Welcome to the Wannaskan Almanac for Friday.
It was on this day in 1633 that Galileo was forced to deny that he believed that the earth revolved around the sun. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for heresy. This was was commuted to house arrest and he spent the final nine years of his life in his villa. He did some of his best work during this period.
Galileo was a polymath, which means he was smart about lots of things. It's impossible to list in this post all the scientific advances he's responsible for, but heliocentrism was not one of them. It was Copernicus back in 1543 who devised a solar system with the sun at the center. But Galileo championed it. The Inquisition studied heliocentrism and in 1616 said it was heretical because it contradicted the Bible. The professors in the Italian universities knew there was something to heliocentrism, but there was lots of debate about exactly how things worked.
Galileo was a professor of mathematics at the universities of Pisa and Padua and he and the other professors had friendly arguments about the heavens. But in 1623 Galileo got in a heated dispute over comets with a Jesuit professor. Galileo got insulting which ended up alienating all the other Jesuits.
All through the early 1600s, educated people argued over the sun center vs earth center debate. Some stuck with the biblical view, some liked Copernicus, and others believed in a combination of the two. The anti-Copernicus people said heliocentrism smacked of Protestantism. The Vatican banned Copernicus' books but said it was ok to discuss heliocentrism as long as you didn't say it was true.
Galileo got in real trouble when he insulted Pope Urban VIII. The pope had been a friend of Galileo's and asked Galileo to write a book with arguments for and against heliocentrism. He also asked Galileo to include his own ideas. Galileo wrote the book in the form of an argument. The anti-heliocentric view was presented by a character named Simplicio, which in Italian means simpleton. Simplicio also mouthed the pope's ideas. The pope was very angry. Galileo's enemies saw their chance and convinced the pope to send Galileo to the Inquisition. This would be equivalent today to turning a Guatemalan baby over to Jeff Sessions.
Galileo died at his villa in 1642 at the age of 77. The Galileo affair was forgotten and in the following century the church allowed his books to be printed. Protestant propagandists revived the affair in the 1800s as a way to attack Catholicism. In 1992, Pope John Paul expressed regret at how the Galileo affair had been handled. In 2008, it was announced that a statue to Galileo would be erected in the Vatican, but a month later, the statue was cancelled. Urban's ghost had raised a horrible stink.
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| " OK, OK, the sun goes around the earth. I get it!" |
You know, I know (A curious statement in itself) a guy who is a polymath. That statement alone, "You know I know" lends itself to some familiarity, as though the writer and his subject know one another. The writer in as much says, "You are complicit knowing what I do and I know it," although it wasn't the writer's intent at all. In fact, it would've been a better sentence if he/I wrote, "I know a guy who is a polymath" then added, " ,who knew?" But that's another whole kettle of worms.
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