Allan Siegel via nettime-l on Tue, 14 Nov 2023 13:32:41 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> It's Time to Fight for Open Source Again (Galileo excerpt)


Hello,
Sorry about the missing text from previous post. Apparently image files don't work well on Nettime. Here's the text.
cheers
a


      From Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht

GALILEO: We cannot invent mechanisms to pump water up from rivers if we are not to be allowed to study the greatest of all mechanisms right under our nose, that of the heavenly bodies. The sum of the angles in a triangle cannot be varied to suit the Vatican's convenience. I can't calculate the courses of flying bodies in such a way as also to explain witches taking trips on broomsticks.

THE LITTLE MONK: But don't you think that the truth will get through without us, so long as it's true?

GALILEO: No, no, no. The only truth that gets through will be what we force through: the victory of reason will be the victory of people who are prepared to reason, nothing else. Your picture of the Campagna peasants makes them look like the moss on their own huts. How can anyone imagine that the sum of the angles in a triangle conflicts with their needs? But unless they get moving and learn how to think, they will find even the finest irrigation systems won't help them. Oh, to hell with it: I see your people's divine patience, but where is their divine anger?

THE LITTLE MONK: They are tired.

GALILEO /tosses him a bundle of manuscripts:/ Are you a physicist, my son? Here you have the reasons why the ocean moves, ebbing and flowing. But you're not supposed to read it, d'you hear? Oh, you've already started. You are a physicist, then? The little monk is absorbed in the papers.
--
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