The Jesuits play an odd role in all this.............



Galileo contributed to the method of indivisibles, now known as Cavalieri's principle, which relates to forerunners of infinitesimal calculus.^[144] In 1604, while at the University of Padua, he was experimenting with indivisibles in formulating his law of falling bodies.^[145] From 1621 onward, he and Cavalieri exchanged a series of letters exploring the hypothesis that a continuum is composed of indivisibles, a hypothesis fiercely opposed by the Jesuits as contrary to Aristotelian dogma (Alexander, p. 86).