City-Trekking through Palermo: From the Urban Rhythm to the Immensity of Galileo

 
Today, the routine transformed into a low-intensity urban trek (LISS — Low-Intensity Steady State). A walking route to connect with the pulse of the city, add kilometers toward cardiovascular health, and reflect beneath the shade of the Planetarium on the limits of human knowledge.

📍 The Route: Urban Trek through Palermo

The circuit mapped out a dynamic route through one of the greenest and most iconic lungs of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires:

1.    Start: Intersection of Av. Juan B. Justo / Av. Intendente Bullrich with Av. Santa Fe.

2.    Connection: Stretch along Av. Dorrego until merging into Av. Presidente Figueroa Alcorta.

3.    Key Point: One loop around the iconic Galileo Galilei Planetarium.

4.    Green Space: One loop around Plaza Dr. Benjamín Apthorp Gould.

5.    Return: Closing the circuit by returning to the starting point at Av. Intendente Bullrich and Av. Santa Fe.

🏃♂️ LISS Workout Analysis

This type of brisk walking is essential for building an aerobic base without generating high joint impact. The session metrics showed optimal performance:

•    Intensity and speed: A constant pace of 6.4 km/h was maintained, the exact range for a vigorous walk in the LISS zone (approximately 50–65% of max HR).

•    Duration: 58 minutes, within the ideal recommended range of 45 to 60 minutes for this type of aerobic work.

•    Pace stability: Ended with remarkable consistency—variations of barely ±3 seconds per kilometer between loops. This stability reflects excellent pace control, key to sustaining the desired metabolic zone.

•    Daily volume: The daily step and active time targets were more than doubled, representing a substantial contribution to cardiovascular health and overall energy expenditure.

 

🌌 Reflection at the Foot of the Planetarium: Galileo and The Assayer

Walking around the Galileo Galilei Planetarium inevitably evokes the figure of the Florentine scholar and his perspective on the relationship between man and the universe.

In his celebrated work The Assayer (Il Saggiatore, published in Rome in October 1623), Galileo not only laid the foundations of the modern scientific method, but also set forth a deeply skeptical stance regarding the human claim to comprehend everything.

📜 The Myth of the Single Model

In Section 21 of The Assayer, Galileo reflects on the human tendency to constrain reality within our limited mental frameworks:

“It seems to me that I have observed that almost all men persuade themselves that Nature produces her works in the first place by the same method, and according to the same model, that they use for their own [...]. But if it ever happens that they run across something extremely far removed from their conceptions and from what they have seen before, they are so astounded that they declare themselves incapable of grasping or understanding it.

However, Nature has not the slightest care to accommodate her creations to the capacity of understanding of the human intellect; rather, her operations are infinite and her modes of acting inexhaustible.”

⚖️ Doubt vs. Cosmological Dogmatism

Galileo attacked the vanity of pretending to enclose the behavior of celestial bodies within the limits of the knowledge of his time. As he himself points out in the work:

“Certainly, it is a ridiculous and haughty presumption on the part of those who pretend to measure the universe and limit Nature's modes of acting to the meager notions that their minds have been capable of encompassing to this day. Whoever thinks he knows everything is because he has not understood the immensity of that which he does not know.”

This skepticism did not seek to discredit empirical observation, but rather to dismantle blind faith in closed models (such as Aristotelian geocentrism) and to serve as a reminder that physical reality always surpasses the observer's imagination.

📖 About The Assayer (1623)

Considered one of Galileo's four major works—along with the Sidereus Nuncius (1610), the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), and the Two New Sciences (1638)—this work is a manifesto of experimental rigor and the mathematization of nature.
Its full title reveals the ironic and refined tone of his prose:

Il Saggiatore, nel quale con bilancia esquisita e giusta si ponderano le cose contenute nella Libra astronomica e filosofica di Lotario Sarsi Sigensano

(“The Assayer, in which, with an exquisite and just balance, the things contained in the Astronomical and Philosophical Balance of Lotario Sarsi Sigensano are weighed”).

The title plays with a precise analogy: the libra (steelyard scale) used by his opponent (Orazio Grassi, writing under the pseudonym Sarsi) is a crude Roman balance, whereas the saggiatore is the precision scale used by goldsmiths to weigh precious metals with millimeter accuracy.

🦗 The Fable of the Cicada (Favola dei suoni)

Within The Assayer, Galileo includes a famous passage known as the fable of the cicada (favola dei suoni):

Summary of the Fable

A man endowed with extraordinary curiosity enjoyed raising birds and observing how they transformed air into sweet and varied sounds. One night, hearing a delicate song near his house, he went out to look for it, thinking it was an unknown bird. Instead, he found a young shepherd blowing into a wooden flute.

Surprised by this new way of producing sound, he decided to travel the world to discover all possible ways to generate it. Throughout his journey, he discovered:

•    Musicians who plucked strings with a bow (violin).

•    Door hinges squeaking as they moved.

•    People making the rim of a glass sound with the tip of their wet fingers.

•    Insects stridulating through the movement of their wings.

•    Organs, trumpets, whistles, stringed instruments, and the Jew's harp (that iron tongue placed between the teeth using the mouth cavity as a resonance box).

Convinced that he now knew every possible method of producing sound, he came across a cicada. He tried to decipher how it sang:

•    He closed its mouth: the sound continued.

•    He immobilized its wings: it kept singing.

•    He observed that it moved neither scales nor any other visible part.

Finally, he lifted the shell of its chest and discovered thin, hard cartilages. Believing that the singing came from the vibration of these ligaments, he decided to pierce them with a needle to verify it. By pushing it deeper, he killed the cicada, remaining forever without knowing the real origin of the sound.

From that moment on, overcome by the modest awareness of his limits, whenever asked how sounds are produced, he replied:

“I know some ways, but I am sure that another hundred unknown and unimaginable ones may exist.”

Meaning and Epistemological Impact

Galileo uses this fable to convey two fundamental teachings:

1.    Epistemological Humility: No matter how much we investigate, there will always be phenomena whose true cause eludes us or is infinitely more complex than our hypotheses suppose.

2.    The Analogy with Celestial Phenomena: If we cannot even comprehend with certainty how a cicada produces its song when we hold it in our own hand, by what right do we pretend to explicitly explain the nature of distant and inaccessible phenomena, such as comets?

As Galileo himself concludes, the difficulty of understanding the cicada's song while it sings in our hand "amply excuses" our inability to resolve with certainty the mysteries of the cosmos at a great distance. An excellent lesson in scientific caution to apply with every step we take.

 

Wikiloc track: https://es.wikiloc.com/rutas-senderismo/walk-through-palermo-caba-planetarium-liss-292600386