Report Quote #7761

Rose: Over thanksgiving break I was listening to this podcast that was named, "Archimedes good, Galileo bad". The entire podcast was about how Galileo was not as smart as his contemporaries. Like, at the time there was this famous problem, finding the area under a cycloid. It's like 3. He mailed this to all his friends like Descartes. And Descartes, in his usual arrogant manner, was like "Just recently... I mean just yesterday... well actually earlier this morning, I received this problem in the mail, and after just an hour, I have solved it completely; it really wasn't that hard". But Galileo couldn't do it. He tried to cut out pieces of paper and weigh them accurately... Class (mumbling): Calc R&E... Rose: Yeah, like Calc R&E, and he got pretty close to 3, and he said that, but he was like "The answer is fairly close to 3, although from experimental verification, the answer seems to be slightly greater than 3". Basically, Galileo was not that smart as our history textbooks make him out to be.