Galileo Galileo

A good amount of advance publicity was given to the lunar eclipse that occurred last night in the wee hours of the morning. I stayed up for it, watching the curved shadow of the earth take a “bite” out of the moon a little after 1:30AM. The bite got bigger and bigger, until “totality” about an hour later. Instead of completely disappearing in the shadow, the moon was somewhat visible, displaying a weird coppery color.

It was a crisp and cold night here in the Poconos, no humidity or city glare to dim the view. It was the early morning of December 21, the winter solstice, the official beginning of winter.

News programs announced it was the first combination of a lunar eclipse and winter solstice since 1638, at which time “Galileo was under house arrest for suggesting that the earth moved around the sun.”

OK it was a radical-sounding idea at the time. We see the sun “rise in the East and set in the West” all the time…sure looks like the sun is doing all the moving,  and  I certainly wouldn't  have thought otherwise back  in 1638.

More importantly, the Catholic Church firmly believed that the Earth was Stationary --  that it was -- that it HAD to be -- the Center of the Universe. It said so in the Bible -- (Psalms 93 and 96) “The World is Firmly Established. It Can’t Be Moved.”  

So one could run afoul of both his fellow man AND God by embracing this newfangled Heliocentric (“sun-centered”) Theory.

In the middle of a full career teaching mathematics at universities, Galileo, in his mid-forties, shook the world in 1609 by inventing a telescope that could magnify by a factor of 30x. Prior to that the best available was only 3x. Not only had he created a new source of income, selling the telescope to mariners and sky gazers, perhaps a few Peeping Toms…
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….but now he could explore the heavens so much more, and perhaps find something that would help prove that the Earth was not the Center of the Universe. The Heliocentric - Geocentric debate had been simmering for almost 70 years, courtesy of a man named Copernicus, who first proposed Heliocentrism. But Copernicus was aware that the world - particularly the Religious world - was not ready for his radical ideas, and he waited until the last year of his life (1543) to publicize his theories. The resulting controversy was somewhat reserved, with no strong champion for "Copernicanism".

Until Galileo, that is. With his new and vastly improved telescope, Galileo found four small celestial bodies orbiting the planet Jupiter. He plotted their movements, predicted their future movements, and destroyed the idea that ONLY the earth could have anything orbiting it.

With this and other discoveries, the Heliocentric - Geocentric debate heated up and became more public. The Church, still confident that its less-than-scientific viewpoint could be verified, didn’t flinch with the upcoming publication of Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”.

But Galileo’s masterwork was devastating and well-written, completely debunking the Geocentric theory and putting the Church in an uncomfortable position.

Galileo was ordered to stand trial for Suspicion of Heresy in 1633. With the threat of torture and death hanging over him, he officially recanted Heliocentrism. His books on the subject, as well as all of his other scientific publications, were banned.

At first he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but then the sentence was reduced to “house arrest”. He was guarded and monitored for the rest of his life, which was another ten years.

Copernicus had waited until the very end of his life to start ruffling the Church’s feathers. Galileo did almost the same thing, and didn’t stand trial until he was 68, having been free to do great things for most of his life.

He probably knew he would eventually be vindicated, maybe posthumously,  that superstition and fanciful doctrines would eventually fall in the face of hard scientific evidence. Secretly the scientific community was embracing his ideas more and more, and it was reasonable to assume that better telescopes would eventually come along, for ever-improving views of a vast and complex cosmos.

Today the Hubble Telescope orbits the earth, taking photos of things so distant that Galileo would have been flabbergasted. Those four moons orbiting Jupiter are merely the four largest, out of a total of 23, and their surfaces have been photographed extensively. They are Callisto, Ganymede, Io, and Europa, known collectively as the Galilean moons of Jupiter.

It took some 350 years, but in the early 1990s the Church vindicated Galileo, apologizing for his heresy trial and the subsequent mistreatment. His legacy lives on, one of the greatest minds of human history, who absolutely loved lunar eclipses.