Mark Twain tells the story of a white elephant, a present of the king of Siam to Queen Victoria of England, who got somehow lost in New York on its way to England. An impressive army of highly qualified detectives swarmed out over the whole country to search for the lost treasure. And after short time an abundance of optimistic reports with precise observations were returned from the detectives giving evidence that the elephant must have been shortly before at that very place each detective had chosen for his investigations. Although no elephant could ever have been strolling around at the same time at such different places of a vast area and in spite of the fact that the elephant, wounded by a bullet, was lying dead the whole time in the cellar of the police headquarters, the detectives were highly praised by the public for their professional and effective execution of the task. In spite of having been the subject of more than a century of historical research, the question of when and how Galileo made his major discoveries is still answered insufficiently only. It is mostly assumed that he must have found the law of fall around the year 1604 and that only sev-1 This paper makes use of the work of research projects of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, some pursued jointly with the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, and the Istituto Nazionale die Fisica Nucleare in Florence. In particular, we have made use of results achieved in the context of a project dedicated to the development of an electronic representation of Galileo's notes on mechanics (together with the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale and the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, both in Florence), of results achieved in a study of the time-sequence of entries in Galileo's manuscripts by means of an analysis of differences in the composition of the ink (together with the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, and the Istituto Nazionale die Fisica Nucleare, all in Florence), and finally of results achieved in the context of a central research project of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, dedicated to the study of the relation of practical experience and conceptual structures in the emergence of science. We would especially like to acknowledge the generous support of several individuals involved in these projects: Jochen Büttner, Paolo Galluzzi, Wallace Hooper, Franco Lucarelli, Pier Andrea Mandó, Fiorenza Z. Renn, Urs Schöpflin, Isabella Truci, and Bernd Wischnewski. From several other individuals we received helpful suggestions acknowleged at appropriate places throughout the paper.
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