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When Galileo Stood Trial for Defending Science Four centuries ago, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei put his liberty and life on the line to convince the religious establishment that the Copernican model of the solar system—in which the Earth and the other planets revolved around the sun—represented physical reality. Nicolaus Copernicus Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer known as the father of modern astronomy. Nikola Tesla Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power.
In Galileo was admonished by the Sacred Inquisition. But Galileo persisted. He chose to write using urlgar Latin-a precursor to modern Italian, a language accessible to University professors, researchers and students alike-and in the form of a dialogue because he wanted to give voice to the advocates of both geocentrism and heliocentrism, thus presenting a logical argumentation for his science.
As a result, and despite the warm friendship and mutual respect that Galileo enjoyed with Pope Urban VIII, the Vatican deemed him a heretic; Galileo was sentenced to spend the rest of his life under house arrest.
In addition to his innovative theories and ground breaking points of view, Galileo humbly bowed to human realism and reached a compromise between religion and science.
During the long and hard trial, after having exhausted every argument with the judges of the Sacred Inquisition, Galileo arrived at a final decision. If his theory had been confirmed, he would have been condemned to the stake as had been the fate of Giordano Bruno a few years before.
Galileo knew that his contemporaries were not ready to accept such a radical claim as heliocentrism. And the effects are countless. He examined nature to find answers to phenomena via experimentations; only then would he give scientific value to these answers by means of a mathematical model. As the first modern physicist, Galileo has offered important contributions to the study of Dynamics.
Some of which directly affect the way we observe space and we will be able to discover gradually thanks to the strength of the Hubble and Herschel telescopes, which observe the infinity of the universe.
Another project that carries his name today is the Galileo Program, whose objective is to develop scientific exchanges and technologies of excellence among the research laboratories of Italy and France. Through this program, many hope to increase environmental protection, the improvement of the quality of life, protection of cultural heritage, the development of innovative technologies, etc. His Galileo and the Science Deniers aims to stand out by placing the original Renaissance man and his discoveries in modern scientific and social contexts.
Born in in Pisa, Italy, into an intellectual family of declining fortune, Galileo pursued medicine at the University of Pisa. But he soon abandoned his course to study mathematics, his enduring passion.
It was an argot that allowed him to break reliance on the Aristotelian cosmology prized by the Catholic Church, and to forge a new, quantitative study of nature. In , he moved to the University of Padua in Italy, an intellectually liberal environment happily beyond the jurisdiction of the Pope.
Galileo turned it to the heavens to make the discoveries that changed the course of astronomy, and launched his own fate. In his first observations, Galileo saw that the Moon was not a smooth sphere, but was mountainous. He also saw satellites orbiting Jupiter, shooting a hole in the geocentric argument that if Earth were to move, it would lose its Moon. The rise and fall of scientific authority — and how to bring it back.
Galileo suggested, for example, that comets might be optical phenomena caused by the reflection of sunlight by vapours released from Earth. The end of the affair is simply stated. In late , in the aftermath of the publication of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems , Galileo was ordered to appear in Rome to be examined by the Congregation of the Holy Office; i. In January , a very ill Galileo made an arduous journey to Rome. From April, Galileo was called four times to hearings; the last was on June The next day, June 22, , Galileo was taken to the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and ordered to kneel while his condemnation was read.
I have been judged vehemently suspect of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the sun in the center of the universe and immoveable, and that the Earth is not at the center of same, and that it does move.
Wishing however, to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error, heresy, and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church. Quoted in Shea and Artigas , When he later finished his last book, the Two New Sciences which does not mention Copernicanism at all , it had to be printed in Holland, and Galileo professed amazement at how it could have been published.
The details and interpretations of these proceedings have long been debated, and it seems that each year we learn more about what actually happened.
One point of controversy is the legitimacy of the charges against Galileo, both in terms of their content and the judicial procedure. Galileo was charged with teaching and defending the Copernican doctrine that holds the sun is at the center of the universe and the Earth moves.
The status of this doctrine was cloudy. In , an internal commission of the Inquisition had determined that it was heretical, but this was not publicly proclaimed. In , at the same time that the Inquisition was evaluating Copernicanism, they were also investigating Galileo personally—a separate proceeding of which Galileo himself was not likely aware.
To confound issues further, the case against Galileo transpired in a fraught political context. Galileo was a creature of the powerful Medici and a personal friend of Pope Urban VIII, connections that significantly modulated developments Biagioli The legitimacy of the underlying condemnation of Copernicus on theological and rational grounds is even more problematic. Galileo had addressed this problem in , when he wrote his Letter to Castelli and then the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina.
In these texts, Galileo argues that there are two truths: one derived from Scripture, the other from the created natural world. Since both are expressions of the divine will, they cannot contradict one another. However, Scripture and Creation both require interpretation in order to glean the truths they contain—Scripture because it is a historical document written for common people, and thus accommodated to their understanding so as to lead them towards true religion; Creation because the divine act must be distilled from sense experience through scientific enquiry.
While the truths are necessarily compatible, biblical and natural interpretations can go awry, and are subject to correction. Cardinal Bellarmine was willing to countenance scientific truth if it could be proven or demonstrated McMullin But Bellarmine held that the planetary theories of Ptolemy and Copernicus and presumably Tycho Brahe are only mathematical hypotheses; since they are just calculating devices, they are not susceptible to physical proof.
This is a sort of instrumentalist, anti-realist position Machamer ; Duhem There are any number of ways to argue for some sort of instrumentalism. Duhem himself argued that science is not metaphysics, and so only deals with useful conjectures that enable us to systematize phenomena. Subtler versions of this position, without an Aquinian metaphysical bias, have been argued subsequently and more fully by Van Fraassen and others.
Galileo would be led to such a view by his concern with matter theory, which minimized the kinds of motion ascribed uniformly to all bodies. Of course, when put this way, we are faced with the question of what constitutes identity conditions for a theory. The other aspect of all this that has been hotly debated is what constitutes proof or demonstration of a scientific claim. Galileo believed he had a proof of terrestrial motion. How could the moon cause the tides to ebb and flow without any connection to the seas?
Such an explanation would be an invocation of magic or occult powers. Thus, for Galileo, the only conceivable or maybe plausible physical cause for the regular reciprocation of the tides is the combination of the diurnal and annual motions of the Earth.
Briefly, as the Earth rotates around its axis, some parts of its surface are moving along with the annual revolution around the sun and some parts are moving in the contrary direction. Hence the tides. Local differences in tidal flows are due to the differences in the physical conformations of the basins in which they occur for background and more detail, see Palmieri One can see why Galileo thinks he has some sort of proof for the motion of the Earth, and therefore for Copernicanism.
Yet one can also see why Bellarmine and the instrumentalists would not have been impressed. Third, the argument does not touch upon the central position of the sun or arrangement of the planets as calculated by Copernicus. Nevertheless, when the tidal argument is added to the earlier telescopic observations that show the improbabilities of the older celestial picture—the fact that Venus has phases like the moon and so must revolve around the sun; the principle of the relativity of perceived motion which neutralizes the physical arguments against a moving Earth; and so on—it was enough for Galileo to believe that he had the necessary proof to convince the doubters.
But this could occur only after Galileo had changed the acceptable parameters for gaining knowledge and theorizing about the world. Copernicus, Nicolaus natural philosophy: in the Renaissance religion: and science. Brief Biography 2. Introduction and Background 3.
Brief Biography Galileo was born in Pisa on February 15, Fredette, Raymond trans. Drake, Stillman trans. Van Helden, Albert trans. Hessler eds. Barker, Peter trans. Shea, William R. Reeves, Eileen, and Van Helden, Albert trans. Crew, Henry, and de Salvio, Alfonso trans. This inferior translation, first published in , has been reprinted numerous times and is widely available. Collections of primary sources in English: Drake, Stillman ed.
Finocchiaro, Maurice A. Secondary Sources Adams, Marcus P. Sullivan eds. Zalta ed. Bolton trans. Carugo, Adriano, and Alistair C. Coyne, George V.
McMullin ed. Crombie, Alistair C. Bonelli and W. Shea eds. Dijksterhuis, E. Dikshoorn trans. Swerdlow and T. Levere eds. Roger trans.
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