On This Day in 1564

It's the birthday of scientist and writer Galileo Galilei, born in Pisa, Italy (1564), who defended the scientific belief that the Earth was not the center of the Universe and was tried by the Roman Inquisition for heresy. After being prohibited from doing any more astronomy and being placed under house arrest for the rest of his life, he played a major role in inventing physics.

Galileo was a mathematics professor at Padua when he first heard about a new invention from the Netherlands, the telescope. He couldn't get his hands on one to even look at, so worked out the optics on his own.

He then sold it to the Doge of Venice to help him manipulate the commodities market. The Doge was able to see incoming ships before anyone else and could run down to the docks to set prices on the cargo he knew was arriving.

Galileo was a very slippery character.

The spyglass everyone had been talking about could magnify objects to three times their original size. The instrument Galileo made with lenses he ground himself magnified all the way up to 20 times. He was able to see the valleys and mountains of the moon, the Milky Way, and to discover four moons of Jupiter. In 1610, Galileo published the story of his telescope and the results of his studies as The Starry Messenger.

This is ultimately what got him in trouble with the Church.To be fair, the Church had a point. His telescope was not very good, there were crystals in the lenses, sometimes it made a double image. You could argue that he wasn't seeing what he claimed to be seeing.

But more importantly, he argued that the universe must of necessity be a certain way, namely that not everything went around the Earth, witness the moons going around Jupiter. This ran afoul of something called the Doctrine of Necessity, a key piece of medieval scholasticism. Pope Bernardini was heard to thunder "The blessed Lord will not be necessitated."

Galileo had been corresponding with German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who also believed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system. Galileo was tried and convicted by the Church for heresy, but he was never tortured or excommunicated; he remained a loyal Catholic his entire life.

The Church showed him the instruments of torture and told him to recant his believe that the Earth moves. He did, but was said to mumble on leaving the hearing "And yet it does."

It didn't help that Galileo was a massive liar. That whole Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment? Never happened, because it is physically impossible for it to have come out the way Galileo claimed it did. He didn't have a clear enough understanding of aerodynamic drag to lie properly.

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