CPL310
10/1/2004
Test on Monday (damn!)
Back to Galileo
Scene 11 (12 in mine)
-- new pope being robed
-- as cardinal he had one set of views but as pope his responsibilities change his mind about what he can allow
-- the Inquisitor says that scientists' findings come from doubt; he says these men doubt everything
-- he asks if society can stand on doubt and not on faith
-- in Inherit the Wind Brady says we must not abandon faith (his opponent said we must abandon our faith in the pleasant poetry of Genesis)
-- shuffling feet as uncertainty of the time; the pope is annoyed by the shuffling (but really by having to deal with all this)
-- they decide not to torture Galileo but to show him the instruments; that should be enough since he likes comfort too much
-- Galileo's hopes are dashed
Scene 12 (13)
-- daughter hopes Galileo will recant
-- Andrea hopes he won't, thinking he'll die before he'll recant
-- silence indicated as stage direction breaks things up
-- Virginia's prayers get louder as the hopes of Andrea and the little monk rise as well
-- Andrea and Federzoni think he hasn't recanted and Federzoni proclaims the dawn of the Age of Reason
[Brecht had believed in the new age of communism, in the 1920s; Brecht later was stuck in East Germany, realizing this is where his bread was buttered but that things weren't as he'd hoped]
-- they find out Galileo has recanted or capitulated
-- Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes
-- Galileo: Unhappy the land that needs a hero (if you have a just society to begin with you don't need anything extraordinary)
Scene 13 (14)
-- Galileo is living as a prisoner in Florence and is visited by Andrea
-- not one paper expounding a new thesis has been issued in Italy since your recanting
-- Andrea is going to Holland in order to work
-- Galileo gives him a manuscript that he's been working on
-- he warns him to be careful when he goes through Germany (a reference to the Third Reich)
-- last part of Scene 13 (14)
-- read this carefully
-- Galileo puts himself on trial in the name of all science
-- purpose of science is to ease human existence; should you then discover all there is to be discovered, your progress [a buzz word] ... That your discovery would be met with a universal cry of horror (say someone discovered the atom bomb or cloned a man)
If I had resisted, the sciences could hae developed something like the Hippocratic Oath of medicine, a pledge to use your knowledge only for the good of mankind. As it is, the highest one can ever hope for is a race of invetnive dwarfs who can be rented for antyhing.
(this wasn't in the class edition but is in mine on page 109, a later veresion)
Galileo says that he had power and wouldn't have died; he relinguished it to the authorities and they used it for bad.
[the end of the Oppenheimer play is very similar; Oppenheimer had been in charge of developing the atomic bomb in Los Alamos and was a national hero; because of his previous communist association and of his reluctance to push ahead research on his hydrogen bomb, he had to go throgh a hearing to renew his security clearance; at the end of the play he says he wouldn't take it if they gave it to him, since what he'd done turning over the bomb to the government was wrong]
Last scene
-- Andrea has the truth and he's being checked by the border officials
-- they don't want to see politics or X
-- he says the papers just contain figures and is allowed to pass
-- the children nearby are talking about a woman they think is a witch
-- Andrea admonishes them to check it out scientifically and not just to gossip
Test outline
-- authors an titles
-- main themes of course
-- main themes of each work
-- cross references to themes of course and to other works
(e.g. Faust was an example of Scientific Man; who in other works were also examples?)
1) Faust
2) Woyzeck
3) Frankenstein
4) An Enemy of the People
5) Galileo
6) Knowledge or certainty (from Ascent of Man) [this is online]
-- short answer: IDs, fill-ins, 1-2 sentences
-- essay questions, mostly short
Knowledge or Certainty
Chapter in Ascent of Man
-- 30 years old but still effective
-- we're seeing a video based on this
-- first part deals with question of perception and knowledge; Polish man whose face is being studied by a bunch of instruments; thesis: artist and scientist have different methods but they're not ultimate methods; there is no absolute knowledge; quantum physics also says there is no absolute knowledge; science can always come along and challenge what we know
-- absolute power and knowledge lead us to do things such as concentration camps
-- he talks about G?ttingen, where quantum physics first came alive
-- he talks about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which he says should be called tolerance; nothing can be described with certainty or zero tolerance; Heisenberg says we must specify to what degree of tolerance we know something
-- he talks about Gaust and the Gaust curve of mapping star positions
-- Leo Szilard discovered the principle of physics that implied the atom could be split; he hid the knowledge from the world until after World War II, fearing Hitler would use his knowledge to ill ends; he and Eistein later appealed to Roosevelt to not use the bomb but failed since Roosevelt died
-- end of the video is at the concentration camp at Auschwitz; he talks about how many of his relativevs died there; it was the result not of science but of a monstrous certainty on the part of the National Socialists
-- jacob rinowski is the narrator of this video