Flourished Italy, 1619
Horatio Grassi was an Italian Jesuit and mathematician. He is best known for the malignant pamphlet he wrote against Discorso delle comete by Galileo Galilei , published in 1619, where Galilei argued that the comets are not sublunar fires because of their transparency and their small parallax. Grassi’s pamphlet, entitled Libra astronomica ac Philosophica, was also published in 1619 under the name Lothario Sarsio Sigensano, an imperfect anagram of Horatio Grassio Saronensi. Galileo answered him with a still more virulent Il saggiatore in 1623.
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Drake, Stillman and C. D. O’Malley (trans.) (1960). The Controversy on the Comets of 1618. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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Hack, M. (2014). Grassi, Horatio. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_536
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