Rather, he claimed he was simply showing off his debating skills. Galileo was never tortured, however. The pope decreed that the interrogation should stop short with the mere threat of torture. He died in In his later years Galileo insisted on the truth of the geocentric solar system, Kelly said. Jessica Wolf December 22, Today virtually every child grows up learning that the earth orbits the sun.
Tags: history science research astronomy. Yet in , Galileo presented it again, with a key change to his argument from He omitted all mention of the Atlantic tides. The science of the day—the observable evidence, the most correct reasoning—was against him and his theory. And his opponents knew that. Melchoir Inchofer, S. Zaccaria Pasqualigo, also involved in that rejection, noted the issue of tidal periods. Thus when churchmen or a royal woman argued against Galileo, they were not denying science.
The Earth may not be the center of the universe, but neither is the sun; it is just one star in a galaxy of stars, which, in turn, is one among a universe of galaxies. Any Galileo story that ends with a triumphant finality misunderstands the nature of science itself.
No one today views the universe as Galileo did. The Earth may not be the center of the universe, but neither is the sun. Furthermore, such a story misses the very things about Galileo that made him great: his wider vision; the artistic talent that allowed him to see and intuit the truth even if incompletely; his mathematical ability to ask the right questions and suggest ways of searching for answers; his genius for communicating his ideas to a broad and influential audience.
But just as we must recognize that science is neither monolithic nor always right, we also should be wary of treating the other side of this equation, the church, as if it, too, were a single entity speaking with a single voice.
Historians debate the root of that injustice. Some blame the personalities involved. Others cite the political and economic pressures involving the Holy See and the wealth of the Medici family, represented by Grand Duchess Christina. All these pressures were real.
None justified a heresy trial. To cite but one example: A generation after Galileo, Jesuit priests in Maryland would own slaves. That racism infects society even today. We study what happened in history to imagine a better future. That is the immediate relevance of the Galileo story to us today. You do not treat Covid as if it were the flu. You do not treat systemic racism as if it were merely an economic issue. You do not treat the mistakes the church made with Galileo by assuming it was due to science-denial in the church.
And you do not treat the problem of science-denial today through the fiction that it was at the root of the Galileo story. Guy Consolmagno, S. Your source for jobs, books, retreats, and much more. Guy Consolmagno Christopher M. Graney September 18, Engraving from showing Galileo Galilei at the Inquisition in iStock.
Compelling Scientific Reasons Note that Galileo responded to Christina not through scientific arguments but by focusing on the Bible. Nevertheless, as we know now, they were wrong. The Catholic Science Guy. More: Science.
Guy Consolmagno Guy Consolmagno, S. Christopher M. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer.
In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. The original letter in which Galileo argued against the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church has been rediscovered in London.
Credit: The Royal Society. It had been hiding in plain sight. Many copies of the letter were made, and two differing versions exist — one that was sent to the Inquisition in Rome and another with less inflammatory language.
Galileo did the editing, it seems. He shared a copy of this softened version with a friend, claiming it was his original, and urged him to send it to the Vatican.
It was rediscovered in the library there by Salvatore Ricciardo, a postdoctoral science historian at the University of Bergamo in Italy, who visited on 2 August for a different purpose, and then browsed the online catalogue.
Some science historians declined to comment on the finding before they had scrutinized the article. Galileo wrote the letter to Benedetto Castelli, a mathematician at the University of Pisa in Italy.
He argued that the scant references in the Bible to astronomical events should not be taken literally, because scribes had simplified these descriptions so that they could be understood by common people. Most crucially, he reasoned that the heliocentric model of Earth orbiting the Sun, proposed by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus 70 years earlier, is not actually incompatible with the Bible.
Galileo, who by then was living in Florence, wrote thousands of letters, many of which are scientific treatises.
Copies of the most significant were immediately made by different readers and widely circulated. Of the two versions known to survive, one is now held in the Vatican Secret Archives.
Galileo enclosed with that letter a less inflammatory version of the document, which he said was the correct one, and asked Dini to pass it on to Vatican theologians.
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