so much grittier than that. It was a time
of incredibly vicious pamphlets, wild accusations
of plagiarism, and these deeply personal feuds
that lasted until one of the participants died,
and in some cases even continued after they were
dead. Yeah, we have a stack of sources here to
go through that are honestly just... wild. We
have letters, we have these scientific treatises
with titles that literally sound like death metal
albums. We have the actual mathematical proofs
that help force the transition from the Middle
Ages into the modern scientific era. Our mission
today is to essentially resurrect Giovanni Camillo
Glorioso for you. We want to see this incredibly
volatile world through his eyes, the eyes of
the successor. We want to understand what it
actually takes to hold your ground when you are
standing in the shadow of a giant like Galileo.
And we really want to unpack how the truth of
science is actually forged. It's not just these
neat little eureka moments. It is decades of
arguing, checking the math and dealing with colleagues
you absolutely cannot stand. Let's strip away
the Galileo mythos for a minute and look at the
man who followed him. Where does a guy like Glorioso
even come from? What is the origin story of the
person brave enough or maybe crazy enough to
replace Galileo? To really understand Glorioso,
you have to mentally map out Italy in the late
16th century. He was born in 1572, way down in
the Kingdom of Naples. Now, Kingdom of Naples
sounds very grand, but we're talking about the
deep south of Italy, right? We are. Specifically,
he was born in a small place called Monte Corvino
Ravella. It's new Salerno. So he is very far
removed from these bustling northern power centers
like Venice or Florence. He was a southern Italian
boy growing up in an era where those regional
differences dictate almost everything about your
prospects. In 1572, that puts him squarely in
this weird generation that straddles the very
old world and the brand new one. Exactly. He
is only eight years younger than Galileo, so
they are effectively contemporaries. But Glorioso
is just slightly behind the curve chronologically,
which means he is coming of age in a world that
is already starting to crack open intellectually.
The old rules are just starting to show some
stress fractures. Well, let's talk about how
he was educated, because looking at his resume
and the sources, He did not start out as a mass
prodigy. No, and almost nobody did back then.
You didn't just go off to the university to become
a scientist. That word didn't even exist yet.
Right, natural philosophy was the closest thing.
Exactly. So, Glorioso actually earned his initial
degrees in philosophy and theology from the University
of Naples. Why was that the standard prerequisite?
Why not just jump into the numbers? Because before
you could measure the physical world, you had
to understand what the physical world fundamentally
was. Philosophy provided the absolute framework,
which was almost entirely Aristotelian physics
at that point. And theology provided the why.
The ultimate cause. Right. The mindset was that
you had to understand the creator's intent before
you had any business looking at the creation's
mechanics. If you just jumped straight to math
without that deep philosophical grounding, you
were viewed as just a calculator. You were a
technician, not a true scholar. Okay, so he gets
the foundational degrees. He knows his Aristotle
inside and out. He knows the theology. But then
he takes a hard pivot. He does. He enters the
orbit of the Jesuits. He studied mathematics
specifically at the Jesuit College in Naples.
And he trained under two really key figures there,
Vincenzo Filiucci and Giovanni Giacomo Stasario.
We really need to pause on the Jesuits for a
second here, because when we hear the word Jesuit
today, we might just think of a specific Catholic
religious order, maybe high schools or universities.
But in the 1600s, in the context of science and
math, what did it mean to be trained? by the
Jesuits. It meant you were dealing with the absolute
intellectual special forces of the era. The Jesuits
were the undisputed educational elite of the
Catholic world. They utilized this curriculum
called the ratio studiorum, and it was incredibly
brutally rigorous. Especially in the sciences.
Yes. In mathematics specifically, they were strict
followers of Christopher Clavius. He's the guy
who basically fixed the calendar, right? Exactly.
He was the architect of the Gregorian calendar
that the entire world uses today. And the Jesuit
mathematical tradition that Calavius built was
completely obsessed with precision. They focused
heavily on Euclidean geometry, an absolute watertight
logical proof. So no guessing? None. They despised
hand waving. They didn't like vague poetic theories
about how the universe might work. They demanded
mathematical rigor. So if you studied with the
Jesuits, like Glorioso did, you came out with
a brain that was essentially wired to find errors.
You were trained to spot the flaw in someone
else's logic. That feels like a totally crucial
character trait for Glorioso. He is basically
trained from the ground up to be a debugger of
the universe. Debugger is the perfect way to
put it. He is a debugger. And that specific intellectual
training totally sets the stage for his future.
with a guy like Galileo. So how did the two of
them actually cross paths initially? Is it like
a fan meeting is idle? Not really, no. It was
much more of a peer -to -peer dynamic. You have
to remember the scientific community in Italy
at this time was tiny. It was a very small club.
Right. Everyone wrote letters to everyone else.
Glorioso was already part of this respected mathematical
circle that included guys like Marino Gattaldi
and Antonio Santini. These are very serious,
heavy -hitting mathematicians. So Glorioso and
Galileo corresponded. They were friendly enough.
Glorioso was very much in the club. So the powers
that be at Padua, they know who he is. He's a
known quantity. He's smart. He has the theological
credentials, and he has that intense Jesuit mathematical
rigor. Right. And then comes 1613, the great
pivot point. Galileo takes the posh job in Florence.
The chair of mathematics at Padua suddenly opens
up. And we cannot overstate this. The chair of
mathematics at Padua was arguably the most prestigious
academic post for a mathematician anywhere in
Europe at the time. Padua was under the direct
protection of the Republic of Venice. It was
wealthy. It was powerful. And crucially, it was
slightly more secular and independent than the
rest of Italy. So you could push the envelope
a little bit more there. Exactly. It was a known
safe haven for free thinkers. Well, up to a point
anyway. And what about the compensation? The
salary was actually quite significant, even though
Galileo was famous for constantly complaining
that it wasn't enough. But the prestige, that
was the real currency. To be the mathematics
professor at Padrow was to be the undisputed
voice of authority. So the university makes Gloriosa
the offer. He accepts it, he leaves the south,
and moves up north to Venice. He takes the chair.
I really want to circle back to the psychological
aspect of this, though. because Galileo was,
at his core, a massive showman. Oh, absolutely.
He intentionally wrote his dialogues in vernacular
Italian so the common merchants could read them,
not just the Latin -speaking elites. He cracked
jokes. He was incredibly charismatic. Glorioso,
based on his Jesuit background, sounds like he
was much more, I don't know... He was entirely
by the book, and honestly, I think that is the
exact reason he survived the transition. What
do you mean? Well, if he had walked into that
lecture hall and tried to play the role of Galileo
2 .0, he would have failed miserably. You simply
cannot out -charisma a generational celebrity.
The students would have eaten him alive. Instead,
Glorioso did a hard pivot to pure unadulterated
competence. He leaned into the math. Exactly.
He positioned himself as the very serious, highly
rigorous academic who wasn't going to try and
dazzle you with optical magic tricks, but who
was going to teach you the absolute unbreakable
truth of geometry. So he was the eat your vegetables
professor compared to Galileo's dessert first
approach. In a lot of ways, yes. But we also
have to remember he was stepping into an act
war zone. By 1613, the conflict between the traditional
Aristotelian view of the universe and the new
telescopic observations was getting incredibly
hot, and Glorioso walked right into the dead
center of it. And he clearly didn't just keep
his head down and teach the syllabus. He got
straight to work. Let's dig into his actual astronomy,
because the outline from our sources points to
a very specific event that really defined his
early tenure at Padua, and that is the Great
Comet of 1618. This was just a massive culture
-stopping event. Late in the year 1618, three
different comets appeared in the sky in succession.
And the third one was absolutely spectacular.
It was huge. It was incredibly bright. And it
was visible for weeks on end. Literally everyone
saw it. Kings, peasants, the pope. Everyone.
And naturally, because it's the 17th century,
everyone immediately starts arguing about what
it actually is. Right. And to fully grasp why
this was such a bitter argument, we have to do
a very quick crash course in Aristotelian cosmology.
Please lay it on us. OK. So Aristotle's physics
had basically ruled the intellectual world for
2 ,000 years at this point. And his system states
that the universe is strictly divided into two
distinct zones. Zone one is everything below
the orbit of the moon. They called this the sublunar
sphere. This includes the Earth, our oceans,
and our atmosphere. And Aristotle said this entire
zone is made up of four elements, Earth, water,
air, and fire. The classic four. Right. And the
key feature of zone one is that it is fundamentally
imperfect. Things down here change, they grow,
they die, they rot, they burn, they decay. Chaos
and unpredictable change are perfectly allowed
in the sublunar zone. Got it. Zone one is messy
and mortal. Exactly. Now, zone two is everything
above the moon. The moon itself, the sun, the
planets, the fixed stars. Aristotle insisted
that the superlunar zone is completely different.
It is made of a mysterious fifth element called
the quintessence. And what's the rule for the
quintessence? The rule is perfection. This material
is crystalline. flawless and most importantly
it is completely immutable. Immutable meaning
it literally never changes ever. Never. The heavens
are eternal they operate like perfect frictionless
clockwork. According to this physics nothing
new can ever be created up there and nothing
that is up there can ever be destroyed. Okay
so suddenly enter the Great Comet of 1618. Right
here is this giant blazing streak of fire that
just appears completely out of nowhere, moves
erratically across the sky, visibly changes its
shape over several weeks, and then completely
vanishes. If you are a strict Aristotelian professor
whose entire career is based on the heavens being
unchanging, that comet is your absolute worst
nightmare. It breaks the entire system. Because
if that comet is actually up in the heavens,
then the heavens are actively changing. And if
the heavens are changing, Aristotle is fundamentally
wrong. And if Aristotle is wrong about physics,
the entire theological mapping of the universe
that the Church has built up over centuries starts
to collapse. The stakes are just incredibly high.
So what did the Aristotelians actually say to
defend themselves? Did they just say, Don't look
up. They basically said, oh, it's not actually
in the heavens at all. They argued very forcefully
that comets were just weird atmospheric phenomena.
They called them exhalations. Exhalations. Yeah.
The theory was that they were essentially swamp
gas, just hot, dry Earth vapors that rose up
from the ground into the very upper, upper atmosphere,
but still firmly within zone one, the sub lunar
sphere. And they simply caught fire due to friction.
So they were trying to write off the most spectacular
astronomical event of the decade as just some
fancy weather. Exactly. It's just a sub lunar
fire. It's not a celestial body. Crisis averted.
But Glorioso didn't buy that explanation for
a second. Not for a second. Glorioso was a mathematician.
He trusted geometry, not ancient dogma. He, along
with a few other forward -thinking astronomers
like Tycho Bravo up in Denmark, decided to actually
measure the comet's position. And they used a
mathematical technique called parallax. OK, let's
break down parallax for the listener who maybe
hasn't thought about high school geometry in
a while. It's actually very intuitive. Hold your
thumb out at arm's length right now. Close your
left eye and look at where your thumb is relative
to the wall behind it. Okay, doing it. Now open
your left eye and close your right eye. Your
thumb appears to jump back and forth across the
background, right? Right, it shifts completely.
Now bring your thumb right up to touch your nose
and do the exact same thing. The jump is huge.
Massive jump. Exactly. But now, look out your
window at a building that's a mile away and blink
your eyes back and forth. The building doesn't
appear to move at all. Got it. So the closer
an object is to you, the more it appears to shift
against the background when you look at it from
two different angles. Precisely. So apply that
to the comet. If the comet is just swamp gas
burning in our local atmosphere, meaning it's
very close to the Earth, then astronomers observing
it from widely different parts of Europe should
see it in significantly different positions against
the background of the fixed stars. Because they
represent the two different eyes blinking. Right.
But if the comet is incredibly far away out,
among the planets in the heavens, then the shift,
the parallax, will be practically zero. So, Glorioso
actually sat down and crunched these numbers.
He did. He made his own rigorous observations
of the comet from Padua. He collected the observational
data from other astronomers across Europe. He
did the math, and he found no parallax. or at
least none that was measurable with their instruments.
Which conclusively means the comet is very, very
far away. It means it is millions of miles away.
It is absolutely without a dare in celestial
realm. Glorioso laid this all out in a major
work published in 1624 called De Cometis Dissertatio
Astronomico Physica. He effectively said, look,
the geometry does not lie. This object is currently
smashing its way right through your supposed
immutable crystal spheres. He was just driving
a math math. You was. But here is the massive
plot twist in all of this. Do you know who famously
got the comet issue completely wrong? Don't tell
me. Oh yeah. Galileo Galilei? No way. The guy
he replaced. The father of modern astronomy.
The very same. Galileo actually argued that comets
might just be weird optical illusions, sort of
like rainbows or strange reflections of sunlight
hitting atmospheric vapor. Galileo stubbornly
refused to accept Tycho Brahe's model of comets
as celestial bodies, mostly because he had his
own personal beef with Tycho's system. He got
completely caught up in his own rhetorical arguments
and missed the truth. That is genuinely fascinating.
It really humanizes the history of science. Yeah.
Just because you're an absolute genius doesn't
mean you bat a thousand on every issue. Exactly.
And it really highlights Glorioso's fierce independence.
He didn't just blindly echo whatever Galileo
said. He followed the hard data. He was a rigorous
his core. If the parallax calculation says the
comet is celestial, then it's celestial, period,
regardless of what Aristotle or Galileo thinks.
He was also heavily involved in watching the
planets, right? It wasn't just this one comet.
No, he was a very dedicated long -term observer.
He became particularly famous for his detailed
observations of Mars and Saturn. And we really
have to pause and remember what the word observation
actually meant back in the 1620s. It wasn't exactly
sitting in a climate -controlled room looking
at a computer monitor. Not even close. You are
standing outside on a stone tower in the freezing,
damp, Padua winter. You are looking through a
long, heavy, wooden tube fitted with hand -ground
glass lenses that probably have tiny bubbles
and imperfections in them, and you're trying
to sketch this tiny, blurry, constantly shivering
blob of light by the flickering light of a candle
before your hands go completely numb. It was
a test of physical endurance as much as it was
intellectual. It really was, and Glorioso did
the hard, unglamorous work night after night.
This just reinforces the reality that he wasn't
just a theorist sitting in an armchair. He was
a working, practicing astronomer. Let's shift
gears a little bit and talk about his other major
superpower, which was math. The source outline
explicitly calls him one of the leading Italian
algebraists of his time. Now I know listening
to two people talk about 17th century algebra
on a deep dive is usually a guaranteed cure for
insomnia, but there is actually something incredibly
cool here about the evolution of the language
of math. It is incredibly cool because the way
we do math today The basic symbols we take completely
for granted. They basically didn't exist yet.
Or at least they were just in the painful process
of being born. Right. Like today, if I want to
write down, say, A to the power of eight, I just
write the letter A and I put a tiny little eight
right next to it. Boom. Two characters. I'm done.
It's simple. It's efficient. It's universal.
But in the early 1600s, algebra was still desperately
trying to transition away from what historians
call a rhetorical style. Rhetorical meaning using
words instead of symbols. exactly they wrote
out complex mathematical problems in full grammatical
sentences so imagine trying to balance a complex
polynomial equation but you have to write it
out like you are writing a paragraph of prose
in an essay the unknown thing multiplied by itself
which is then added to the unknown thing cubed
is equal to the number 10 Yes. It was incredibly
maddeningly cumbersome. And the biggest problem
was that it made it almost impossible to visually
spot the underlying patterns, because you were
just drowning in a sea of Latin words. So the
top mathematicians of the era were desperately
trying to invent a shorthand, a new code to compress
the logic. And Glorioso was one of the guys writing
that code. He was. His major work in this specific
field was called Exorcitis Onum Mathematicaerum
Decades Tres, which he published in parts between
1627 and 1639. He was aggressively pushing for
a standardized, symbolic way to represent massive
exponential powers. Our sources give us a very
specific visual example of his notation. And
I have it to say, looking at it, it looks really
weird to modernize. It does look strange. It's
the string of letters capital A, lowercase q,
lowercase q, lowercase c, a, q, q, c. A, q, q,
c. It sounds like someone's sneezing, or just
a really terrible hand of Scrabble tiles. It
definitely does, but it's actually a very logical,
albeit clunky system once you understand the
rules he was playing by. Okay, decode at QQC
for us. What does it actually mean? It literally
translates to A to the eighth power. Okay, so
how on earth do you extract the number eight
from the letters QQC? You have to look at the
Latin roots of the words those letters stand
for. The Q stands for quadrato, which means squared.
The C stands for cubo, which means cubed. Okay,
squared and cubed. Two and three. Right. But
the system they were working with involved combining
these terms in a hierarchical way to build bigger
exponents. So a square, square, q, q would be
a variable squared and then squared again. So
x squared times x squared, which is x to the
fourth. Exactly. And then the c term, sometimes
referring to cubo or sometimes a related term
like census, depending on the exact regional
mathematical dialect, would modify that fourth
power, effectively multiplying the indices to
reach the eighth power. The specific mechanics
of how they stack these abbreviations were very
slightly from mathematician to mathematician,
but the core innovation is what matters. Glorioso
was systematically stacking these letters to
build a much larger number without writing a
sentence. So instead of writing out the unknown
quantity multiplied by its own value eight consecutive
times, he just jotted down AQC. Exactly. It's
all about data compression. It allowed him to
write these incredibly complex multivariable
equations on a single line of paper. It is literally
the difference between trying to to download
a movie on dial -up internet versus using fiber
optic broadband. It certainly wasn't perfect.
Obviously, our modern exponent notation is vastly
superior, but it was a massive necessary step
forward in the evolution of human thought. It's
just amazing to think that somebody actually
had to invent the way we physically write math
down. We just take it as a given, like the alphabet
or the wheel. But a guy like Gloria also had
to sit at his desk, look at a massive paragraph
of text and say, this is way too slow, we need
a better And by building that better tool, he
fundamentally sped up the global rate of scientific
discovery. Because if you can write your thoughts
faster and you can visually process the equation
faster, you can think faster. He also used his
math chops to tackle some of the classic impossible
problems of antiquity, right? The outline specifically
mentions squaring the circle. Ah, yes, squaring
the circle. This was the absolute white whale
of classical geometry. What is the actual challenge
there for the uninitiated? The challenge, which
goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks,
is to construct a square that has the exact same
area as a given circle but you are only allowed
to use a traditional compass and a straight edge
to draw it. No measuring rulers, no protractors.
Just arcs and straight lines. And spoiler alert
for anyone trying this at home, it is literally
impossible. It is mathematically impossible.
We know that for an absolute fact now because
the number pi is a transcendental number. You
simply cannot construct it geometrically using
only those two specific tools. But they did not
know that in the 1620s. So brilliant people wasted
years, sometimes their entire lives, obsessively
trying to solve it. And there was a guy named
Gian Battista De La Porta who very publicly claimed
he had finally done it. Right. De La Porta was
this very famous, very eccentric Neapolitan polymath.
He was a bit of a magician, a scientist, a playwright,
a real Renaissance man. And he published a work
claiming he had successfully squared the circle.
And Glorioso, true to form, stepped right in
to be the ultimate academic buzzkill. The ultimate
fact checker strikes again. Glorioso wrote a
blistering refutation. He basically took Delaporte's
supposedly perfect proof, tore it apart gear
by gear, and showed exactly mathematically where
the logic completely failed. He confuted him.
He seems to really, really enjoy proving other
people wrong. Like it seems to be his primary
love language. I think enjoy is probably an understatement.
I think he practically lived for it. Which brings
us perfectly to the most dramatic and honestly
the most entertaining part of Gloriosa's entire
life. Yes. Section four of our sources, the beefs.
The scientific blood sports. You know we think
of scientists today having an argument and maybe
they write a slightly passive aggressive peer
review or they subtweet each other. But in the
17th century they absolutely went for the throat.
It was a full -contact combat sport. Your public
reputation was literally everything. If someone
attacked your theory in print, they weren't just
questioning your math. They were attacking your
personal honor, your livelihood, and your basic
intelligence. You couldn't just take the high
road and let it slide. You had to completely
destroy them in the public square. And Glorioso
found his ultimate arch nemesis in a man named
Scioni Chiaramonti. Chiaramonti. He is either
the great villain of this story or the tragic
hero, depending entirely on how much sympathy
you have for Aristotle. Chiaramonti was a very
prominent philosopher from Sassina, and he was
the ultimate diehard defender of the old ways.
He was Team Aristotle all the way to the bitter
end. 100%. He fundamentally believed the Earth
was the center of everything, that the heavens
were in and that comets were just swamp gas.
He represented every single thing that Glorioso
was trying to mathematically disprove. So how
does this epic feud actually kick off? It started
with a book. Cura Monte published a major work
called De Tribus Novus Stellis, which translates
to On the Three New Stars. He was desperately
trying to use complex philosophical arguments
to explain away the recent supernovae and comets
in a way that would somehow save Aristotle's
physics. And Glorioso gets his hands on a copy.
He reads it and he absolutely hates it. He wrote
a formal critique of the book that the historical
sources describe as particularly harsh. He didn't
just point out that Cura Monte's math was a little
off. He heavily implied that the man was fundamentally
incompetent. Which... Obviously, Chiaramonte
is not going to take lying down. Of course not.
So Chiaramonte stews on it, does his own writing,
and in 1636, he fires back. He publishes a new
book specifically targeting Glorioso titled,
Examines Sensory Gloriosi. The examination of
Glorioso's censorship. It sounds a bit dry and
bureaucratic to us, but in the context of the
time, it was a brutal public takedown. He tried
to systematically dismantle Glorioso's mathematical
credentials. OK, so now it is 1637, round three
of the heavyweight bout. What does Glorioso do?
He massively escalates. He publishes his own
response volume and he titles it Castigatio Examinus.
Castigatio? Yes. It translates to the castigation.
Or, more directly, the punishment. The punishment
of the examination? That is amazing! He is literally
publicly disciplining Ciaramonti's book. He is
treating this respected philosopher like a naughty
little schoolboy who completely failed his arithmetic
test. That is just incredibly condescending.
I love the pettiness of it. Oh, it gets so much
better. Chiaramonte, seeing that he is now being
publicly punished, spends another year writing
yet another book. He publishes it in 1638, and
he titles it Castigazio Ioannis Camilli Gloriosi.
The punishment of Giovanni Camillo Glorioso.
He literally just takes the title and throws
it right back in his face. It is the extremely
highbrow 17th century equivalent of saying, no,
you are. But you have to imagine the sheer effort
involved here. These are not quick little tweets.
These are massive full -length Latin treatises.
They are filled with incredibly complex geometric
diagrams and dense logical arguments. They are
printed on very expensive paper, painstakingly
bound, and distributed via carriage all across
Italy. These two men are spending years of their
finite lives just to comprehensively insult each
other. It's pure obsession at this point. It
absolutely is. Glorioso tries to finally end
it and get the last word in 1641. He publishes
a book simply titled, You get the sense he's
just tired of it. He just wants to lay out the
final facts and settle the score permanently.
And then what happens? And then shortly after
that, Glorioso dies. It's 1643. So ding, ding,
ding. The fight is over. Glorioso rests in peace.
The debate is closed. You would think that. Any
normal person would think that. But Scipiano
Chiaramanti was a man of truly spectacular historical
pettiness. He literally waited until Glorioso
was safely dead and buried. And then, in 1644,
a full year after Glorioso's funeral, Chiaramante
published Opus Sabionis Claramontus Citanatus
De Universum. Which was what, exactly? It was
a massive 500 -page summary of his entire cosmological
philosophy. And right in the middle of it, he
formally declared total absolute victory over
Glorioso. He dropped a 500 -page brick of a book
on a ghost. He literally declared himself the
undisputed winner of the debate solely because
his opponent was no longer breathing and therefore
couldn't publish a rebuttal. It has to be one
of the ultimate cheap shots in the entire history
of science. But you know, it also really speaks
to the sheer desperation of the Aristotelians,
doesn't it? It absolutely does. Kirimanti wasn't
just fighting one Neapolitan mathematician. He
was fighting the entire tide of human history.
I think he knew deep down in his bones that the
observational data and the math were irrevocably
turning against Aristotle. He could feel the
walls of his universe closing in on him. So he
just shouted louder. He wrote longer, heavier
books. He tried to physically drown out the truth
with sheer volume. It's almost tragic in a way.
He spent his entire life fiercely defending a
worldview that was already dead. Well, Glorioso
spent his life building the new worldview, even
if he was kind of a jerk about how he did it.
And he wasn't just a jerk to Chiaramati, right?
He had plenty of other feuds going on simultaneously.
Oh, plenty. He fought bitterly with another scholar
named Fortunio Licchetti. And weirdly enough,
he even picked a massive fight with a Swiss mathematician
named Barthélemy Souvet. Who was Suve? Suve was
the guy they hired to replace Glorioso at Padua
when Glorioso finally retired. Wait, hold on.
So Glorioso takes the immense pressure of getting
the job after Galileo. He holds the chair successfully
for years. He finally retires. And then he immediately
starts heckling the new guy who took his place.
Yep. In 1630, Glorioso actually published a tract
called Responsio ad Venditius Bartholome Sovere.
It implies a very serious, very public conflict
between them. It seems Glorioso was incredibly
territory. He treated that chair of mathematics
at Padua like it was his own personal throne.
He simply couldn't stand seeing someone else
sit in it even after he had voluntarily left.
This just paints a picture of such a deeply complicated
man brilliant, rigorously scientific, incredibly
forward thinking, but also prickly, highly defensive
and maybe just a little bit deeply insecure about
his legacy. I think that's a very fair psychological
assessment. But you know, that insecurity or
maybe we should just call it an absolute obsession
with correctness. That specific trait led to
some of his most interesting historical moments,
which the outline refers to as his hot takes.
And this directly involves his famous predecessor,
Galileo. Right. Section five, the hot takes.
Because you would naturally think, having successfully
replaced Galileo and survived, Glorioso would
be his biggest hype man. Yes, I am proudly following
in the massive footsteps of the great, untouchable
genius. But he wasn't. At all. Glorioso absolutely
refused to be a sycophant. In fact, he actively
went out of his way to debunk some of the foundational
myths surrounding Galileo's legacy. There is
a very specific letter mentioned in the sources
dated May 29th, 1610. Right. This is quite early
on, a few years before he even took the Padua
job. He is writing a private letter to his good
friend, Johann Schreck. And in this letter, he
basically decides to completely fact check Galileo's
entire resume. What specifically does he go after?
Two major things. First, he goes after the sector.
Explain what the sector is for us. The sector
was a really brilliant physical calculation instrument.
Visually, it looked kind of like a compass. Two
flat metal rulers joined together by a hinge.
But it had all these very specific proportional
scales and markings engraved along the legs.
It was essentially the pocket calculator of the
Renaissance. What did they use it for? Everything.
You could use it to calculate complex compound
interest for merchants. You could use it to determine
the exact weight and trajectory of artillery
cannonballs for the military. You could solve
advanced geometric surveying problems. It was
an incredibly useful, very highly sought after
tool. And Galileo was famous for it. Galileo
manufactured them in his own personal workshop.
He sold them to wealthy patrons for a premium.
He even wrote and published the definitive instruction
manual on how to use them. He made a lot of money
and built a lot of his early reputation off the
sector. But in this letter, Glorioso writes,
Galileo did not actually invent this instrument.
Michel Coyne did. Was Glorioso actually right
about that? He was mostly right, yeah. The instrument
has a very murky, iterative history. Modern historians
usually credit guys like Fabrizio Mordente or
Michel Coynier with inventing the early, functional
versions of the proportional compass. Galileo
took their designs, he undeniably improved the
engravings, and he brilliantly popularized it,
but he did not invent the core concept from scratch.
Glorioso is quietly pointing out to his friend
that Galileo was taking way too much credit for
other people's engineering. And then in that
same letter, he goes for the absolute big one,
the telescope. The holy grail of the scientific
revolution, the single device that completely
changed humanity's place in the universe. Glorioso
flatly tells Shrek in the letter, Galileo did
not invent the telescope. That is just a stunningly
bold statement to make about the man who is literally
historically synonymous with the telescope. It's
bold, but the crazy thing is it's absolutely
true. It is true. We know for an absolute fact
now that Dutch spectacle makers, primarily a
guy named Hans Lippershey, were openly applying
for patents on these magnifying spy glasses in
1608. The technology was already floating around
Europe. Galileo just heard a rumor about the
Dutch invention, he quickly figured out the underlying
optics of how lenses bend light, and he managed
to grind much better glass to build a vastly
superior version. But he absolutely did not invent
the concept of the telescope, he just refined
the engineering to a scientific grade. So why
was Glorioso so incredibly pressed about this
specific issue? Why act like the ultimate reply
guy on Galileo's historical timeline? I really
don't think it was just professional jealousy,
though maybe there was a tiny bit of that. I
think it loops all the way back to his strict
Jesuit training. Glorioso hated imprecision in
all its forms. And he especially hated the great
man narrative, this romantic idea that one solitary,
untouchable genius just invents everything out
of thin air while everyone else is asleep. He
saw science for what it actually is, a very slow,
highly collaborative, cumulative process. He
wanted the obscure Belgian scholars and the working
class Dutch opticians to actually get their rightful
due in the historical record. He was aggressively
prioritizing factual historical accuracy over
hero worship. Exactly. He was effectively saying,
look, Galileo is great. The astronomical observations
he made with the tube are amazing and world changing.
But let's not lie to ourselves about where the
physical tool actually came from. It is a surprisingly
modern perspective. Yeah. It's almost like he
is demanding to see Galileo's citations. He was
the original uncompromising And as we all know,
peer reviewers are rarely the most popular people
in the room, but they are absolutely necessary
for the integrity of the system. So we have this
portrait of a man who just spent his entire life
aggressively fighting battles. Battles over the
distance of comets. Battles over how to write
algebra notation. brutal pamphlet wars with stubborn
Aristotelians battles over exactly who gets the
patent for the telescope. It just sounds physically
and emotionally exhausting. It must have been
completely draining. But the interesting thing
is, as he finally reaches the twilight of his
life, the tone of his story really shifts. The
fighting actually stops. Let's talk about that
legacy, the final years of his life. Glorioso
eventually leaves Padua for good and returns
down south to Naples. He goes back home. He is
in his late 60s. By this point, he is widely
considered a deeply respected, albeit incredibly
combative elder statesman of the Italian scientific
community. And he ends up meeting someone important
there. He meets a man named Francesco Fontana.
Now, Fontana wasn't a university professor. He
was actually a Neapolitan lawyer. But he was
completely obsessed with astronomy in his spare
time. And he happened to be a very, very talented
lens grinder and observer. Now, based on literally
everything we've learned about Glorioso today,
I would absolutely expect him to just tear this
amateur lawyer apart. Like, your lenses have
aberrations, your math is sloppy, get out of
my sight. Right, that is exactly what his track
record would suggest. But he didn't do that at
all. Glorioso actually befriended Fontana. He
actively became his mentor. He constantly encouraged
Fontana to pursue his telescopic research. And
most importantly, he gave Fontana the absolute
keys to the intellectual kingdom. He gave him
full access to his private library. We really
have to stress what that means in context. In
1640, a private scientific library was pure,
unadulterated power. Printed books were rare,
they were astronomically expensive, and they
were hard to transport. Scientific data was not
something you could just look up online. It was
physically locked inside these heavy, letter
-bound volumes, and Gloria's personal library
contained the accumulated knowledge of his entire,
incredibly dense career. His private letters,
his annotated treatises, rare observational manuscripts
from guys like Tico Brahe and Johannes Kepler.
Giving a younger amateur astronomer free access
to that collection, that is a staggeringly huge
deal. It is the ultimate act of scientific generosity.
It is glorioso implicitly saying, I am finally
done fighting. I have done all the math I can
do. I want you to take all of this hard won knowledge
and go further into the dark than I ever did.
It really shows that underneath that incredibly
prickly, defensive exterior, he actually cared
about the work itself more than his own ego.
He wanted the methodology of science to survive
him. He truly did. Glorioso eventually died in
Naples on January 8th, 1643. He was around 70
or 71 years old. And what actually happened to
that incredible library after he was gone? It
was sold off to the Spanish viceroy of Naples,
a man named Romero Núñez de Guzmán, which honestly
was probably the best case scenario because having
a vastly wealthy and powerful patron acquire
it meant the physical books were actually preserved
and protected, at least for a while, rather than
just being scattered or burned. So we have reached
the end of the life of Giovanni Camillo Glorioso.
When you zoom all the way out past the petty
pamphlet wars, past the weird acuac algebra,
past the comets, what do you actually see? What
does a guy like this represent in the grand sweep
of history? I see him as the dark matter of the
scientific revolution. I really like that image.
break that down for us. When we look back at
the history of science, we naturally tend to
only look at the brightest stars, Galileo, Isaac
Newton, Kepler. They shine incredibly bright
and they blind us to everything else. But a galaxy
is actually held together by the massive amounts
of dark matter that we don't always talk about
and rarely even see. Glorioso is that mass. He
is the quintessential working scientist. He is
the guy quietly doing the unglamorous, tedious
verification of the data. He's the one fighting
the brutal, exhausting rearguard action against
the enfrenched so that the new ideas can actually
take root and survive. He is the guy in the trenches
doing the dirty work. He absolutely is. He's
a perfectly transitional figure. He has one foot
stuck firmly in the medieval world, fighting
these ridiculously petty Latin pamphlet wars
over honor. And he has his other foot. stepping
boldly into the modern world using advanced algebraic
compression and proving through geometry that
the heavens are actual, physical, changing places.
He essentially proves that the scientific revolution
wasn't just magic. It wasn't just apples falling
on heads. It was work. It was a daily frustrating
grind. And looking at his life leaves us with
one final, slightly haunting thought to chew
on. The Kirimanti feud. Yes. Think about the
timeline there. Glorioso spent decades of his
life aggressively arguing for the objective truth.
He had the math, he had the observational data,
he had the reality of the universe on his side.
But simply because he happened to die one year
too early, his bitterest rival got to write the
final word. Chiaramanti published that massive
book claiming total victory, and there was absolutely
no one left with the specific authority to answer
him. It raises a really massive, slightly uncomfortable
question for all of us. It does. In the grand
scheme of human progress, how much of what we
accept as historical truth is actually established
by the weight of the evidence? And how much is
established simply by the sheer biological luck
of outliving your opponents? If Glorioso had
just lived 10 more years, he absolutely would
have written the responsio to the responsio.
He would have mathematically crushed Chiaramante
once and for all in the public record. But you
know, in the very end, the math still won out.
The comets were real. Glorioso was fundamentally
right, even if he didn't personally get to write
the final chapter of his own story. That is the
ultimate comfort of the scientific method. The
individual scientist dies, the massive egos eventually
fade away into dust, but the equation itself
remains completely true. On a surprisingly profound
note, I think we will wrap up this deep dive
into the life of the man who replaced Galileo,
a man who reminds all of us to always check our
sources, to rigidly respect the data, and maybe
just maybe to keep our book titles under 10 words.
Please, for the sake of the historians and the
librarians, keep it brief. Thanks for joining
us for this deep dive, everyone. We will see
you on the next one. Goodbye.