NASA Scientist Cries on Camera

Too much like a pope, apparently.

Nevertheless, Galileo was correct. The pope, not.

p.s. Early heliocentric hypotheses involved circular orbits, so din’t match observations as well as geocentric + epicycles.

Kepler’s elliptical orbits did explain the observations better, but weren’t published until after Galileo’s brouhaha.

The Wikipedia article on Heliocentrism seems to provide a reasonable summary.

There have previously been some very good expositions here on Galileo’s troubles with The Establishment. The Wikipedia article is broadly in agreement.

Galileo’s treatise didn’t advance the argument for heliocentrism a lot without the explanatory power of elliptical orbits, though his observations of planets and their moons should have been useful if he hadn’t been deliberately provocative.

That was the point 🙂

He had jumped through all the hoops to be allowed to publish his dissertation on what was still a sore topic, then did his best to antagonise the person who had done a lot to facilitate that publication.

I don’t have any particular view, but have worked with enough large organisations to know how the internal politics play out.

Galileo’s Celestial observations using a telescope (which was probably a Dutch invention) led him to formulate a Heliocentric hypothesis.

Nothing could be published without The Church’s approval, and Heliocentrism was in the naughty corner at the time.

After bashing his head against the bureaucratic brick wall for ages, Galileo appealed to his friend, The Pope.

The Pope saw merit in the argument, but even he couldn’t make the immovable Cardinals move. More likely, he saw it as interesting, but not a big enough deal to overtly take on the Cardinals.
Eventually, The Pope brokered a compromise where the proposition could be published on the condition that Heliocentrism wasn’t advocated, but was just one of the equally weighted options. The Cardinals would have extracted something for this.

Galileo published, and didn’t keep his side of the bargain. Not only that, he intentionally insulted his benefactor and champion.

Of course that betrayal of trust alienated the Pope, who had now lost a lot of face and authority after having brokered the deal at his own cost.

Rather than the Pope’s pique leading to Galileo’s prosecution. Galileo’s betrayal led to the Pope withdrawing his protection.

If Galileo had kept his side of the bargain, nothing would have happened to him.

Probably the more important questions are:
Who was responsible for proof-reading and approving the manuscript?
Who stood to gain from The Pope’s loss of authority?
Why wasn’t The Pope advised there was trouble at t’mill?

To the extent that Wikipedia can be trusted, the Dialogue was published in 1632 with the encouragement of Pope Urban VIII.

If this was the original 1616 version with no further review, it would appear that Galileo was simply extremely naive rather than an a-hole, and that Sir Humphrey managed to kill two birds with one stone.

The questions still apply to the 1632 publication.

Oh. Then it would appear that there were a lot of grandstanding a-holes that the Vatican had to deal with during the Spanish Inquisition or those grandstanding a-holes that wanted an English Bible?

True. There was Giordano Bruno.

And the view itself that contradiction is heresy and therefore a crime punishable by burning alive — that’s acceptable?

Bruno’s declarations that the sun was just another star and that the solar system was heliocentric were just the toppers of a series of heresies that neither the Catholic Church nor the Lutheran would tolerate.

The notion of heresy was theirs. Speak your mind, get burned.

Freethinkers ran afoul of slave states. Blaming the victim is a classic defense of tyranny.

Galileo’s victory was complete in the physical correctness of his position, in the self-serving chicanery of the Inquisition, and in John Paul II’s later admission of error.

than for his actual important contribution.

Galileo invented mathematical physics.

Galileo made theory subject to experiment, separating science forever from Philosophy; essences and nature of no longer any part of science.

Galileo overthrew the reign of Aristotle as revered source of all knowledge, infuriating the hidebound academics of his day. They, not the Church, were his greatest enemies.

His astronomical work alone would have made Galileo famous. But he invented modern science, he brought dynamics into it. The full scope of his work makes him the equal of Isaac Newton. Indeed, Newton is inconceivable without Galileo.

The 19th century Church tried very hard to exculpate itself from the guilt of Galileo’s trial and condemnation. By then, there was no denying Galileo had been correct.

So, the Church developed an elaborate polemic — one that blamed Galileo for his own persecution and calculated to get them out from under their own burden of wrongdoing. A classic of insult following injury.

AD White has an excellent description of the Church’s shameful attempts to place the blame on Galileo in his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.

It was they who elevated the persecution of Galileo front and center to his history, misleading people such as yourself, OC, into thinking it was the centerpiece of Galileo’s life.

Kepler’s elliptical orbits were empirical, not theoretical.

Galileo accepted them as providing accurate predictions of orbits in a much simpler frame than the complex sets of epicycles required of the Ptolemaic model.

There was also much original research and knowledge preservation occurring in the Caliphates starting a little later.

The canonical story of Islam’s rise and early conquests is almost certainly wrong. Most of the translation of Greek science into, first Aramaic and later Arabic, occurred in the 8th and 9th centuries, before Islam got its full grip.

Islam itself emerged only in the 8th century. Most of the scholars were Semitic Christians, Jews, and Persians. It was primarily their descendants who kept the tradition alive. They converted to Islam after the religious oppression became severe in the mid-9th century, and took Arabic names.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 produced a large-scale migration of Byzantine scholars into Europe. They, as much as anything else, brought the ancient learning into the West.

Much of the rest was translation into Latin of the early Arabic treatises. Islamic societies by then had no interest in the ancient sciences.

Following al-Ghazzali (12th C), most Islamic thinking had it that whatever contradicted the Quran was wrong and anything consistent with the Quran was redundant. So, Islamic societies became moribund and uninterested in any external learning.

Pat and I may be the only people still taking notice, so this is late to the party.

What would the reaction have been to the following statement?

That was apparently because he exceeded the bounds of his publication approval in a paper written in somewhat intemperate terms.