It is easy to treat Galileo as fighting the obscurantist church of the 15th century, but as the article explains briefly:
> provocatively voiced the pope’s own arguments through an obtuse Aristotelian called Simplicio
... Galileo's ordeal with the inquisition was mostly due to him making fun of the pope (probably not a good idea). The truth is that until Kepler introduced elliptical orbits and variable orbital speeds, the Copernican heliocentric model still needed epicycles and was not much better than the ptolemaic model.
And the church didn't even care _that_ much. Copernicus himself was a priest and, while he himself was wary of publishing it and framed it as a way to do astronomical calculations without any kind of philosophical implication, in the end it circulated without much fuss.
This of course should not diminish his contributions to the scientific method and his other contribution to astronomical observations (mostly the satellites of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, though his instrument wasn't good enough to recognize them as rings).
> Galileo's ordeal with the inquisition was mostly due to him making fun of the pope (probably not a good idea).
And at least one history I read on the subject questions whether Galileo was even intending to make fun of the Pope. My memory of the basic story that book told:
- The Pope encouraged Galileo to publish a book with his new theories, but just told him to add a theological "escape hatch" (provided by the Pope himself) to make sure he wasn't viewed as heretical
- The book is a dialogue between three people, one of whom, "Simplicio", is kind of stupid and backwards the whole book, but in the last chapter says effectively, "Actually I've just been pretending this whole time to be foolish; but actually I"m wise, and let me tell you why." He then gives the Pope's argument and the book ends -- giving the Pope the last word, as it were.
- At the time no books can be printed unless they're officially approved by the Church as being non-heretical. The book was reviewed, and approved, by two different Papal censors in two different cities. It was only sometime later that the Pope became offended by his words being placed in Simplicio's mouth; in what the author I read thought was almost certainly a misunderstanding.
As the author said, Galileo was encouraged to write the book; was told some theology to put into it; he did so. The book was submitted for review and approved twice. What more could Galileo have done?
If I could read Renaissance Italian I'd go back and read it and judge for myself. Anyone here read it that can weigh in on the theory that Galileo never meant to offend the Pope?
You need not make any excuses; they are superfluous, and especially so to me, who, being accustomed to public debates, have heard disputants countless times not merely grow angry and get excited at each other, but even break out into insulting speech and sometimes come very close to blows.
As to the discourses we have held, and especially this last one concerning the reasons for the ebbing and flowing of the ocean, I am really not entirely convinced; but from such feeble ideas of the matter as I have formed, I admit that your thoughts seem to me more ingenious than many others I have heard. I do not therefore consider them true and conclusive; indeed, keeping always before my mind's eye a most solid doctrine that I once heard from a most eminent and learned person, and before which one must fall silent, I know that if asked whether God in His infinite power and wisdom could have conferred upon the watery element its observed reciprocating motion using some other means than moving its containing vessels, both of you would reply that He could have, and that He would have known how to do this in many ways which are unthinkable to our minds. From this I forthwith conclude that, this being so, it would be excessive boldness for anyone to limit and restrict the Divine power and wisdom to some particular fancy of his own.
[ends]
That doesn't seem like it's quite the same as what you're saying you read. Simplicio ends up professing a sort of pious agnosticism about what Galileo is talking about. I don't get any particular sense from this that we're meant to think "oh, hey, Simplicio is much smarter than we were giving him credit for being".
(I do not know enough about any pope's astronomical opinions to have a useful opinion on how closely Simplicio's professed positions match those of the pope, or how likely it is that Galileo was and/or seemed to be making fun of the pope. My highly inexpert impression was that Simplicio wasn't modelled on the pope specifically but on other people with whom Galileo had more of a grudge.)
> I do not therefore consider them true and conclusive; indeed, keeping always before my mind's eye a most solid doctrine that I once heard from a most eminent and learned person, and before which one must fall silent,
Assuming that the following really is the "theological angle" suggested by the Pope, it's literally saying that the Pope is a most eminent and learned person, and that the argument he's made is "solid doctrine" and an unassailable argument. And Simplicio isn't coming up with the argument himself; he's saying he's heard it from this other eminent and learned person. All that's perfectly consistent with a good-faith attempt to flatter the Pope's wisdom and influence, and accommodate his request regarding the theological "escape hatch".
Unfortunately, it's also fairly open to being construed as being a sarcastic insult... or even an attempt at a sort of "dog whistle", where "devout" people take it as face value, but people "in the know" take it as being sarcastic.
EDIT: And, seriously:
> I know that if asked whether God in His infinite power and wisdom could have conferred upon the watery element its observed reciprocating motion using some other means than moving its containing vessels... From this I forthwith conclude that, this being so, it would be excessive boldness for anyone to limit and restrict the Divine power and wisdom to some particular fancy of his own.
It's not saying "God could just magic things to make the water appear to move like this"; it's "There are lots of other possible reasons why the water might appear to move like that".
It sounds to me like a description of necessary scientific humility. We have these observations, this one theory is consistent with them, but there lots of other possibilities, so we should keep an open mind and not be too insistent on one particular theory.
It turns out the trial of Galileo was based on a clerical error. They were going through his file and found a document that seemed to say he had pled guilty to a heresy several years earlier, and he was bound by a consent decree that prevented him from teaching heliocentrism. They hauled him to court and accused him of violating the consent decree. Galileo promptly pulled out paperwork showing that he had been cleared in that investigation, he WAS permitted to teach heliocentrism (as a hypothesis), and the judges were looking at an unsigned draft document that never went into effect. It seems to be the case that he never would have been tried if that bogus document hadn't been left in his file.
Galileo also couldn't explain the lack of an observed parallax effect between opposite seasons given the ideas about optics at the time.
When Kepler's model arrived, it was so much better at predicting the positions of all planets except Mercury than any previous model that it was clearly superior. Galileo's was bad at predicting and just contradicted the accepted observations of the day.
IMO Galileo should be better remembered for objects of different masses falling at the same rate and the original idea that all motion is relative (when observing from an internal frame).
> Galileo also couldn't explain the lack of an observed parallax effect between opposite seasons given the ideas about optics at the time.
That's not entirely correct. The lack of parallax was explained by the stars being far away; the problem with that explanation is that Brahe had measured the apparent stellar diameter of stars, which implied that for the stars to be as big as they appear to be to us, they would have to be far, far larger... which violates the underlying Copernican principle that the sun is but a normal star.
The Copernican model was heliocentric, surely? It placed the sun motionless at the centre of the universe. That makes the sun anything but a normal star.
The copernican principle is separate from the model. Basically it says that our position in the universe is random - we don't exist at the center of the universe.
"Hermann Bondi named the principle after Copernicus in the mid-20th century, although the principle itself dates back to the 16th-17th century paradigm shift away from the Ptolemaic system, which placed Earth at the center of the universe. Copernicus proposed that the motion of the planets could be explained by reference to an assumption that the Sun is centrally located and stationary in contrast to the geocentrism. "
"Hermann Bondi named the principle after Copernicus in the mid-20th century, although the principle itself dates back to the 16th-17th century paradigm shift away from the Ptolemaic system, which placed Earth at the center of the universe... Copernicus himself was mainly motivated by technical dissatisfaction with the earlier system and not by support for any mediocrity principle."
Copernicus' solar-system model is entirely separable from any assumptions about star size distribution, and the latter was apparently not a concern of his (nor do I recall seeing anything to the contrary elsewhere.)
On account of this separability, the mediocrity principle cannot be used to eliminate heliocentric models of the solar system from consideration, at least unless there's good evidence for it.
Nevertheless, the presumed huge size of the stars was seen as more or less of a problem (depending on which way one leaned on the heliocentricity issue), but it turned out that the apparent size of the stars was merely an artifact created by diffraction (the Airy disk) [1], making it possible to hold both that the sun is well within the range of stellar sizes and that other stars are far enough away that their parallax is difficult to observe.
That sort of makes sense but the comment I replied to was still mistaken in linking the 20th century "Copernican principle" to debates in the time of Galileo.
IMO calling something so greatly at odds with Copernicus's model the "Copernican principle" is misleading (if not outright nonsensical) and explains why the commentor I corrected confused the two. What a good idea to name something completely at odds with Copernicus's view of the universe after him.
Its like "Gell-Mann amnesia" but without the humour or self awareness.
They cared enough to put heliocentric books on the index of forbidded books for centuries. Gallileo might have offended the Pope, but the works of Copernicus was also forbidden.
There's a weird amount of apologism for the actions of the Church towards Galileo. "Oh but he insulted an authority" - like, that doesn't make it better.
I mean they also just straight up incinerated a man for daring to suggest aliens might exist[1].
Organized religion is, and remains, an authoritarian system of oppression.
Did you know that in quite some countries you are officially not allowed to mock foreign leaders either? I mean it’s usually not enforced, but it’s definitely part of the law
Their goal was to limit what support Galileo could gain for his works in public discurse. It most likely helped with that. It also did not stop scientists from improving on the copernican model without incurring the wrath of the church, they just used earth as point of reference to make the model geocentric.
> provocatively voiced the pope’s own arguments through an obtuse Aristotelian called Simplicio
... Galileo's ordeal with the inquisition was mostly due to him making fun of the pope (probably not a good idea). The truth is that until Kepler introduced elliptical orbits and variable orbital speeds, the Copernican heliocentric model still needed epicycles and was not much better than the ptolemaic model.
And the church didn't even care _that_ much. Copernicus himself was a priest and, while he himself was wary of publishing it and framed it as a way to do astronomical calculations without any kind of philosophical implication, in the end it circulated without much fuss.
This of course should not diminish his contributions to the scientific method and his other contribution to astronomical observations (mostly the satellites of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, though his instrument wasn't good enough to recognize them as rings).