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Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

Galileo Galilei (attributed)

Science

The story behind the card

Galileo never wrote this. The historian Andreas Kleinert showed in 2009 that the maxim comes from two 19th-century French scholars, Antoine-Augustin Cournot (1847) and Thomas-Henri Martin (1868), who used it to sum up Galileo's method. The German mathematician Hermann Weyl spread it in English in the late 1940s. It does describe what Galileo did: in his inclined-plane experiments he timed balls rolling down a ramp by weighing the water that ran from a vessel, turning motion into numbers.

Türkçe oku
Ölçülebilir olanı ölç; ölçülemeyeni ölçülebilir kıl.
Galileo Galilei (atfedilir)

Galileo bu sözü hiçbir zaman yazmadı. Bilim tarihçisi Andreas Kleinert 2009'da, sözün Galileo'nun yöntemini özetlemek için bu ifadeyi kullanan iki 19. yüzyıl Fransız bilginine, Antoine-Augustin Cournot (1847) ile Thomas-Henri Martin'e (1868) dayandığını gösterdi. Sözü İngilizce konuşulan dünyada 1940'ların sonunda Alman matematikçi Hermann Weyl yaydı. Yine de Galileo'nun yaptığını iyi anlatır: Eğik düzlem deneylerinde, bir kaptan akan suyu tartarak rampadan yuvarlanan topların süresini ölçmüş, hareketi sayılara dökmüştü.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Galileo Galilei
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