7 January 2026 · 2 min
Galileo Galilei was the OpenAI of his time. He helped establish modern science by emphasizing experimentation as the primary means to uncover natural truths. To this end, he built his own telescopes. He revealed to the world the moons of Jupiter, thereby changing forever how we viewed the cosmos.
How was Galileo able to design better telescopes than others ? If you have ever been to Venice, you may know that it was famous for its glassmakers. There is a small island nearby (Murano) where there are still glassmakers. Further, Venice had some of the best merchants of Europe, so they could export their glass worldwide.
This is an important lesson as to what drives innovation. It is not a linear process. Living near people making fancy glasses could be the key you need.
A common misconception portrays Galileo as persecuted solely for advocating heliocentrism, the idea that Earth orbits the Sun. In reality, he spent most of his career challenging established doctrines and thrived under Church patronage. Galileo overturned the widespread belief that heavier objects fall faster, and this achievement, if nothing else, brought him greater fame. When he gathered strong evidence for heliocentrism, he initially faced only cautions rather than outright condemnation.
Pope Urban VIII had personally permitted Galileo to discuss heliocentrism as a hypothesis and even requested that his own arguments on the matter be included. However, Galileo placed these papal views in the mouth of Simplicio, a character portrayed as intellectually inadequate in defending the traditional geocentric position. This was widely interpreted as a mockery.
Galileo was sentenced to house arrest, during which he continued productive work. The ban on his Copernican writings applied mainly within Catholic territories, allowing their dissemination elsewhere in Europe.
Thus another important element that made Galileo possible was the relative freedom he enjoyed.
You want to innovate ? Don’t live in the world of ideas solely. Don’t be shy about mixing with commercial interest. And make sure to have a bit of freedom.
Daniel Lemire, "A bit of glass and freedom is all you need," in Daniel Lemire's blog, January 7, 2026, https://lemire.me/blog/2026/01/07/a-bit-of-glass-and-freedom-is-all-you-need/.
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>Galileo Galilei was the OpenAI of his time.
Hi, I’m an avid reader of your blog, but would you consider toning down your LLM usage for writing posts?
Best wishes!
I wrote this line.
Ok, sorry, my bad then! I didn’t get that this was satire, because you surely wouldn’t equal OpenAI to Galileo unironically.
A while ago, while reading about how the classical era Greeks reasoned about physics and how they were somewhat limited by their ability to accurately observe at long distances, I began to wonder about the discovery/creation of optical glass as a linchpin discovery for the scientific revolution. I’ve wondered if the Greeks had had that innovation, we might have moved the Galilean and Leeuwenhoekan scientific revolutions forward by centuries.
It’s fun to think about because the Greeks and other cultures of their time were pretty sophisticated when it came to glass and other material manipulation.