
When Galileo professed that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, his claim was not at all that the natural processes are conducive to quantitative analysis, that there are relationships and correlations between measured parameters. In his time, as in ours, that would have been a banality, while the thought of Galileo was revolutionary. It was much more than counting or measuring: farmers have been counting sheep and measuring their property since prehistory. It was of an entirely different order than even the Ptolemean model, which, though a magnificent example of the ancient art of curve-fitting, had not progressed the understanding of nature beyond the confirmation of the fact that some regularities exist in the trajectories of the planets. In reality, Galileo was establishing a programme of searching out the postulates of nature, its mathematical principles, hidden behind complex theorems of phenomena.