Little known insight into Galileo's paradigm shift

Well, little known to me at least. Had no idea that Galileo was the one who invented mathematical physics. I found this insight fascinating. Emphasis mine:

Perhaps the most important move in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s declaration that mathematics is the language of natural science. But he felt able to declare this only after he had revolutionised the philosophical picture of the world. Before Galileo it was generally assumed that matter had sensory qualities: tomatoes were red, paprika was spicy, flowers were sweet-smelling. It’s hard to see how these sensory qualities could be captured in the abstract, austere vocabulary of mathematics. How could an equation capture the taste of spicy paprika? And if sensory qualities can’t be captured in a mathematical vocabulary, it seemed to follow that a mathematical vocabulary could never capture the complete nature of matter. Galileo’s solution was to strip matter of its sensory qualities and put them in the soul (as we might put it, in the mind). The sweet smell isn’t really in the flowers, but in the soul (mind) of the person smelling them; the spicy taste isn’t really in the paprika, but in the soul of the person tasting it... Even colours for Galileo aren’t on the surfaces of the objects themselves, but in the soul of the person observing them. And if matter in itself has no sensory qualities, then it’s possible in principle to describe the material world in the purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics. This was the birth of mathematical physics.

It's from https://philosophynow.org/issues/121/Can_Science_Explain_Consciousness

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