A scientific revolution represents more than the overthrow of one scientific theory or system by another. It also represents the displacement from positions of authority of the advocates of the old by advocates new system or theory. In modern times, we see this in the dispensation of research grants, invitations to give talks, etc. There is something rather pathetic about, for example, the proverbial fruit fly geneticist whose lab is no longer funded, who has no more graduate students, and who doesn't get travel grants to the international congresses. Too often, these displaced scientists (or rather, scientists whose theories have been displaced) wind up teaching the introductory courses or, perhaps safer, the history and philosophy of science courses in their departments| Needless to say, the resistance to new theories thus carries with it a social as well as intellectual component. Under this grant, Dr. Biagioli is looking at this social and intellectual process as it developed at the start of modern science. He is completing his analysis of Galileo's career and strategies for the legitimation of Copernicanism and the mathematical method. Dr. Biagioli has found that disciplinary hierarchies established under the then accepted scholastic system held mathematics to be subordinate to philosophy and theology. Consequently, Galileo needed to increase his social and disciplinary status in order to legitimize Copernican astronomy and mathematical physics. However, as mathematicians could not obtain the higher status of philosophers within the university, Galileo looked elsewhere. His career traces a trajectory of socio-professional escalation away from the university toward the court (where he became the first mathematician to obtain the title of "philosopher"), finally landing in the newly created scientific academy--and institutions in which the "new philosophers" could dictate the rules of their own game. Under this grant, Dr. Biagioli is specifically studying Galileo's activity within the first scientific institution, the Accademia dei Lincei, and the strategies for the legitimation of Copernicanism he developed through the authority of that institution. This work offers not only a specific case study, but brings together a range of analyses that he has already developed. Further, on a broader scale, this study illustrates the strategies, both social and intellectual, which advocates of a new scientific system must use in order to displace their adversaries and gain access to sources of support for their research.
