Galileo Galilei

1609: Galileo builds his first telescope

Galileo demonstrates telescope to the Venetian senate

Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) 1610

The surface of the moon is not smooth, uniform, and precisely spherical as a great number of philosophers believe it (and the other heavenly bodies) to be, but is uneven, rough, and full of cavities and prominences, being not unlike the face of the earth, relieved by chains of mountains and deep valleys. Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius

Moons of Jupiter, Sketches from Jan. 7 to Jan. 24, 1610

Galileo’s drawings of the planets, Showing Saturn’s ears and the phases of Venus

Galileo, Letters on Sunspots, 1613

Celestial Realm Ether Uniform circular motion Incorruptible Terrestrial Realm 4 elements (earth, water, fire, air) straight lines corruptible Aristotle’s cosmology

Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, 1543

"On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel: "O sun, stand still over Gibeon, O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon." So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day." Joshua 10:12-13

Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615 I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth-whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. … Thus it would be necessary to assign to God feet, hands and eyes, as well as corporeal and human affections, such as anger, repentance, hatred, and sometimes even the forgetting of` things past and ignorance of those to come. These propositions uttered by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes in order to accommodate them to the capacities, Of the common people, who are rude and unlearned.

…having arrived at any certainties in physics, we ought to utilize these as the most appropriate aids in the true exposition of the Bible Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess

Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615 Your Reverence and Galileo did prudently to content yourself with speaking hypothetically, and not absolutely, as I have always believed that Copernicus spoke … I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun was in the center of the universe and the earth in the third sphere, and that the sun did not travel around the earth but the earth circled the sun, then it would be necessary to proceed with great caution in explaining the passages of Scripture which seemed contrary

1616: Holy Office declares heliocentric theory “foolish and absurd philosophically, and formally heretical, in as much as it expressly contradicts the doctrines of Holy Scripture in many places, both according to their literal meaning, and according to the common exposition and meaning of the holy Fathers and Doctors”

Cardinal Barberini becomes pope Urban VII in 1623

Tycho Brahe’s earth-centered system

Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 1632

1633, Galileo brought before the Inquisition

Sentence of the Inquisition, 1633 We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare that you, the above-mentioned Galileo, because of the things deduced in the trial and confessed by you as above, have rendered yourself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture: that the sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and the earth moves and is not the center of the world, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after is has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture

Galileo placed under house arrest, Worked on the physics of motion