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Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

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Galileo's great defense of the Copernican system, staged as a three-day conversation between defenders of the old and new astronomy. Its persuasive force brought him before the Inquisition. His deeper conviction, stated in The Assayer, was that nature speaks the language of mathematics.

Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.

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