Galileo Project In Full Force

Cwilich Discusses Galileo's Multivariate Personality

The Dean's office of Yeshiva College announced further details about the Galileo Project, focusing on the life, work, and greater meaning of the 17th century astronomer and physicist, Galileo Galilei. As many students are aware, a highlight of this year's orientation was a dinner lecture and discussion focusing on the play Galileo, by Bertolt Brecht, the Marxist playwright and erstwhile cigar smoker. That evening included speeches by Yeshiva University President and Rosh Yeshiva, Norman Lamm, and Roald Hoffman, Noble Prize winning chemist and formerly a YU visiting Gottesman lecturer.

As a natural follow up to the orientation book project, which required all incoming students to read the play, the Galileo project was created by Yeshiva College Dean Norman Adler as a forum to discuss issues raised by the play.

The first formal event was a lecture on Tuesday December 16, at 8:00 PM by Dr. Gabriel Cwilich, Associate Professor of Physics at YC, with a dinner for faculty and students preceding the lecture. The topic of the evening was "Galileo: The Scientist and the Man" and was based on Cwilich's personal research about Galileo at the University of Padua this past summer. Cwilich spoke on the multivariate aspects of Galileo's life and studies and the different disciplines Galileo was involved in. He illustrated this by explaining that if Galileo had not been an artist as well as a scientist, he would not have discovered the mountains on the moon. Because of Galileo's artistic experience, he understood that the vague dark spots and shadings seen on the moon were actually shadows, and therefore was able to deduce the existence of the lunar peaks. Cwilich used the story to stress the need for a well rounded education in various disparate fields, and challenged the assemblage to strive for this goal in their personal studies.

The next event scheduled will be a talk by Rabbi Dovid Horwitz, Rosh Yeshiva at RIETS and a doctoral candidate at the Bernard Revel Graduate School, on February 3, titled "The Jewish Response to the Copernican Revolution Reconsidered".

Events to follow include a faculty-student roundtable/debate on the issue of science and authority, featuring Drs. Weidhorn and Cwilich and moderated by Dr. William Lee; and a guest lecture on the historical background to the conflict between Galileo and the church by an outside historian of science.

In conjunction with the Galileo project, the Dean's office also announced the creation of a new essay contest whose topics are "Galileo: The Play the Man, and Idea" and "Science and Authority." More

information about the contest, including the prizes to be awarded, is to be announced soon.

Organizers of the event were optimistic. Said Yonatan Kaganoff, one student coordinator, "This is an opportunity for diverse elements of the student body to come together. Philosophy and history students, the Bait Midrash chevra, and physics and math majors can all argue together. These issues, about the validity of scientific research and the cultural effect on science, are being debated across academia and the larger culture. And here, in the Galileo Project, we can confront them in an historical con text. "

Said Dean Norman Adler about the venture, "This a critically important project. I feel that it really represents, without PR and exaggeration, the integration of Torah U'Maddah. Dr. Lamm's commission on Jewish values and democracy has creative themes in Torah Judaism to explicitly carry into the curriculum, which for me as an educator is of consummate importance. What especially pleases me is this plan has grown with ideas brought forward by both students and faculty. Very few colleges in the country h ave the true intellectualism that this place has at its best, which is one of the reasons why I came here."