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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Galileo was originally on very good terms with the pope. Then the pope asked him to write a book comparing heliocentric and geocentric ideas from a neutral perspective. Galileo instead wrote a book ridiculing geocentrism, and had some things the pope said repeated by a character called "Simplico" ("Fool"). He insulted the pope, and that's where the trouble really started.

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I don't think that's a defense of the church.

It is not. But it is also different story and different complaint about church.

Well to be honest if antivaxer asked a doctor to compare vaccines to essential oils you would probably do the same, or flat earther asked you to compare theory of flat earth vs cube earth vs geoid earth.

Although one could expect trouble when that patron was basically the most powerful person at that time.

The big difference in your comparison is that vaccines and the roundness of the Earth are very well established with overwhelming evidence supporting them. The heliocentric solar system was not well established at that time. That's what the whole discussion was about.

Copernicus' book had been published in 1543. Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633. That would be like someone in 2043 being convicted of heresy for saying that DNA has a double helical structure.

Parallax, predicted by the heliocentric model, was only observed in 1806. Until then, its apparent absence was a strong argument against heliocentrism. (We just didn't know that stars are so far away.)

DNA structure is not a very good analogue because here we already had the X-ray image, and the question was to find a molecular structure that matched the data.

Also, the discovery of DNA fulfilled a prediction by Darwin's theory of evolution: that there had to be a mechanism by which traits were passed on to the next generation. It's something that made sense within the paradigm of the time, and it fit the observations.

Heliocentrism made sense on some level, but not on another, and it didn't fit the observations of the time. Only when Kepler made a model that fit observations, and Newton's theory of gravity explained why it had to be that way, did heliocentrism made scientific sense and was geocentrism obviously wrong.

It is not about evidence, it is about sure you are about your argument, and as it was stated below - Galileo wasn't the first one to propose heliocentricism.

But at the time, without robust mathematical concepts of inertia, forces, etc there were some reasonable arguments against heliocentrism. Plus, Galileo ignored Kepler's elliptical orbits, which are closer to reality.

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