The Voyagers Log 03 - The Science Publishing Capital of the World
- Igor Alcantara
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
In 1638, one of the most important physics books ever written could not be printed in the country where its author lived. Galileo was under house arrest in Italy, his ideas condemned by the Church. So the manuscript was smuggled north and printed by the Elzevirs in the Dutch Republic. That is how "Two New Sciences" survived.
In this third episode of The Voyager's Log, Igor Alcantara is standing in front of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to talk about why so many dangerous ideas ended up here.
For a long stretch of the 16th and 17th centuries, being wrong in public was expensive. The Church kept a list of banned books. Monarchs decided what could be said about God, the heavens, and the shape of the world. A printer in the wrong city could lose his press, or worse. But Amsterdam was run mostly by merchants, and merchants cared more about turning a profit than about policing what people thought. A banned book was not a threat. It was inventory.
So, the ideas came here to live free. Descartes wrote and published much of his work while living in the Dutch Republic, partly because he could. Galileo reached readers through Dutch presses after Italy shut him down. Spinoza was born in Amsterdam and paid a heavy personal price anyway, which tells you the freedom had limits, but it was still more freedom than almost anywhere else in Europe. Printers here would run manuscripts that would have gotten them arrested a few hundred miles in any direction, then ship them back across those same borders.
It was the closest thing the era had to the Internet. A place where information routed around the people trying to block it, mostly because someone figured out there was money in letting it flow.
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