The Galileo Controversy

The Galileo Inquisition & Trial Was Not Christianity vs. Science!
The scientific decisions made in the Galileo inquisition and trial were based on the current science and were not a result of church persecution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsh6rhAzCss

Images:
1. Galileo Galilei is a painting by Ivan Petrovich Keler Viliandi.
2. Galileo Galilei 'I would say here something from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ;That the intention of Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.'
3. Galileo Galilei 'All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.''
4. Galileo’s eldest daughter, Virginia, or Sister Maria Celeste.

Background from {[https://physicsworld.com/a/the-galileo-affair/]}
In June 1609 Galileo Galilei heard about an optical instrument invented in Holland the year before, consisting of an arrangement of lenses that magnified images three to four times. Despite not having a prototype in his possession, he was soon able to duplicate the instrument, mostly by trial and error. He was also able to increase its magnifying power first to nine, then to 20, and, by the end of the year, to 30. Moreover, rather than merely exploiting the instrument for practical applications on Earth, he started using it to make systematic observations of the heavens to learn new truths about the universe.
Within three years Galileo had made several startling discoveries. He discovered that the Moon had a rough surface full of mountains and valleys. He saw that innumerable other stars existed in addition to those visible with the naked eye. He found that the Milky Way and the nebulae were dense collections of large numbers of individual stars. The planet Jupiter had four moons revolving around it at different distances and with different periods. The appearance of the planet Venus, in the course of its orbital revolution, changed regularly from a full disc, to half a disc, to crescent, and back to a half and a full disc, in a manner analogous to the phases of the Moon. And the surface of the Sun was dotted with dark spots that were generated and dissipated in a very irregular fashion and had highly irregular sizes and shapes, like the clouds above the Earth; while they lasted, these spots moved in such a way as to imply that the Sun rotated on its axis with a period of about one month.
Many of these discoveries were also made independently by others; for example, lunar mountains were also seen by Thomas Harriot in England, and sunspots by Christoph Scheiner in Germany. However, no-one understood their significance as well as Galileo. Methodologically, the telescope implied a revolution in astronomy, in so far as it was a new instrument for the gathering of new kinds of data, vastly transcending the previous reliance on naked-eye observation. Substantively, these discoveries provided a crucial, although not conclusive, confirmation of the Copernican hypothesis of the Earth’s motion. To understand the latter, some background is needed.

The Copernican revolution
In 1543 Copernicus had published a book elaborating a world system the key point of which was that the Earth rotates on its own axis daily and revolves around the Sun yearly. Copernicus’s accomplishment was to give a new argument supporting an old idea that had been almost universally rejected since the ancient Greeks. He demonstrated that the known facts about heavenly motions could be explained in quantitative detail if the universe is a heliocentric system where the Earth revolves around the Sun (the geokinetic hypothesis); and that this explanation was more coherent (and simpler and more elegant) than the geostatic account.
However, the Copernican revolution required much more than this argument. The geokinetic hypothesis had to be supported not only with new theoretical arguments, but also with new observational evidence. The telescope provided such novel evidence. For example, lunar mountains and sunspots showed that there were significant similarities between the Earth and the heavenly bodies. This refuted the traditional doctrine of the Earth–heaven dichotomy; and so it became possible for the Earth to be a planet, i.e. located in “heaven”. The satellites of Jupiter showed that it was physically possible for one body to revolve around another, while the latter revolved around a third; and hence it became possible for the Earth to revolve around the Sun while the Moon revolved around the Earth. And the phases of Venus proved the heliocentricity of its orbit, thus confirming this particular element of the Copernican system.
Moreover, the Earth’s motion had to be not only constructively supported with new arguments and evidence, but it also had to be critically defended from a host of powerful old and new objections. These objections were based on astronomical observation, Aristotelian physics, scriptural passages and traditional epistemology. For example, according to Aristotelian physics, the natural state of bodies was rest and a constant force was needed to keep a body in motion; thus, supposedly, bodies on a rotating Earth could not fall vertically, as they are seen to do. And according to the scriptural passage in Joshua 10:12–13, God miraculously stopped the diurnal motion of the Sun to prolong daylight, so that Joshua could lead the Israelites to victory before nightfall. Galileo answered the astronomical objections by showing that the observational consequences implied by Copernicanism were indeed visible with the telescope, although still invisible with the naked eye. He answered the physical objections by articulating a new physics centred on the principles of conservation and composition of motion. And he answered the biblical objections by arguing that Scripture is not a scientific authority, and so scriptural passages should not be used to invalidate astronomical claims that are proved or provable.
Finally, the defence of heliocentrism required not only the destructive refutation of these objections, but also the appreciative understanding of their strength. Galileo was keen on this, and so in his writings we find the anti-Copernican arguments stated more clearly and incisively than in the works of advocates of geocentrism.
However, Galileo also realized that his case in favour of Copernicanism was not absolutely conclusive or decisive. Some counter-evidence remained, since, for example, his telescope failed to reveal an annual parallax of the fixed stars.
In short, Galileo’s key contribution to the Copernican revolution was to elaborate a successful (although not definitive) defence of Copernicanism that stressed argumentation and observation judiciously guided by the ideals of critical-mindedness, open-mindedness and fair-mindedness.

Galileo’s trial
As is well known, however, Galileo’s efforts were hindered by the Catholic Church. In fact, the trial of Galileo can be interpreted as a series of ecclesiastic attempts to stop him from defending Copernicus. In 1616 the Church’s department of book censorship decreed that the geokinetic doctrine was contrary to Scripture, and this decree amounted to a general prohibition on defending Copernicanism from scriptural objections. Furthermore, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine warned Galileo to cease defending the Earth’s motion — a warning that amounted to a personal prohibition on defending Copernicus from an astronomical, scientific and philosophical point of view. In 1633, after a formal trial, the Inquisition condemned Galileo as a suspected heretic for defending the geokinetic hypothesis and denying the astronomical authority of Scripture. He had done these things implicitly, indirectly and probably in his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632), which was a critical discussion, examining the arguments on both sides, showing that the geokinetic arguments were stronger than the geostatic ones, implying that Copernicanism was probably true, and thus defending it in that sense.
The condemnation of Galileo in turn generated a more protracted, complex and polarized controversy that is still ongoing. However, I believe these complexities can be simplified, without oversimplification.
At first, various questions were raised about the physical reality of the Earth’s motion; but gradually, historians of science established incontrovertibly that Galileo was right on this issue. As this realization emerged, questions began to be raised about whether his supporting reasons, arguments and evidence had been correct; that is, whether he had been right for the wrong reasons. This is an instructive issue, but Galileo’s reasoning can be defended from this criticism. For some time, he was also criticized for his hermeneutical principle that Scripture was not a scientific authority; but history vindicated Galileo in this regard too, at least from the viewpoint of the official position of the modern Catholic Church, which was promulgated in 1893 by Pope Leo XIII in the encyclical Providentissimus Deus. However, before this theological vindication, the myth spread that Galileo had been condemned for being a bad theologian, namely for preaching and practising the use of Scripture to support astronomical claims (i.e. the opposite of what he actually did); it took the whole 19th century before this myth was dispelled. In any case, on the hermeneutical issue too, it is important to check the correctness of his argument to justify that Scripture is not a scientific authority; although this Galilean reasoning has been the target of many objections, I believe it can be defended from them.
As it became increasingly clear that Galileo could not be validly convicted of being a bad scientist, a bad theologian or a bad logician, he started being blamed for other reasons. Some authors began to stress the legal situation, charging that he was guilty of disobeying the Church’s 1616 admonition regarding Copernicanism. However, if this admonition is interpreted as a prohibition on mere discussion, the existence of such a special injunction is undermined by the record of the trial proceedings, first published in 1867–1878. These records include only one document stating that Galileo was forbidden to even discuss the topic, but this document is highly irregular in several respects, whereas there are several more reliable relevant documents that say nothing about such a strict prohibition, although they should have mentioned it if it had occurred. On the other hand, if the admonition is taken as a prohibition on defending Copernicanism, nobody denies its existence, but the issue reduces to whether such a prohibition was legitimate, and if it was, whether Galileo’s defence was scientifically and logically fair and valid.
Finally, there is the issue of whether Galileo should be credited or blamed for helping us understand that science and religion are in conflict or that they are in harmony, as the case may be. The resolution of this issue requires that we admit three crucial things. First, the original affair featured an historical conflict between those who affirmed and those who denied that Copernicanism contradicted Scripture; and the irony is that it was Galileo who denied the conflict and the Church officials who advocated it. Second, the original affair epitomized more the conflict between cultural conservation and innovation than the conflict between science and religion; this is the case because there were many clergymen who sided with Galileo and many scientists who sided with the Church, which means that there was an internal split within both the Church and science. Third, in the subsequent four centuries the original affair was usually perceived (rightly or wrongly) as epitomizing the conflict between science and religion; thus, the most essential feature of the subsequent controversy is indeed the science versus religion conflict.

The two cultures
The controversy shows no signs of abating to this date. This is obvious not only from the recent rehabilitation efforts by the Catholic Church, but also from the recent anti-Galilean critiques by left-leaning social critics.
For example, in 1942, the tricentennial of Galileo’s death, there was the first partial and informal rehabilitation. In the years that followed, this was done by several clergymen who held the top positions at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Catholic University of Milan, the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, and the Vatican Radio. They published accounts of Galileo as a Catholic hero who upheld the harmony between science and religion, who had the courage to advocate the truth in astronomy even against the Catholic authorities of his time, and who had the religious piety to retract his views outwardly when the 1633 trial proceedings made his obedience necessary.
In 1979 Pope John Paul II began a further informal rehabilitation of Galileo that was not concluded until 1992. In two speeches to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in other statements and actions, the pope admitted that Galileo’s trial was not merely an error but also an injustice. The pope also declared that Galileo was theologically right about scriptural interpretation, as against his ecclesiastical opponents; that even pastorally speaking, his desire to disseminate novelties was as reasonable as his opponents’ inclination to resist them; and that he provides an instructive example of the harmony between science and religion.
At about the same time that Galileo was being rehabilitated by various Catholic officials and institutions, he became the target of unprecedented criticism on the part of various representatives of secular culture. It was an unexpected reversal of roles, with his erstwhile enemies turning into friends and his former friends becoming enemies. These critics elaborated what might be called social and cultural criticism of Galileo; that is, they tried to blame Galileo by holding him personally or emblematically responsible for such things as the abuses of the industrial revolution, the social irresponsibility of scientists, the atomic bomb, and the rift between the two cultures. They were mostly leftwing writers. Chief among them were the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose play Galileo, written in 1938, became a classic of 20th-century theatre; Arthur Koestler, who wrote the 1958 bestselling book The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe; and Paul Feyerabend, the Austrian-born philosopher, who advanced his version of social criticism in a book entitled Against Method, first published in 1975.
These developments have not been properly assimilated yet. For example, the Catholic “rehabilitations” tend to be either unfairly criticized (even by Catholics) or uncritically accepted (even by non-Catholics). And the left-leaning social critiques tend to be summarily dismissed by practising scientists, whose professional identity is thereby threatened, or dogmatically advocated by self-styled progressives, who seem not to have learned much from Galileo and to want to turn the clock back to pre-Galilean days. I believe this controversy is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, I believe I have devised a framework that paves the way for coming to terms with the controversy and eventually resolving it. In my approach, one interprets the controversy in terms of arguments for and against the rightness of Galileo’s condemnation; one displays towards these arguments the same attitude that Galileo displayed towards the arguments for and against the Earth’s motion; and the key elements of this Galilean attitude (labelled critical-mindedness, open-mindedness and fair-mindedness) are to know and understand the arguments against one’s own view and appreciate their strength before refuting them. In short, my overarching thesis is that today, in the context of the Galileo affair and the controversies over science versus religion and over institutional authority versus individual freedom, the proper defence of Galileo should have the reasoned, critical, open-minded and fair-minded character that was also displayed by his own defence of Copernicus.
These are some of the cultural repercussions and lessons of the telescopic discoveries that Galileo began making in 1609. And such are, in part, the challenges and opportunities of the quatercentenary of their occurrence.
Maurice A Finocchiaro is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, US. He is the editor of The Essential Galileo (Hackett) and the author of Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Springer), of which this article is a summary"

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Galileo's Moon (2019, 1080p HD Documentary)
Join experts as they uncover the truth behind the find of the century; an alleged proof copy of Galileo's "Sidereus Nuncius" with the astronomer's signature and seemingly original watercolor paintings that changed our understanding of the cosmos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLEIhYuQbjk

Images:
1. Galileo Galilei 'Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.'.
2. Print of Galileo by Samuel Sartain from painting by Wyatt, date unknown.
3. Galileo using a telescope, circa 1620.
4. Galileo’s middle finger on display in 2009

Background from {[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Galileos-Revolutionary-Vision-Helped-Usher-In-Modern-Astronomy-34545274//]}
Galileo’s Revolutionary Vision Helped Usher In Modern Astronomy
The Italian scientist turned his telescope toward the stars and changed our view of the universe

AUGUST 2009
Inside a glass case was a plain-looking tube, worn and scuffed. Lying in the street, it would have looked like a length of old pipe. But as I approached it, Derrick Pitts—only half in jest—commanded: "Bow down!"
The unremarkable-looking object is in fact one of the most important artifacts in the history of science: it's one of only two surviving telescopes known to have been made by Galileo Galilei, the man who helped revolutionize our conception of the universe. The telescope was the centerpiece of "Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy," an exhibition at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 2009.
Read More
Pitts, who runs the institute's planetarium and other astronomy programs, says that receiving the telescope from Florence's Galileo Museum—the first time the instrument ever left Florence—was "something of a religious experience." Understandably so: if Galileo is considered a patron saint of astronomy, then his telescope is one of its most holy relics. "Galileo's work with the telescope unleashed the notion that ours is a sun-centered solar system and not an Earth-centered solar system," says Pitts. In other words, from that ugly old cylinder came the profound idea that we are not the center of the universe.
It was a dangerous idea, and one that cost Galileo his freedom.
On a starry night in Padua 400 years ago, Galileo first turned a telescope toward the sky. It might seem the most natural of actions—after all,what else does one do with a telescope? But in 1609, the instrument, which had been invented only the year before by Dutch opticians, was known as a "spyglass," in anticipation of its military uses. The device was also sold as a toy. When Galileo read of it, he quickly set about making a much more powerful version. The Dutch telescopes magnified images by 3 times; Galileo's telescopes magnified them by 8 to 30 times.
At the time, astronomy, like much of science, remained under the spell of Aristotle. Almost 2,000 years after his death, the giant of Greek philosophy was held in such high regard that even his most suspect pronouncements were considered unimpeachable. Aristotle had maintained that all celestial objects were perfect and immutable spheres, and that the stars made a dizzying daily journey around the center of the universe, our stationary Earth. Why scrutinize the sky? The system had already been neatly laid out in books. Astronomers "wish never to raise their eyes from those pages," Galileo wrote in frustration, "as if this great book of the universe had been written to be read by nobody but Aristotle, and his eyes had been destined to see for all posterity."
In Galileo's day, the study of astronomy was used to maintain and reform the calendar. Sufficiently advanced students of astronomy made horoscopes; the alignment of the stars was believed to influence everything from politics to health.
Certain pursuits were not in an astronomer's job description, says Dava Sobel, author of the best-selling historical memoir Galileo's Daughter (1999). "You didn't talk about what the planets were made of," she says. "It was a foregone conclusion that they were made of the fifth essence, celestial material that never changed." Astronomers might make astrological predictions, but they weren't expected to discover anything new.
So when Galileo, then 45 years old, turned his telescope to the heavens in the fall of 1609, it was a small act of dissent. He saw that the Milky Way was in fact "a congeries of innumberable stars," more even than his tired hand could draw. He saw the pockmarked surface of the moon, which, far from being perfectly spherical, was in fact "full of cavities and prominences, being not unlike the face of the Earth." Soon he would note that Jupiter had four moons of its own and that Venus had moonlike phases, sometimes waxing to a disk, sometimes waning to a crescent. He later saw imperfections in the Sun. Each discovery drew Aristotle's system further into question and lent ever more support to the dangerously revolutionary view that Galileo had privately come to hold—set out just a half-century earlier by a Polish astronomer named Nicolaus Copernicus—that Earth traveled around the Sun.
"I give infinite thanks to God," Galileo wrote to the powerful Florentine statesman Belisario Vinta in January of 1610, "who has been pleased to make me the first observer of marvelous things."
Like many figures whose names have endured, Galileo wasn't shy about seeking fame. His genius for astronomy was matched by a genius for self-promotion, and soon, by virtue of several canny decisions, Galileo's own star was rising.
In Tuscany, the name Medici had been synonymous with power for centuries. The Medici family acquired and wielded it through various means—public office, predatory banking and alliances with the powerful Catholic Church. Conquest of territory was a method favored in the late 16th century, when the head of the family, Cosimo I, seized many regions neighboring Florence. The family took a keen interest in science and its potential military applications.
The Medicis may have needed scientists, but scientists—and especially Galileo—needed the Medicis even more. With a mistress, three children and an extended family to support, and knowing that his questioning of Aristotelian science was controversial, Galileo shrewdly decided to court the family's favor. In 1606, he dedicated a book about a geometric and military compass to his student Cosimo II, the family's 16-year-old heir apparent.
Then, in 1610, on the occasion of his publication of The Starry Messenger, which detailed his telescopic findings, Galileo dedicated to Cosimo II something far greater than a book: the very moons of Jupiter. "Behold, therefore, four stars reserved for your illustrious name," wrote Galileo. "...Indeed it appears that the Maker of the Stars himself, by clear arguments, admonished me to call these new planets by the illustrious name of Your Highness before all others." (Galileo chose the name "Cosmian stars," but Cosimo's office requested "Medicean stars" instead, and the alteration was duly made.) "The Starry Messenger was a job application," says Owen Gingerich, an astronomer and science historian at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics—and, sure enough, Galileo got just what he had been seeking: the Medicis' patronage.
He could hardly have hoped for better patrons, as the Franklin exhibit made clear. It included scores of intricately wrought instruments from the family's collection. The fanciful names of the ingenious contraptions hint at their function and describe their forms: nautical planispheres, gimbaled compasses, horary quadrants, armillary spheres. One of the oldest surviving astrolabes, an instrument for calculating the position of the Sun and stars, was on exhibit, as was a set of brass and steel compasses believed to have belonged to Michelangelo, another Medici beneficiary. (Galileo's telescope and the rest of the collection have since returned to Florence.)
Though capable of measuring the world in various ways and to various ends—determining the caliber of projectiles, surveying land, aiding navigation—some of the instruments were never used, having been collected for the very purpose to which museums put them today: display. A few, such as a compass that collapses into the shape of a dagger, demonstrate the era's alliance of science and power. But they also illustrate its blending of science and art—the gleaming artifacts rival works of sculpture. They tell, too, of a growing awareness that, as Galileo said, nature was a grand book ("questo grandissimo libro") written in the language of mathematics.
Not everyone took pleasure in—or even believed—what Galileo claimed to have seen in the sky.
Some of his contemporaries refused to even look through the telescope at all, so certain were they of Aristotle's wisdom. "These satellites of Jupiter are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can exercise no influence on the Earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist," proclaimed nobleman Francesco Sizzi. Besides, said Sizzi, the appearance of new planets was impossible—since seven was a sacred number: "There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head: two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth....From this and many other similarities in Nature, which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets must necessarily be seven."
Some who did deign to use the telescope still disbelieved their own eyes. A Bohemian scholar named Martin Horky wrote that "below, it works wonderfully; in the sky it deceives one." Others nominally honored the evidence of the telescope but scrambled to make it conform to their preconceptions. A Jesuit scholar and correspondent of Galileo named Father Clavius attempted to rescue the idea that the Moon was a sphere by postulating a perfectly smooth and invisible surface stretching above its scarred hills and valleys.
The Starry Messenger was a success, however: the first 500 copies sold out within months. There was a great demand for Galileo's telescopes, and he was named the head mathematician at the University of Pisa.
In time Galileo's findings began to trouble a powerful authority—the Catholic Church. The Aristotelian worldview had been integrated with Catholic teachings, so any challenges to Aristotle had the potential to run afoul of the church. That Galileo had revealed flaws in celestial objects was bothersome enough. But some of his observations, especially the changing phases of Venus and the presence of moons around other planets, lent support to Copernicus' heliocentric theory, and that made Galileo's work potentially heretical. Biblical literalists pointed to the book of Joshua, in which the Sun is described as stopping, miraculously, "in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day." How could the Sun stop if, as Copernicus and now Galileo claimed, it was already stationary? By 1614, a Dominican friar named Tommaso Caccini preached openly against Galileo, calling the Copernican worldview heretical. In 1615 another Dominican friar, Niccolò Lorini, filed a complaint against Galileo with the Roman Inquisition, a tribunal instituted the previous century to eliminate heresy.
These church challenges greatly troubled Galileo, a deeply pious man. It is a common misconception that Galileo was irreligious, but as Dava Sobel says, "Everything he did, he did as a believing Catholic." Galileo simply believed that Scripture was not intended to teach astronomy, but rather, as he wrote in a 1613 letter to his disciple Benedetto Castelli, to "persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation." Some members of the church held the same opinion: Cardinal Baronius in 1598 said that the Bible was meant "to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."
Late in 1615, Galileo traveled to Rome to meet with church leaders personally; he was eager to present his discoveries and make the case for heliocentrism. But Baronius' view turned out to be the minority one in Rome. Galileo was cautioned against defending Copernicanism.
Eight years later, a new pope, Urban VIII, ascended and Galileo again requested permission to publish. Pope Urban granted permission—with the caveat that Galileo present the theory as a hypothesis only. But the book Galileo finally published in 1632, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, came off clearly in favor of the Copernican view, infuriating the pope.
And so, in what Pope John Paul II would deem, more than three centuries later, a case of "tragic mutual incomprehension," Galileo was condemned by the Holy Office of the Inquisition for being "vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed the doctrine which is false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scriptures, that the Sun is the center of the world." He was sentenced to imprisonment, which was commuted to house arrest for the by then ailing 69-year-old man.
Despite repeated requests for clemency, the astronomer spent his last eight years confined to his home, forbidden to speak or write of the topics that had so captivated him. (Meanwhile, forbidden copies of his Dialogue are thought to have been widely sold on the black market.) Blindness overcame him, and as he wrote to a friend in 1638, "The universe which I with my astonishing observations and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred, nay, a thousandfold beyond the limits commonly seen by wise men of all centuries past, is now for me so diminished and reduced, it has shrunk to the meager confines of my body."
The exact composition of some of Galileo's telescopes remains a mystery. A written fragment—a shopping list jotted on a letter—allows historians to surmise the materials Galileo used for his lenses. And so the ingredients for one of the most famous telescopes in history—an organ pipe, molds for shaping lenses, abrasives for polishing glass—are thrown in with reminders to buy soap, combs and sugar.
It's a humdrum list—as plain as the lusterless tube in a museum display. Yet what came from that tube, like the man who made it, was anything but ordinary. Galileo "was one of those who was present at the birth of modern astronomy," says Harvard-Smithsonian's Gingerich.
In the dedication of The Starry Messenger, addressed to Cosimo II, Galileo hailed the effort to "preserve from oblivion and ruin names deserving of immortality." But the moons of Jupiter he named the Medicean have come to be more commonly known as the Galilean moons, and in 1989, the spacecraft NASA launched to study them was named Galileo. And 2009 was named the International Year of Astronomy by the United Nations in honor of the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first telescopic observations.
The fame Galileo sought and obtained, he earned. "Galileo understood what was fundamentally important" about his telescopic observations, says Gingerich. "Namely, that they were showing us a whole new universe."
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