Science Quote by Evangelista Torricelli

Torricelli is doing something sly here: he’s defending the scientist’s right to commit a kind of controlled heresy. In the 17th century, “abstraction” wasn’t just a mathematical technique; it was a social and philosophical provocation. To claim a “special privilege” for the geometer is to carve out an intellectual jurisdiction where authority, tradition, even common sense can’t easily file objections. Geometry becomes a passport that lets you leave the messy jurisdiction of the visible world and still return with lawful conclusions.

The image is audaciously theatrical: “figures hanging on a balance” suspended at “an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world.” That’s not idle poetry. Torricelli, living in Galileo’s wake, is reaching for the new mechanics where idealized objects - frictionless planes, perfect levers, weightless strings - do real work. The “balance” signals equilibrium, the heart of classical statics, while the infinite distance signals the trick: remove contingencies (air resistance, imperfect materials, local irregularities) so the mind can isolate structure.

Subtext: don’t confuse an imagined setup with a frivolous one. Torricelli is arguing that rigor doesn’t require physical proximity, only logical necessity. It’s also a quiet rebuttal to critics who saw mathematical physics as detached, even dangerous. He’s asserting that imagination, when disciplined by geometry, is not escapism; it’s the engine of discovery. In an era where cosmology, theology, and physics still jostled for primacy, Torricelli stakes a modern claim: the mind can legitimately build worlds to understand this one.