Hacker News Reader

Oh, the Galileo thing.

Politics is a complex thing where people don't mean what they say, and their meaning change depending on who are listening, how, why and when.

Heliocentrism was discovered by a joint-enterprise of two enemy churches, and only became heresy post-facto when some very good evidence arrived. But by then it seemed to really become heresy, and was punished by itself. Almost certainly the Galileo's posture was important for that, but the society's context was way more important.

Anyway, you won't get any good conclusion if you insist on analyzing the politicians arguments on logic or expect coherence.

> Context: Galileo was the first person to see with his own eyes with his first of the kind self-made telescope the moons that are today known as Galilean moons and recognized them as the satellites of Jupiter in March 1610.

Which was not evidence for heliocentrism.

In the early 1600s there were seven models floating around: Heraclidean (geo-heliocentric), Ptolemaic, Copernican (heliocentric, pure circles with lots of epicycles), Gilbertian, Tychonic, Ursine, Keplerian.

Newton, in his Principia (1687), did not use calculus to present his Universal Graviation: rather it was carefully structured in Aristotelian form, with axioms and deductive logic. Kepler's laws can be deduced from principles. Still no coriollis or parallax.

The first inkling of the Earth's motion comes in 1728 when James Bradley detects stellar aberration in γ-Draconis. In 1791 Giovanni Guglielmini finds a 4 mm Coriolis deflection over a 29 m drop, thus providing empirical evidence of rotation. In 1806 Giuseppi Calandrelli publishes "Ozzervatione e riflessione sulla paralasse annua dall’alfa della Lira," reporting parallax in α-Lyrae. So parallax, the chief evidence for the Earth's motion came 250+ years after Galileo.

Stellar parallax was considered since at least Aristotle, as he mentions in his On the Heavens (II.14), and since it is not observed then it is reasonable to conclude that there is no motion (it took several thousand years to develop instruments to actually measure it).

Galileo's chief problems were (a) he was an egotistical jackass, and (b) he had no evidence for what he was claiming to be true. He was allowed to put forward the Copernican model "suppositionally", i.e., as an hypothesis, and "not absolutely". The latter of which, (b), Galileo admitted in his first deposition (12 April 1633): it was concluded that his book put forward the idea 'absolutely', which is where his conviction comes from.

By the late 1600s most folks had switched over to the Keplerian model: not necessarily because they thought it was what was actually happening in reality, but probably because it made the math easier.

For a good timeline of events, see (recently late) Michael F. Flynn's "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown":

* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

Daniel Whitten's "Matters of Faith and Morals Ex Suppositione" is also an interesting read.

So yes, that's exactly an example of the "guilty Galileo and the good church" false narrative.

Many useless claims which don't disprove that his sentence was literally because of:

"heresy" ... "that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world" ... "contrary to Holy Scripture"

And the church forbade his book as "heresy" for 200 years.

He was right. The church was wrong, directly referring to the effing "Holy Scripture" to support its claim and played fighting "heresy", keeping being wrong for 200 years afterwards. It's so clear.

> He was right.

Monkeys throwing darts can also (just happen to) be "right" when picking stocks that do well in the market. Galileo had as much evidence in believing Copernicus was right as the monkeys.

If he had simply stuck to simply arguing both sides of an hypothesis in his Dialogue, which he was asked to do by the pope in the first place, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Heck, Kepler's stuff was already around for decades, and Galileo completely ignored it (along with Tycho):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_Concerning_the_Two_Ch...

If you want to argue 'for science' then Galileo is not a good example: the only thing he just happen to be right about was that the sun was the centre of things, whereas everything else in the Copernican system (including epicycles) was just as messy as in Ptolemy. There was no practical reason to switch systems, and no evidence to think it was correct.

At the end of the day the person who actually got things right was Kepler, and he kept plugging away at the problem because of this belief that the physical world reflected the spiritual realm (KGW XIII, letter 23, 35; 1595)

> In this way, then, the Sun, itself at rest in the middle and yet the fount of motion, carries the image of God the Father and creator. For what creation is to God, motion is to the Sun. Moreover, it moves [the planets] in a fixed place, as the Father creates in the Son. Unless the fixed stars offered a place, thanks to their motionlessness, no movement could exist. I defended this axiom while still in Tübingen. The Sun distributes motive virtue through the medium space, in which the planets are found: just as the Father creates by spirit or by the virtue of His spirit. And from the necessity of these presuppositions, it follows that motion is in proportion with distance.

See Kozhamthadam's "The Religious Foundations of Kepler's Science" and "Theological Foundations of Kepler's Astronomy" by Barker and Goldstein.

Going further, one needs to believe in certain metaphysical assumptions before you can even start doing what we know call science:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#Provid...

There were plenty ideas floating around at the time, but ideas are cheap. Galileo certainly made important improvements to telescope technology, but his efforts in moving forward new models (specifically Copernican) were a dead end, and he made no practical difference to things: Kepler was already defending Copernicus in his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1e 1596), and put forward his laws in Astronomia nova (1609), a copy of which he sent to Galileo, which Galileo promptly ignored even two decades later when he published his Dialogue (1632).

You still can't deny: the church was wrong, directly referring to the effing "Holy Scripture" to support its claim.

The Earth was never the center around which the Sun rotated. Not in 1AD, not in 1600AD, not now.

If the church claimed that the "Holy Scripture" says that the Earth is in the center, the church was still wrong, and moreover, the "Holy Scripture" was wrong.

The church can't be right to claim "heresy" to somebody who was right then and is still right now.

> You still can't deny: the church was wrong, directly referring to the effing "Holy Scripture" to support its claim.

It was the pope that asked Galileo to write a book in the first place. The Church was so against the idea that… its leader asked a prominent natural philosopher to write about. The book had two imprimatur approvals.

> The Earth was never the center around which the Sun rotated. Not in 1AD, not in 1600AD, not now.

And there was no evidence to support this assertion until 1728 and Bradley with γ-Draconis, and with the first parallax report in 1806 and Calandrelli (a priest) with α-Lyrae/Vega (the actual value he calculated was wrong). It was not a new idea when Copernicus published his book in 1543, nor when Kepler defended it in 1596, nor when Galileo published his Dialgoue in 1623: Aristotle most famously considered it in ~300 BC and rejected it for lack of evidence. Anaxagoras (400s BC) and Aristarchus of Samos put forward heliocentrism.

It was never a grand Science Vs Church issue, not at the time at least, that came perhaps later with legend.

It wan't even the case that the Pope (in person) was mad with Galileo for being used as a Simplicio caricature and figure of fun in his work.

All the data used came from church funded observatories and church backed astronomers, all the main ideas from both sides of the debate came from church funded theorists.

The crux of the dispute and the trial was pretty much that Galileo was a dedicated edgelord who had decades of pissing people off and making enemies on his ledger.

Think less about religion Vs science and more about maverick asshole vs. faction within giant bureaucracy.

Once Galileo had "insulted the Pope" the knives came out and his enemies struck, it was a pure show trial fueled by personal vindictiveness that came from being the target of savage biting insults.

Still:

- the church officially wrote that the Earth is the center

- that the Holy Scripture says so and

- whoever says differently is heretic

and the Earth was never the center.

None of which had much to do with the persecution of Galileo.

The Catholic Church has changed its stance on many things through time, see [history].

In this instance the Church itself had officially requested a presentation be made to demonstrate various arguments for and against different viewpoints .. one of which was that the heavens didn't rotate about the earth.

It wasn't a surprise that such a well known hypothetical should appear in a book commissioned to outline such hypotheticals.

And yet ... Pope Urban VIII was a patron of Galileo and encouraged him to write his treatise.

Those who judged Galileo were part of the Roman Inquisition.

Pope Urban's hands were tied when Galileo was seen to mock the pope and church through the figure and dialogue of Simplicio.

This is of course does not make the adjudication OK but you're going too far in the opposite direction.

Haha yeah, the whole "Galileo was mean" is just insight porn nonsense. Evidence-free claim.

There's the evidence of the character Simplicio, who employed stock arguments in support of geocentricity, and was depicted in the book as being an intellectually inept fool.

The arguments made "by an idiot" were clear swipes at both Lodovico delle Colombe and Cesare Cremonini.

And other passages in other works of Galileo, but that alone is sufficiento sink "Evidence-free claim".

This has been batted back and forth since (at least) The Sleepwalkers (1959) by Arthur Koestler so you can argue against the assertaion but it's foolish to pretend there isn't reams of references on this going back decades.

That's not evidence. That's the claim. If you claim that he was put to death for making fun of someone, you can't prove that by claiming that he made fun of someone. It's total conspiracy theory stuff.

All those references are in the class of this salt stuff in the OP. They're whole fiction.

> Haha yeah, the whole "Galileo was mean" is just insight porn nonsense. Evidence-free claim.

The Our Fake History podcast had a two-part series on this:

* https://www.podcastone.com/episode/Episode-163--What-Was-The...

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-163-what-was-t...

* https://www.podcastone.com/episode/Episode-164--What-Was-The...

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-164-what-was-t...