Mersenne's solution for Galileo's problem of the rotating earth (Q1239140)

Galileo, in his Dialogue (1632), went to a lot of trouble to convince his readers that a rotating earth would not cause objects at the surface to be thrown off. In his most detailed analysis of the problem he examined the distance between a tangential path and the spherical surface for a given time interval, and compared it to the distance that an object would fall to the earth in the same time. By a slip in his analysis Galileo concluded, erroneously, that no speed of the earth's rotation (however great) would suffice to throw objects from the earth. Adequate general solutions to this problem were found by Huygens in 1659 and by Newton in 1666. Both of their analyses involved taking a quantity to a vanishing limit to establish an equivalent of the \(v^2/r\) relation for centrifugal force. Their work has led historians to find Galileo deficient either in mathematical analysis or in physical conceptualization. However, in 1635 Marin Mersenne produced an analysis of the Galileo problem (in Harmonie universelle, Book II) that used nothing unavailable to Galileo. All Mersenne had to do was to put numbers to the lengths of the lines in Galileo's basic diagram. He showed that the distance a body could fall in 1 s was more than 100 times greater than the distance that the tangential motion of the earth's rotation would remove it from the earth's surface in 1 s. Call that ratio \(\rho\). Mersenne then proceeded to calculate \(\rho\) for successively shorter time intervals, down to \(2 \times 10^{-5}\) s. Contrary to a claim of Galileo's, Mersenne found that \(\rho\) remained constant. Then Mersenne made a numerical calculation of \(\rho'\) for a rate of earth rotation double the diurnal rate, and found \(\rho'=\rho/4\). This is equivalent to finding the centrifugal force proportional to \(v^2\). However, Mersenne was innocent of the notion of centrifugal force. He employed a kind of calculus of finite differences to get a particular result that avoided Galileo's error, without being blocked therein by his lack of the notion of limits or of infinitesimals. Thus, contrary to the opinions of recent historians, the solution to Galileo's problem did not require the mathematical and physical concepts developed by Huygens and Newton. With the care taken by Mersenne the problem was amenable to the less sophisticated techniques available prior to 1650.