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The manuscript Ms. Gal. 72), kept in the Archives of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, is a manuscript which has a tremendous importance for the study of the transition from Aristotelian to classical physics. In spite of its importance, this manuscript has neither been translated in full, nor even been adequately published until today. It is in fact virtually impossible to publish the chaotic mixture of texts, calculations and drawings on the pages of this manuscript using traditional editorial techniques.
The masterful National Edition of Galileo's Papers by Antonio Favaro, which is the canonical entry point to Galileo's work, nevertheless proved to be insufficient in its representation of this codex. In the edition one finds, in particular, only transcriptions of texts of a certain minimal length; the calculations have been omitted completely and frequently also the diagrams contained in the codex. Another difficulty of such a traditional edition lies in the disposition of the fragments which follows a certain (sometimes questionable) logic and which is not based on their placement in the pages of the codex (see the introductory remarks by Antonio Favaro). The same difficulty is characteristic also of a special volume of the Annali di Storia della Scienza published by Stillman Drake in 1979, which contains high quality photos of parts of the manuscript which are, however, cut into fragments and presented in a piece-meal way according to a hypothetical order of composition. In view of the steadily increasing scholarly interest in Galileo's manuscripts, the project of a new and comprehensive edition of the Codex 72 hence became a desideratum and was sketched in a paper published in 1988 by Jürgen Renn (then Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, now Max Planck Institute for the History of Science).
Around the end of the eighties, the technological development suggested new ways of realizing such an edition. In view of these new possibilities, traditional editorial projects appeared more and more to be inefficient and obsolete. The history of science program of the American National Science Foundation, then directed by Ron Overmann, therefore systematically encouraged traditional editorial projects, such as the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, to explore the usage of electronic forms of the representation of historical documents. At the same time Peter Damerow in Berlin (then Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education, now Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) and Paolo Galluzzi in Florence (Institute and Museum for the History of Science) had embarked on similar paths, employing electronic tools in research projects of the history of science. They joined forces with Jürgen Renn and designed the "Galileo Einstein Electronic Archives Project," whose exploratory phase was funded by the National Science Foundation. But due to copy right problems with the Einstein part of the project, only the Galileo part could be pursued further, in close cooperation with the manuscript department of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence represented by Isabella Truci.
The electronic representation of the manuscript Ms. Gal. 72, as it is now available, is a pilot project realized jointly by the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, the Institute and Museum for the History of Science in Florence, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. It is part of a larger endeavor by the Biblioteca Nazionale and the Institute and Museum for the History of Science to make the Florentine Galileo collection electronically accessible. The Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence provided the digital images of the manuscript, gave the permission for their inclusion in the electronic representation, and contributed in many other ways to the realization of the pilot project. A working group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science created the electronic working environment in which the electronic representation of the codex is embedded. The aim was not only to provide easy access to the codex but also to support further research on it. The scholarly work on the codex that is included as part of the electronic representation (transcriptions, translations, internal cross-references, references to the literature, classification of folio pages, etc.) was performed by a common working group of the Museo di Storia della Scienza and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. (For more information, see the Staff of the Project.
In the eyes of the editors, there are two elements which characterize the electronic representation of a manuscript as it is here presented: easy access and open-endedness. The editors hope in fact that the further development of this electronic representation will be a truly joint result achieved together with those colleagues with whom, up until now, collaboration has been limited to publications in the same journals or in collections of essays dedicated to Galileo.
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