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Hindsight's 20/20. Jailing some scientist trying to promote some radical new theory is a different matter when you're looking at it from their perspective. In
by ethbro 11y ago
Hindsight's 20/20. Jailing some scientist trying to promote some radical new theory is a different matter when you're looking at it from their perspective.
In fact, that'd be almost as reasonable as modern commercial interests arguing against some kind of theory that proposed humans were impacting the climate of the planet...
- kragen 11y ago"Arguing against" is always okay. It's okay to be wrong. What's not okay is squelching conflicting opinions with violence so that neither you nor anybody else has a chance to stop being wrong. How many decades of astronomical progress did we lose to Urban VII? How many scholars or potential scholars in other fields suffered a chilling effect from seeing that proposing new scientific theories could bring the Inquisition down upon their head?
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWhat did Urban VII do?
- kragen 11y agoProsecuted Galileo, resulting in him spending the rest of his life under house arrest?
- TeMPOraL 11y agoOh, you meant Pope Urban VIII. Urban VII lived like a hundred years earlier. But the anwser to your question, "How many decades of astronomical progress did we lose to Urban VII?", given the sources referenced upthread is: apparently zero. Neither Urban VIII nor the rest of papacy seem to have held back Kepler or Newton.
- kragen 11y agoOh! Of course you're right; I mixed up my popes. Thank you for the correction! It would have been surprising if the papacy were able to hold back Kepler and Newton, since they both lived in Protestant lands. That might be a coincidence. But maybe there were potential Keplers and Newtons living in Rome, or Madrid, or Tuscany, or even Paris¹, who were simply intimidated out of doing research. ¹ Even if they were Huguenots, who were still experiencing religious assassinations at the time, despite Henry IV; but especially if they were Catholics whose friends and family might suspect them of Huguenot sympathies.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago> How many decades of astronomical progress did we lose to Urban VII? Good question. I've never thought of astronomy as characterized by a constant stream of progress building mainly on the work of past astronomers; instead, I've seen it as more in line with the model of "technology advances, with ancillary benefits to all sorts of different fields including astronomy". For example, radio telescopes owe a lot to progress in physics, but not very much to progress in astronomy specifically. If that's the case, "none" is a very plausible answer to your question.
- ethbro 11y agoThe math and development behind a geocentric model is fascinating in a kink of fractal way. Everything needs and receives its own adjustment.