17 ms·

Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

447 points by rfreytag 10y ago

santaragolabs 10y ago
This is basically the thesis of Paul Feyerabend who used it as his main argument against there being a scientific method. His book "Against Method" is one of the best works on Philosophy of Science I've read during my university education.
- santaragolabs 10y ago
  And to follow-up; several works on the history of science are great and it is great for learning that history is very messy. Also in science things are never as black and white as people several decennia down the line tend to think about how those scientific discoveries went went down. I really liked "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton which I read a couple of months ago. A Guardian review of that work can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/28/invention-of-science-scientific-revolution-david-wootton-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/28/invention-of-s...
  - frandroid 10y ago
    Genesis: The Evolution of Biology by Jan Sapp (https://www.amazon.ca/Genesis-Evolution-Biology-Jan-Sapp/dp/0195156196 https://www.amazon.ca/Genesis-Evolution-Biology-Jan-Sapp/dp/... talk about a trolling title :]) is pretty good in that vein too.
- lucasnemeth 10y ago
  I came here to say the same thing. People really should read more Feyerabend, it's fascinating.
- the_duke 10y ago
  "Against Method" is freely available here: http://mcps.umn.edu/assets/pdf/4.2.1_Feyerabend.pdf http://mcps.umn.edu/assets/pdf/4.2.1_Feyerabend.pdf
  - btilly 10y ago
    Just the beginning of the book. But you can buy it at https://www.amazon.com/Against-Method-Paul-Feyerabend/dp/1844674428 https://www.amazon.com/Against-Method-Paul-Feyerabend/dp/184....
- api 10y ago
  For quite a while I've suspected that you might be able to support Feyerabend's argument using modern learning theory. In particular I suspect that this is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op... Science is essentially a learning process. Since every learning method has a performance envelope and fares better against some fitness landscapes than others, restricting science to a singular method effectively prohibits learning over fitness landscapes whose structures lie outside that method's envelope. In layman's terms: a single scientific method will be unable to learn certain things, or at least unable to learn them in a reasonable amount of time. This is also why I am eternally skeptical of all business and management "methodologies." If there were a closed-form methodology that always yielded successful businesses there would be no entrepreneurs. Large companies and investment funds would simply execute this closed-form method deterministically and reliably pump out successes while retaining 100% ownership. Entrepreneurs exist because creating successful companies is an "AI complete problem" that requires the full multi-approach multi-paradigm multi-methodology capabilities of a human intellect... and even then it's hard. (E.g. I put down Lean Startup when I realized I was just reading a description of gradient descent in the business domain. Gradient descent only works over very regular fitness landscapes with clear peaks and well-connected paths to those peaks. In a rocky fitness landscape you will get stuck at a local maximum almost instantly and never go any further.)
  - vslira 10y ago
    >(E.g. I put down Lean Startup when I realized I was just reading a description of gradient descent in the business domain. Gradient descent only works over very regular fitness landscapes with clear peaks and well-connected paths to those peaks. In a rocky fitness landscape you will get stuck at a local maximum almost instantly and never go any further.) Funny, that's exactly how I interpreted the book, but I didn't see that as a bad thing. Of course, a naive gradient descent won't solve everything, but will help on a lot of things satisfactorily. Maybe LS won't help you build the next Airbnb, but not all business must reach Unicorn Status. Pretty clever on Ries' part
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    > Science is essentially a learning process. Science is a testing process which we engage in to learn. Minor, but critical difference. > a single scientific method "Hypothesize and test." That's it, there is only one. Now, which strategy do you use to pick the best hypothesis, and to test faster, etc? That's the part you don't want to get dogmatic about. (eg gradient descent.)
jkot 10y ago
Earth-Centric model was actually scientifically better at that time. With Occam's razor you would prefer it. - Even church agreed that Earth is not static, but is rotating. - Nobody observed star parallax, major proof for Copernican model was missing until 19th century. - Ptolemaic model with its epicycles provided better predictions. - Copernican model is also wrong, planets are orbiting around center of gravity, which is outside of sun..
- 24gttghh 10y ago
  Just to be pedantic, the barycenter of the Solar System [0] is "sometimes" outside the Sun, but is also often within the limb of the Sun. [0]https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_system_barycenter.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_system_barycen...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0xfeba 10y ago
    Interesting. Does the barycenter then have a barycenter over time?
    - nkrisc 10y ago
      My understanding was the sun is orbiting around a constantly (though subtly) shifting point because of the complex interactions of all the planets that orbit it. Each planet orbiting the sun alone would have a different barycenter. Put them all together and you get a much more complex picture. Correct me if I'm wrong.
      - klodolph 10y ago
        It's not that the barycenter is moving, it's that the orbit of the sun is not even remotely circular. The barycenter only moves in response to forces outside the solar system (the galaxy). On the other hand, if you look at the barycenter of, say, Earth + Sun, then that barycenter will move around because there are a bunch of other planets involved. But the barycenter of the solar system is more stable, due to the conservation of momentum and all that, and the distance from the solar system to the nearest objects that would influence it.
eric_the_read 10y ago
Mike Flynn has a very long and detailed story of Galileo and more generally geocentrism vs. heliocentrism at http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Among the things I learned: * The Copernican model had more epicycles than the Ptolemaic * Galileo thought tides were caused by those same epicycles.
edko 10y ago
There is no question that there was religious opposition to Galileo within the Catholic church. However, it was not unanimous, and there were some notable exceptions. José de Calasanz (saint), the founder of the Piarist order, was a friend of Galileo, and had some of the teachers of his congregation study with Galileo, so that the science they learned could be taught in his schools. Moreover, when Galileo fell in disgrace, Calasanz instructed members of his congregation to assist him. When Galileo lost his sight, Calasanz ordered the Piarist Clemente Settimi to serve as his secretary.
- blahi 10y ago
  It is also worth noting that Galileo had a very big mouth and had many enemies. The publishing of this work was a perfect opportunity for them to pounce. It wasn't so much the church hating science as much people hating Galileo and using the church to an end.
  - adonovan 10y ago
    In Sleepwalkers (great book), Arthur Koestler argues that many senior church figures were keen and supportive followers of Galileo's physical investigations, but repeatedly warned him not to cross the line between observing the universe, and questioning the role of God and Man. Galileo was too proud to keep to one side of that line, and Koestler laments that the current epistemological opposition of science and religion dates from that unnecessary conflict.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > Koestler laments that the current epistemological opposition of science and religion dates from that unnecessary conflict. I don't think that's even remotely true; the current (well, in America particularly and to a lesser extent other predominantly Christian places) epistemological opposition of science and religion (which is really substantially more limited than that, but that's how its often portrayed) is of more recent origin, stemming from the conflict between the literalist inerrantist views of certain parts of the Protestant community and various scientific conclusions about the origin of species, the age of the earth, and cosmology.
ktRolster 10y ago
Totally related: http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/bro-science http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/bro-science http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/cardio-arrest http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/cardio-arrest
geodel 10y ago
I watched a course on Coursera and it made similar argument regarding opposition to Galileo by Church. I think it makes very important point and is noticeable everyday where deeply political arguments are passed off as scientific or logical.
- blahi 10y ago
  But it was logical.
- TallGuyShort 10y ago
  Not just where arguments are deeply political, but when we seek to punish people for simply saying or thinking things we don't agree with.
dragonwriter 10y ago
It was also personal and political, not just scientific or religious. There were, of course, people that were opposed to Galileo publishing because of his models (whether for religious or scientific reasons), but there were also (and perhaps more critically) people that were against his model being published because of Galileo.
- radarsat1 10y ago
  Also I think it's important to keep in mind that it's a bit anachronistic to draw such a strong distinction between science and religion. In those days they were much more strongly related. Science and understanding the universe was likened to developing a better understanding of God. Therefore religious logic and "internal logic" (rational and empirical) would hold similar weight.
emodendroket 10y ago
The idea that science and religion are distinct spheres, or even things that might be in opposition to each other, has been so thoroughly established in our modern consciousnesses that it's easy to forget that in the past they didn't really make such a distinction.
- jmcdiesel 10y ago
  Science and Religion aren't at odds with each other, they never have been. What has been at odds is religion and scientific discoveries that contradict or disprove the religious story. Heliocentric system flew in the face of the bible, and that created the problem. Bruno was burned alive for holding fast to the idea that there are more solar systems than just our own, and that the universe is basically infinite, both ideas that contradict the church's story To say that religion is anti-science would be disingenuous, but to say that religion isn't often at odds with science or that it hasn't stifled scientific progress in the name of maintaining the myths of its teachings would be equally so...
  - hprotagonist 10y ago
    Bruno was burned alive for being a complete prat, and pissing off all the wrong people, actually. Formally, he was condemned because: > In the spring of 1599, the trial was begun before a commission of the Roman Inquisition, and, after the accused had been granted several terms of respite in which to retract his errors, he was finally condemned (January, 1600), handed over to the secular power (8 February), and burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome (17 February). Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc. He also has the interesting distinction of being excommunicated by three major denominations (the church of rome, the lutherans, the reform church, and elizabeth/CofE didn't like him much either) which is possibly a unique distinction for his time. tl;dr: bruno had a seriously abrasive personality, heterodox and incoherent theological views, and the result wasn't pretty. His science, such as it was, had little to nothing to do with it. [0]http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03016a.htm http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03016a.htm
michaelsbradley 10y ago
Many persons who were very serious about religious faith in that time period, e.g. Catholic priests, also had great enthusiasm for rigorous mathematics and scientific advancement. For example, Fr. Paul Gudin, a Jesuit priest, was a mathematician and astronomer. He was interested in and supportive of the work of Johannes Kepler and provided him with a telescope when Kepler was experiencing financial difficulties[+]. [+] http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/scientists/guldin.htm http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/scientists/guldin.h...
- eric_the_read 10y ago
  In fact, Kepler, a Lutheran, was named Imperial Mathematician of the Holy Roman (i.e., Catholic) Empire.
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    After the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the HRE effectively sanctioned the ability of princes to choose between Catholicism and Lutheranism. It should be noted, though, that the Emperors tended to be fanatical Catholics, which leads to the Thirty Years' War (tl;dr: Protestant King of Bohemia dies, gets inherited by Catholic Emperor, Bohemia rebels). At the end of that war, the Peace of Westphalia effectively guarantees freedom of religious worship for Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, independent of the religious beliefs of rulers.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
To be fair, the Church's influence in what we would call science back then was incredibly powerful. I think its unrealistic to see 17th century science as this secular institution like we have today. Of course the 'scientists' of the age followed a church friendly narrative. It was in their interests to do so. I think we will never really understand the chill on speech and research the Church had during the medieval and later periods. I would say its significant considering that the ancient Greeks (Aristarchus of Samos) were able to figure out the heliocentric model, arguably because they didn't have a large Christian Church structure working against them. I find that modern revisionism to make religion seem less villainous is fairly common nowadays. I don't know where this is coming from or why its on social media so frequently, but its concerning. I think splitting hairs to make the Church look good is a questionable narrative and a form of feel good politics for certain religious people and certain types of habitual contrarians the internet is so fond of. I imagine we're witnessesing a pendulum shift towards more religiosity considering how the west has swung the other way for so long. Regardless, its still wrong and the hundreds years of fighting to secularize science and to progress past religiously acceptable models wasn't done because Locher was a bad guy, but because the Pope and and the religious establishment was, regardless of the individual merits of the many monks and priests, who ultimately had to tow the party line regardless of their own findings, mathematical skills, or opinions. Blasphemy was certainly a serious charge back then. The wonderful thing about secular science is that there's no serious punishment for being wrong or going against the grain, flawed as it may be. The worst you can expect is being punched by Buzz Aldrin and even then you really have to earn that.
- michaelsbradley 10y ago
  That's really a lot of nonsense, though I'll grant you that "progress-stifling, working-against-science church" is a long-entrenched meme[+]. [+] https://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-progress-in-Europe-in-the-Middle-Ages-3/answer/Tim-ONeill-1 https://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-progr...
  - bjt2n3904 10y ago
    Here here. People see science as this "amoral entity" that generates truth, and anyone who opposes it to be the anti-Christ of societal progress. You have to understand that people are behind science, and people are flawed. In other words, statistics don't lie. But the people who collect them do.
bbctol 10y ago
This may either calm or further motivate people concerned about the issues with replicability in science, the current "reproduction crisis" in biology and psychology. Scientific progress today is certainly messy, slow, filled with political drama, and lacking a good philosophical footing, but it would be a mistake to think it was ever the noble act of discovery we sometimes get nostalgic about. The whole metaphor of "discovery" in science is incorrect. You don't suddenly "see" the truth once you get better telescopes or a new imaging method. Everything you see is an accurate depiction of universal laws, as filtered through the distorting layers of our own internal models. Every new "discovery" in science must be slowly generated, models emerging and feuding for generations, before future scientists have enough research to look back on the past and deem some visionaries and others crackpots.
imaginenore 10y ago
Let's not dilute the term "scientific". Scentific method is relatively recent, and consists of very specific sets of steps. So no, Galileo's opposition was not scientific.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- eugeneionesco 10y ago
  Definitely not true. Please study the work of Johannes Kepler on planetary motion, he lived in the same period.
richman777 10y ago
The amazing thing about the entire discussion is how it really was a scientific discussion that evolved over time. There are clearly scientific ideas that we take as simple truths now that will be disproved in the future. They are clearly going to be a little more nuanced than planetary motion but it's great to see how the scientific community has and will evolve.
acqq 10y ago
Oh, please. First, the article quotes the opposition of only one person, and from that it doesn't follow its title at all. The realistic title would be "The Opposition to Galileo also at least once appeared as scientific, not just religious." Now why I say "appeared" there? Because the arguments quoted in the text "looking through the telescopes it appeared that epicycles existed" isn't "scientifically" meaningful argument. As soon as we accept the relativity of motion, it's clear how meaningless the statement "it looks so from here" is. Moreover, "scientific opposition" doesn't result in the house arrest by the church. Both the Bible and that-other-newer-book- which-is-not-politically-correct-to-be-named have the verses that reflect the false understanding of the nature, and that is indisputable. It's true that there are today enough people that don't take these verses seriously, but in fact, the reasonable people did so, like seen in the article, already at least some 400 years ago. Good for us, because otherwise most of us would be peasants today.
louprado 10y ago
This reminds me of the story of Hippasus, who was sentenced to death by his fellow Pythagorean philosophers because he discovered irrational numbers.
jordigh 10y ago
I tl;dr'ed the article (sorry), but I wanted to say one thing about epicycles. They are not wrong and certainly can be used to explain motion, but the problem with them is that you can keep adding epicycles to fit any continuous orbit at all (this actually is because a Fourier series can converge to any continuous periodic function). This is my favourite visualisation of this fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw
- dacohenii 10y ago
  Exactly. From a geocentric perspective, it's not wrong as long as you're explaining past events (which, as you noted, can be done by adding epicycles). The reason the model is not so useful (to paraphrase my college physics professor) is that you can't use it to predict things in advance with reasonable certainty (i.e. you don't know what epicycles you need until after you've observed it).
- antognini 10y ago
  And, in fact, modern astronomers still use epicycles when studying Galactic orbits.
Amorymeltzer 10y ago
Anyone who is interested in Astronomy and development of historical models of the heavens should check out this season of the Scientific Odyssey podcast (http://thescientificodyssey.typepad.com/ http://thescientificodyssey.typepad.com/). I found it through HN and Chad Davies does a fantastic job of creating a narrative from early civilization, and we are just now discussing Galileo. It's very niche but fairly accessible, and one of my favorites.
antognini 10y ago
Strangely, the article omits a reference to the preferred model of the time, namely the Tychonic system [1]. In the Tychonic system, all the planets revolve around the Sun, but the Sun and moon revolve around the Earth. It was seen to be a very tidy theory that took advantage of the best aspects of the Copernican theory, but resolved the problem of the lack of observed parallax. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system
- dumbmatter 10y ago
  The article does mention it: Brahe had theorised that all planets circled the Sun, while it circled Earth. Locher noted that Brahe might be right, but what was clear was that the telescope supported Ptolemy.
jomamaxx 10y ago
An amazingly reasonable thread for what could be just ignorant mud-slinging.
- ConceptJunkie 10y ago
  Agreed. Came here hoping to see a good discussion, was not disappointed.
triplesec 10y ago
This article serves as quite a fascinating reminder of the problems of new scientific paradigms (see quote pulled out below). All the argumentation about the history of the churrch seems a lot less relevant to me than how if YOU were an astronomer at the time, how sceptical would you have been at this weird thing? Excerpt: "Copernicus proposed that certain oddities observed in the movements of planets through the constellations were due to the fact that Earth itself was moving. Stars show no such oddities, so Copernicus had to theorise that, rather than being just beyond the planets as astronomers had traditionally supposed, stars were so incredibly distant that Earth’s motion was insignificant by comparison. But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun. Tycho Brahe, the most prominent astronomer of the era and a favourite of the Establishm"ent, thought this was absurd, while Peter Crüger, a leading Polish mathematician, wondered how the Copernican system could ever survive in the face of the star-size problem.
jnordwick 10y ago
What about the Orthodox? "The Church" is really an anachronism. You are speaking of the Roman church which is about only half of Christianity at the time: Western Europe. What about the other half of the Church? Eastern Europe, Russia, Asian, Norther Africa, the Middle East, Greece? How did they receive Galileo? I've always been fascinated by this total amnesia over the Orthodox Church as if it didn't exist or was only a few percent.
- whybroke 10y ago
  And the necessary next question: how fast did ideas travel at the time given technical, linguistic and cultural borders. I'd love to know the first mention of Galileo's (or Copernicus') ideas in Moscow, Terran, Mumbai, Mexico City, Beijing etc
- jcranmer 10y ago
  Actually, given the time frame, focusing on the Catholic church is already meaningless in Western Europe. The Reformation was already well underway, indeed Galileo was outspoken during the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Lutheran church was very anti-Copernican; Martin Luther himself condemned it as heresy 80 years before the Galileo affair.
c0ff 10y ago
Of course there was scientific opposition to Galileo. Scientific ideas get hammered out through debate and disagreement. New ideas in science often take decades or even centuries to fully develop and reach broad acceptance. That is why it is important that new ideas can be discussed freely, which wasn't the case in Galileo's time.
- SpeakMouthWords 10y ago
  They are now, but the uninformed reader can't assume that that's static throughout history. There will have been some point where that became fully true, some point where it wasn't, and some continuous function of time defining the extent to which that's true in between. Can you define any of the latter two things on the list?
  - imagist 10y ago
    > They are now, but the uninformed reader can't assume that that's static throughout history. Scientific ideas are not discussed freely. They are driven by funding, which is disproportionally awarded to novel results. Non-novel results or failures to reproduce are overly ignored and under-funded.
Numberwang 10y ago
Scientific opposition is a good thing. Religious is not.
jabbanobodder 10y ago
Scientific opposition is expected, that is the method in which science works. Scientist want proof for a claim, the church didn't want to be wrong.
- bduerst 10y ago
  That's not true at all. In fact, the church was okay with Galileo's models, but they were not okay with how he was slandering the leadership.
gpvos 10y ago
The importance of this article for our current times is in the last two paragraphs.
nsxwolf 10y ago
The comments here are very good and I'm glad people care about the real story and its nuances. For too long people have been taught that Galileo dared to contradict the bible, the church threw him in prison, and that's that.
pippopascal 10y ago
Ultimately, the argument for the helio-centric model is aesthetic. It is more elegant than the geo-centric when describing the dance of the stars. So, are both systems equally right and equally wrong? - Ultimately we're talking about a change in reference frame, which is a vector subtraction. They're mathematically transformations of each other. - Since the Sun doesn't have infinite mass it, in fact, also orbits the Earth - Neither system is an inertial reference frame. If we assume the Earth is infinitesimal, at the very least the Sun orbits the Jupiter-Sun barycenter (which is almost outside the Sun proper). So if anything we should speak of a "J-S centric model" - Both are useful. The geo-centric model is quite useful and still used in astronomy (Never-mind tracking satellites, try understand your coordinates in the heliocentric reference frame.) - The "corrections" of the geo-centric model are higher order harmonics, and can fit any motion and it's an early application of harmonic analysis. In fact, they're not actually corrections to the model, they are motions that naturally arise when describing circular motion wrt a point outside its axis. - What's wrong with non-inertial reference frames anyway? Consider them "fictitious" or consider them real, we can calculate and consider the non-inertial forces.
smallnamespace 10y ago
Stupid question: given General Relativity, and in particular that all reference frames are equally valid, including rotating and accelerating ones, in what sense is heliocentrism more 'true' than geocentrism? E.g. you can pick a geocentric reference frame and all the math works out (albeit you'd need to define large fictitious forces, etc., but again, they are only 'fictitious' from the perspective of a different reference frame; in the chosen frame they look quite real!). Isn't the choice between geocentrism and heliocentrism purely one of convenience, and we can simply pick and choose whichever reference frame is most convenient for calculation purposes? For example, if I'm interested in things happening in daily life, I pick a reference frame at rest with respect to the ground beneath my feet. If I am figuring out satellite orbits, I use a geocentric frame. If I'm calculating a trip to Mars, I use a heliocentric frame (perhaps a rotating one). If so, why do we still define heliocentrism to be more correct? Is the argument really an implicit throwback to Newtonian absolute space and time, which Relativity rejected?
- kevinwang 10y ago
  I think most simply, the entire solar system revolves around the sun and not the earth.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    Isn't that simply begging the question though? If you adopt a geocentric reference frame, then the Sun appears to rotate around the Earth, and all the other planets also appear to follow epicyclic paths around the Earth. You can predict the motions of every planet and star equally well, the equations are just different. So again, why is one more 'correct' than the other, besides calculational simplicity?
    - hsitz 10y ago
      The simple answer of why one is more correct, is because it's deemed as correct by the scientific community, which comprises the scientific experts on that issue. The larger issue you raise is one that was especially prominent in mid-20th century philosophy of science, specifically in Thomas Kuhn's concept of a "paradigm shift". A radically new scientific theory does not displace an existing theory because it is more "correct", since ad hoc modifications (e.g., epicycles) can always be made to the existing theory to account for new evidence that appears not to fit. However, at some point the existing theory will come to have so much baggage, and the new theory will explain the world so much more elegantly (e.g., with calculational simplicity) that the new theory will overthrow the old one and become the new "paradigm". Note that this is not because the old theory could not accommodate all the facts; any old theory can if you modify it enough, but at some point when you have to make all sorts of strange adjustments to the existing (old) theory it just becomes wildly implausible when compared with the new theory. At some point scientific consensus changes and the the new "paradigm" is accepted. You can read more about this at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn
neves 10y ago
The ironic thing in this debate is that almost all arguments in Galileo "Dialog" were wrong. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/galileo-big-mistake.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/galileo-big-mistake.html Do 2 wrongs make a right?
imagist 10y ago
> What were those problems? A big one was the size of stars in the Copernican universe. Copernicus proposed that certain oddities observed in the movements of planets through the constellations were due to the fact that Earth itself was moving. Stars show no such oddities, so Copernicus had to theorise that, rather than being just beyond the planets as astronomers had traditionally supposed, stars were so incredibly distant that Earth’s motion was insignificant by comparison. But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun. Tycho Brahe, the most prominent astronomer of the era and a favourite of the Establishment, thought this was absurd, while Peter Crüger, a leading Polish mathematician, wondered how the Copernican system could ever survive in the face of the star-size problem. This is a fascinating observation, and given the information they had at the time, I can see where Locher is coming from. Given two possibilities, one involving absolutely enormous stars and one involving a earth that circled the sun, both extraordinary claims, and no sure way (yet) to evaluate which was true, it's human that he supported the more comfortable hypothesis, and he wasn't provably wrong given the information they had. > That is unfortunate for science, because today the opponents of science make use of that caricature. Those who insist that the Apollo missions were faked, that vaccines are harmful, or even that the world is flat – whose voices are now loud enough for the ‘War on Science’ to be a National Geographic cover story and for the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to address even their most bizarre claims – do not reject the scientific process per se. Rather, they wrap themselves in the mantle of Galileo, standing (supposedly) against a (supposedly) corrupted science produced by the ‘Scientific Establishment’. The problem with this is that it conflates the public social debate with an internal scientific debate. Galileo vs. Pope Paul V is not the same debate as Galileo vs. Locher. The former is a debate driven by social needs that tries to drive opinion starting from what the pope wanted rather than observation (which is in fact a rejection of scientific process). The latter is two competing scientific hypotheses. Likewise, picking one of the example debates (do vaccines cause autism?) there are two possible debates. The public debate is driven by social needs--mostly people trying to find meaning in the suffering caused by their child's autism, and people trying to take advantage of that need. This is absolutely a rejection of scientific process: scientific process attempts to explain phenomena, not find explanations that make people feel better. The internal scientific debate is largely not a debate, because the evidence that vaccines don't cause autism is, at this point, so overwhelming. "Wrapping oneself in the mantle of Galileo" IS inherently an unscientific position: being pro- or anti-establishment is irrelevant to scientific process. The fact that Galileo happened to be anti-establishment at the time is irrelevant to the fact that ultimately his hypotheses were proven correct. The real problem here is that a large part of the scientific community doesn't recognize that the social debate and the scientific debate are two different debates. Scientific evidence which is persuasive in a scientific context (studies have shown no correlation between vaccines and autism) does not persuade everyone in a public social context. Emotional approaches are also necessary (would you rather your child died of whooping cough? Or as one person with autism said, "It's painful that some people would rather have a dead child than a child like me.").
lootsauce 10y ago
By far the best writing on this subject I have found is over at the fantastic Renaissance Mathematicus blog. Galileo, the Church and Heliocentricity: A Rough Guide. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/galileo-the-church-and-heliocentricity-a-rough-guide/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/galileo-the-church-a... Galileo, Foscarini, The Catholic Church, and heliocentricity in 1615 Part 1 – the occurrences: A Rough Guide. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/galileo-foscarini-the-catholic-church-and-heliocentricity-in-1615-part-1-the-occurrences-a-rough-guide/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/galileo-foscarini-th... And part 2 https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/galileo-foscarini-the-catholic-church-and-heliocentricity-in-1615-part-2-the-consequences-a-rough-guide/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/galileo-foscarini-th... Acceptance, rejection and indifference to heliocentricity before 1610. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/acceptance-rejection-and-indifference-to-heliocentricity-before-1610/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/acceptance-rejection...
amoruso 10y ago
The opposition to Galileo was not really religious or scientific. More than anything, it was political. You can't understand what happened outside the context of the religious wars of the time. His findings undermined the authority of the Catholic Church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion There are plenty of examples of political suppression of science in our own time. The Nazis and Communists were two extreme examples. In our own society, religion doesn't have this kind of power any more. But there are still political pressures on researchers to be PC. I'll let you think up some examples yourself.
Houshalter 10y ago
A somewhat better article on this is here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_the_side_of/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_th... There were also politics involved. Galileo insulted the pope and did some other controversial stuff. He wasn't persecuted for his scientific beliefs.
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meetri 10y ago
Do you have to believe that the sun orbits the earth in order to believe that the earth is the center of the universe? Is it possible that the Earth is the center of the universe given all light in the universe points in the direction of Earth.
jhbadger 10y ago
The problem with saying that there was scientific in addition to religious opposition to Galileo kind of misses the point. That would like saying there was scientific in addition to ideological opposition to genetics in the Soviet Union in the Lysenko years. The reason while both Galileo and Soviet biologists were put on trial was because the power structure at the time opposed them, not because of legitimate scientific concerns.
woodchuck64 10y ago
> But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun. What?? Oh, Wikipedia fills in some crucially missing info in this hypothesis. > However, early telescopes produced a spurious disk-like image of a star (known today as an Airy disk) that was larger for brighter stars and smaller for fainter ones. Astronomers from Galileo to Jaques Cassini mistook these spurious disks for the physical bodies of stars, and thus into the eighteenth century continued to think of magnitude in terms of the physical size of a star. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_(astronomy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_(astronomy)
- novaleaf 10y ago
  Thank you so much for this. I was wondering about this so much and it really gnawed on me that the article didn't bother explaining further.
lazyant 10y ago
I found the book "Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love" by Dava Sobel fascinating, really clarifies many misconceptions about Galileo.
yawaramin 10y ago
So, here's the funny thing. The Church has been vilified over this for centuries, but as it turns out they weren't actually wrong to believe in geocentrism; in a relativistic worldview either belief is equally correct.
Iv 10y ago
I am tired of the Catholics trying to rewrite history. I got deep into this issue several times. First, go to the source. We have the documents from Galileo trials, so first, read what was actually said. http://www.tc.umn.edu/~allch001/galileo/library/1616docs.htm http://www.tc.umn.edu/~allch001/galileo/library/1616docs.htm Here is the most relevant part: Proposition to be assessed: (1) The sun is the center of the world and completely devoid of local motion. Assessement: All said that this proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and the doctors of theology. (2) The earth is not the center of the world, nor motionless, but it moves as a whole and also with diurnal motion. Assessment: All said that this proposition receives the same judgement in philosophy and that in regard to theological truth it is at least errouneous in faith. Here, "philosophy" more or less means science. So, yes, Galileo was criticized on scientific grounds, which is totally fine as indeed, there were some problems with his theory (like the lack of movement of stars). But Galileo was called an heretic because he contradicted the literal meaning of the bible. "formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and the doctors of theology" : this is your regular creationist saying that the bible has to be interpreted literally and that you are a heretic if you don't. Problem: said creationist can throw you in jail if you don't abide to his worldview. That's why from this time (from a bit earlier actually) universities found it primordial to gain independence from the clergy and that science and religion diverged from each other. Is this religious assessment coherent with others? Of course not! Religion is not much about coherency. Copernicus heliocentrism was well accepted by the church as he was less confrontational, richer and more religious. Did Galileo act like an asshole? Maybe, though church did need some trolling at this time. Was his condemnation political? Most certainly! But the salient point is that the motivation may have been political, the justification was religious. And that was unacceptable to scientists that you could justify dogmatism and rewrite science books for political motives. The refusal of this is what gave us modern science.
gsmethells 10y ago
The opposition was not scientific. Read the book "The War on Science" and keep thr enlightenment from slipping away.

447 points by rfreytag 10y ago

This is basically the thesis of Paul Feyerabend who used it as his main argument against there being a scientific method. His book "Against Method" is one of the best works on Philosophy of Science I've read during my university education.

santaragolabs 10y ago
And to follow-up; several works on the history of science are great and it is great for learning that history is very messy. Also in science things are never as black and white as people several decennia down the line tend to think about how those scientific discoveries went went down. I really liked "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton which I read a couple of months ago. A Guardian review of that work can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/28/invention-of-science-scientific-revolution-david-wootton-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/28/invention-of-s...
- frandroid 10y ago
  Genesis: The Evolution of Biology by Jan Sapp (https://www.amazon.ca/Genesis-Evolution-Biology-Jan-Sapp/dp/0195156196 https://www.amazon.ca/Genesis-Evolution-Biology-Jan-Sapp/dp/... talk about a trolling title :]) is pretty good in that vein too.
lucasnemeth 10y ago
I came here to say the same thing. People really should read more Feyerabend, it's fascinating.
the_duke 10y ago
"Against Method" is freely available here: http://mcps.umn.edu/assets/pdf/4.2.1_Feyerabend.pdf http://mcps.umn.edu/assets/pdf/4.2.1_Feyerabend.pdf
- btilly 10y ago
  Just the beginning of the book. But you can buy it at https://www.amazon.com/Against-Method-Paul-Feyerabend/dp/1844674428 https://www.amazon.com/Against-Method-Paul-Feyerabend/dp/184....
api 10y ago
For quite a while I've suspected that you might be able to support Feyerabend's argument using modern learning theory. In particular I suspect that this is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op... Science is essentially a learning process. Since every learning method has a performance envelope and fares better against some fitness landscapes than others, restricting science to a singular method effectively prohibits learning over fitness landscapes whose structures lie outside that method's envelope. In layman's terms: a single scientific method will be unable to learn certain things, or at least unable to learn them in a reasonable amount of time. This is also why I am eternally skeptical of all business and management "methodologies." If there were a closed-form methodology that always yielded successful businesses there would be no entrepreneurs. Large companies and investment funds would simply execute this closed-form method deterministically and reliably pump out successes while retaining 100% ownership. Entrepreneurs exist because creating successful companies is an "AI complete problem" that requires the full multi-approach multi-paradigm multi-methodology capabilities of a human intellect... and even then it's hard. (E.g. I put down Lean Startup when I realized I was just reading a description of gradient descent in the business domain. Gradient descent only works over very regular fitness landscapes with clear peaks and well-connected paths to those peaks. In a rocky fitness landscape you will get stuck at a local maximum almost instantly and never go any further.)
- vslira 10y ago
  >(E.g. I put down Lean Startup when I realized I was just reading a description of gradient descent in the business domain. Gradient descent only works over very regular fitness landscapes with clear peaks and well-connected paths to those peaks. In a rocky fitness landscape you will get stuck at a local maximum almost instantly and never go any further.) Funny, that's exactly how I interpreted the book, but I didn't see that as a bad thing. Of course, a naive gradient descent won't solve everything, but will help on a lot of things satisfactorily. Maybe LS won't help you build the next Airbnb, but not all business must reach Unicorn Status. Pretty clever on Ries' part
- EdHominem 10y ago
  > Science is essentially a learning process. Science is a testing process which we engage in to learn. Minor, but critical difference. > a single scientific method "Hypothesize and test." That's it, there is only one. Now, which strategy do you use to pick the best hypothesis, and to test faster, etc? That's the part you don't want to get dogmatic about. (eg gradient descent.)

jkot 10y ago

Earth-Centric model was actually scientifically better at that time. With Occam's razor you would prefer it. - Even church agreed that Earth is not static, but is rotating. - Nobody observed star parallax, major proof for Copernican model was missing until 19th century. - Ptolemaic model with its epicycles provided better predictions. - Copernican model is also wrong, planets are orbiting around center of gravity, which is outside of sun..

24gttghh 10y ago
Just to be pedantic, the barycenter of the Solar System [0] is "sometimes" outside the Sun, but is also often within the limb of the Sun. [0]https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_system_barycenter.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_system_barycen...
- deleted 10y ago
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- 0xfeba 10y ago
  Interesting. Does the barycenter then have a barycenter over time?
  - nkrisc 10y ago
    My understanding was the sun is orbiting around a constantly (though subtly) shifting point because of the complex interactions of all the planets that orbit it. Each planet orbiting the sun alone would have a different barycenter. Put them all together and you get a much more complex picture. Correct me if I'm wrong.
    - klodolph 10y ago
      It's not that the barycenter is moving, it's that the orbit of the sun is not even remotely circular. The barycenter only moves in response to forces outside the solar system (the galaxy). On the other hand, if you look at the barycenter of, say, Earth + Sun, then that barycenter will move around because there are a bunch of other planets involved. But the barycenter of the solar system is more stable, due to the conservation of momentum and all that, and the distance from the solar system to the nearest objects that would influence it.

eric_the_read 10y ago

Mike Flynn has a very long and detailed story of Galileo and more generally geocentrism vs. heliocentrism at http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Among the things I learned: * The Copernican model had more epicycles than the Ptolemaic * Galileo thought tides were caused by those same epicycles.

edko 10y ago

There is no question that there was religious opposition to Galileo within the Catholic church. However, it was not unanimous, and there were some notable exceptions. José de Calasanz (saint), the founder of the Piarist order, was a friend of Galileo, and had some of the teachers of his congregation study with Galileo, so that the science they learned could be taught in his schools. Moreover, when Galileo fell in disgrace, Calasanz instructed members of his congregation to assist him. When Galileo lost his sight, Calasanz ordered the Piarist Clemente Settimi to serve as his secretary.

blahi 10y ago
It is also worth noting that Galileo had a very big mouth and had many enemies. The publishing of this work was a perfect opportunity for them to pounce. It wasn't so much the church hating science as much people hating Galileo and using the church to an end.
- adonovan 10y ago
  In Sleepwalkers (great book), Arthur Koestler argues that many senior church figures were keen and supportive followers of Galileo's physical investigations, but repeatedly warned him not to cross the line between observing the universe, and questioning the role of God and Man. Galileo was too proud to keep to one side of that line, and Koestler laments that the current epistemological opposition of science and religion dates from that unnecessary conflict.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Koestler laments that the current epistemological opposition of science and religion dates from that unnecessary conflict. I don't think that's even remotely true; the current (well, in America particularly and to a lesser extent other predominantly Christian places) epistemological opposition of science and religion (which is really substantially more limited than that, but that's how its often portrayed) is of more recent origin, stemming from the conflict between the literalist inerrantist views of certain parts of the Protestant community and various scientific conclusions about the origin of species, the age of the earth, and cosmology.

ktRolster 10y ago

Totally related: http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/bro-science http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/bro-science http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/cardio-arrest http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/cardio-arrest

geodel 10y ago

I watched a course on Coursera and it made similar argument regarding opposition to Galileo by Church. I think it makes very important point and is noticeable everyday where deeply political arguments are passed off as scientific or logical.

blahi 10y ago
But it was logical.
TallGuyShort 10y ago
Not just where arguments are deeply political, but when we seek to punish people for simply saying or thinking things we don't agree with.

dragonwriter 10y ago

It was also personal and political, not just scientific or religious. There were, of course, people that were opposed to Galileo publishing because of his models (whether for religious or scientific reasons), but there were also (and perhaps more critically) people that were against his model being published because of Galileo.

radarsat1 10y ago
Also I think it's important to keep in mind that it's a bit anachronistic to draw such a strong distinction between science and religion. In those days they were much more strongly related. Science and understanding the universe was likened to developing a better understanding of God. Therefore religious logic and "internal logic" (rational and empirical) would hold similar weight.

emodendroket 10y ago

The idea that science and religion are distinct spheres, or even things that might be in opposition to each other, has been so thoroughly established in our modern consciousnesses that it's easy to forget that in the past they didn't really make such a distinction.

jmcdiesel 10y ago
Science and Religion aren't at odds with each other, they never have been. What has been at odds is religion and scientific discoveries that contradict or disprove the religious story. Heliocentric system flew in the face of the bible, and that created the problem. Bruno was burned alive for holding fast to the idea that there are more solar systems than just our own, and that the universe is basically infinite, both ideas that contradict the church's story To say that religion is anti-science would be disingenuous, but to say that religion isn't often at odds with science or that it hasn't stifled scientific progress in the name of maintaining the myths of its teachings would be equally so...
- hprotagonist 10y ago
  Bruno was burned alive for being a complete prat, and pissing off all the wrong people, actually. Formally, he was condemned because: > In the spring of 1599, the trial was begun before a commission of the Roman Inquisition, and, after the accused had been granted several terms of respite in which to retract his errors, he was finally condemned (January, 1600), handed over to the secular power (8 February), and burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome (17 February). Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc. He also has the interesting distinction of being excommunicated by three major denominations (the church of rome, the lutherans, the reform church, and elizabeth/CofE didn't like him much either) which is possibly a unique distinction for his time. tl;dr: bruno had a seriously abrasive personality, heterodox and incoherent theological views, and the result wasn't pretty. His science, such as it was, had little to nothing to do with it. [0]http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03016a.htm http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03016a.htm

michaelsbradley 10y ago

Many persons who were very serious about religious faith in that time period, e.g. Catholic priests, also had great enthusiasm for rigorous mathematics and scientific advancement. For example, Fr. Paul Gudin, a Jesuit priest, was a mathematician and astronomer. He was interested in and supportive of the work of Johannes Kepler and provided him with a telescope when Kepler was experiencing financial difficulties[+]. [+] http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/scientists/guldin.htm http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/scientists/guldin.h...

eric_the_read 10y ago
In fact, Kepler, a Lutheran, was named Imperial Mathematician of the Holy Roman (i.e., Catholic) Empire.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  After the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the HRE effectively sanctioned the ability of princes to choose between Catholicism and Lutheranism. It should be noted, though, that the Emperors tended to be fanatical Catholics, which leads to the Thirty Years' War (tl;dr: Protestant King of Bohemia dies, gets inherited by Catholic Emperor, Bohemia rebels). At the end of that war, the Peace of Westphalia effectively guarantees freedom of religious worship for Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, independent of the religious beliefs of rulers.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

To be fair, the Church's influence in what we would call science back then was incredibly powerful. I think its unrealistic to see 17th century science as this secular institution like we have today. Of course the 'scientists' of the age followed a church friendly narrative. It was in their interests to do so. I think we will never really understand the chill on speech and research the Church had during the medieval and later periods. I would say its significant considering that the ancient Greeks (Aristarchus of Samos) were able to figure out the heliocentric model, arguably because they didn't have a large Christian Church structure working against them. I find that modern revisionism to make religion seem less villainous is fairly common nowadays. I don't know where this is coming from or why its on social media so frequently, but its concerning. I think splitting hairs to make the Church look good is a questionable narrative and a form of feel good politics for certain religious people and certain types of habitual contrarians the internet is so fond of. I imagine we're witnessesing a pendulum shift towards more religiosity considering how the west has swung the other way for so long. Regardless, its still wrong and the hundreds years of fighting to secularize science and to progress past religiously acceptable models wasn't done because Locher was a bad guy, but because the Pope and and the religious establishment was, regardless of the individual merits of the many monks and priests, who ultimately had to tow the party line regardless of their own findings, mathematical skills, or opinions. Blasphemy was certainly a serious charge back then. The wonderful thing about secular science is that there's no serious punishment for being wrong or going against the grain, flawed as it may be. The worst you can expect is being punched by Buzz Aldrin and even then you really have to earn that.

michaelsbradley 10y ago
That's really a lot of nonsense, though I'll grant you that "progress-stifling, working-against-science church" is a long-entrenched meme[+]. [+] https://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-progress-in-Europe-in-the-Middle-Ages-3/answer/Tim-ONeill-1 https://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-progr...
- bjt2n3904 10y ago
  Here here. People see science as this "amoral entity" that generates truth, and anyone who opposes it to be the anti-Christ of societal progress. You have to understand that people are behind science, and people are flawed. In other words, statistics don't lie. But the people who collect them do.

bbctol 10y ago

This may either calm or further motivate people concerned about the issues with replicability in science, the current "reproduction crisis" in biology and psychology. Scientific progress today is certainly messy, slow, filled with political drama, and lacking a good philosophical footing, but it would be a mistake to think it was ever the noble act of discovery we sometimes get nostalgic about. The whole metaphor of "discovery" in science is incorrect. You don't suddenly "see" the truth once you get better telescopes or a new imaging method. Everything you see is an accurate depiction of universal laws, as filtered through the distorting layers of our own internal models. Every new "discovery" in science must be slowly generated, models emerging and feuding for generations, before future scientists have enough research to look back on the past and deem some visionaries and others crackpots.

imaginenore 10y ago

Let's not dilute the term "scientific". Scentific method is relatively recent, and consists of very specific sets of steps. So no, Galileo's opposition was not scientific.

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eugeneionesco 10y ago
Definitely not true. Please study the work of Johannes Kepler on planetary motion, he lived in the same period.

richman777 10y ago

The amazing thing about the entire discussion is how it really was a scientific discussion that evolved over time. There are clearly scientific ideas that we take as simple truths now that will be disproved in the future. They are clearly going to be a little more nuanced than planetary motion but it's great to see how the scientific community has and will evolve.

acqq 10y ago

Oh, please. First, the article quotes the opposition of only one person, and from that it doesn't follow its title at all. The realistic title would be "The Opposition to Galileo also at least once appeared as scientific, not just religious." Now why I say "appeared" there? Because the arguments quoted in the text "looking through the telescopes it appeared that epicycles existed" isn't "scientifically" meaningful argument. As soon as we accept the relativity of motion, it's clear how meaningless the statement "it looks so from here" is. Moreover, "scientific opposition" doesn't result in the house arrest by the church. Both the Bible and that-other-newer-book- which-is-not-politically-correct-to-be-named have the verses that reflect the false understanding of the nature, and that is indisputable. It's true that there are today enough people that don't take these verses seriously, but in fact, the reasonable people did so, like seen in the article, already at least some 400 years ago. Good for us, because otherwise most of us would be peasants today.

louprado 10y ago

This reminds me of the story of Hippasus, who was sentenced to death by his fellow Pythagorean philosophers because he discovered irrational numbers.

jordigh 10y ago

I tl;dr'ed the article (sorry), but I wanted to say one thing about epicycles. They are not wrong and certainly can be used to explain motion, but the problem with them is that you can keep adding epicycles to fit any continuous orbit at all (this actually is because a Fourier series can converge to any continuous periodic function). This is my favourite visualisation of this fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw

dacohenii 10y ago
Exactly. From a geocentric perspective, it's not wrong as long as you're explaining past events (which, as you noted, can be done by adding epicycles). The reason the model is not so useful (to paraphrase my college physics professor) is that you can't use it to predict things in advance with reasonable certainty (i.e. you don't know what epicycles you need until after you've observed it).
antognini 10y ago
And, in fact, modern astronomers still use epicycles when studying Galactic orbits.

Amorymeltzer 10y ago

Anyone who is interested in Astronomy and development of historical models of the heavens should check out this season of the Scientific Odyssey podcast (http://thescientificodyssey.typepad.com/ http://thescientificodyssey.typepad.com/). I found it through HN and Chad Davies does a fantastic job of creating a narrative from early civilization, and we are just now discussing Galileo. It's very niche but fairly accessible, and one of my favorites.

antognini 10y ago

Strangely, the article omits a reference to the preferred model of the time, namely the Tychonic system [1]. In the Tychonic system, all the planets revolve around the Sun, but the Sun and moon revolve around the Earth. It was seen to be a very tidy theory that took advantage of the best aspects of the Copernican theory, but resolved the problem of the lack of observed parallax. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system

dumbmatter 10y ago
The article does mention it: Brahe had theorised that all planets circled the Sun, while it circled Earth. Locher noted that Brahe might be right, but what was clear was that the telescope supported Ptolemy.

jomamaxx 10y ago

An amazingly reasonable thread for what could be just ignorant mud-slinging.

ConceptJunkie 10y ago
Agreed. Came here hoping to see a good discussion, was not disappointed.

triplesec 10y ago

This article serves as quite a fascinating reminder of the problems of new scientific paradigms (see quote pulled out below). All the argumentation about the history of the churrch seems a lot less relevant to me than how if YOU were an astronomer at the time, how sceptical would you have been at this weird thing? Excerpt: "Copernicus proposed that certain oddities observed in the movements of planets through the constellations were due to the fact that Earth itself was moving. Stars show no such oddities, so Copernicus had to theorise that, rather than being just beyond the planets as astronomers had traditionally supposed, stars were so incredibly distant that Earth’s motion was insignificant by comparison. But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun. Tycho Brahe, the most prominent astronomer of the era and a favourite of the Establishm"ent, thought this was absurd, while Peter Crüger, a leading Polish mathematician, wondered how the Copernican system could ever survive in the face of the star-size problem.

jnordwick 10y ago

What about the Orthodox? "The Church" is really an anachronism. You are speaking of the Roman church which is about only half of Christianity at the time: Western Europe. What about the other half of the Church? Eastern Europe, Russia, Asian, Norther Africa, the Middle East, Greece? How did they receive Galileo? I've always been fascinated by this total amnesia over the Orthodox Church as if it didn't exist or was only a few percent.

whybroke 10y ago
And the necessary next question: how fast did ideas travel at the time given technical, linguistic and cultural borders. I'd love to know the first mention of Galileo's (or Copernicus') ideas in Moscow, Terran, Mumbai, Mexico City, Beijing etc
jcranmer 10y ago
Actually, given the time frame, focusing on the Catholic church is already meaningless in Western Europe. The Reformation was already well underway, indeed Galileo was outspoken during the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Lutheran church was very anti-Copernican; Martin Luther himself condemned it as heresy 80 years before the Galileo affair.

c0ff 10y ago

Of course there was scientific opposition to Galileo. Scientific ideas get hammered out through debate and disagreement. New ideas in science often take decades or even centuries to fully develop and reach broad acceptance. That is why it is important that new ideas can be discussed freely, which wasn't the case in Galileo's time.

SpeakMouthWords 10y ago
They are now, but the uninformed reader can't assume that that's static throughout history. There will have been some point where that became fully true, some point where it wasn't, and some continuous function of time defining the extent to which that's true in between. Can you define any of the latter two things on the list?
- imagist 10y ago
  > They are now, but the uninformed reader can't assume that that's static throughout history. Scientific ideas are not discussed freely. They are driven by funding, which is disproportionally awarded to novel results. Non-novel results or failures to reproduce are overly ignored and under-funded.

Numberwang 10y ago

Scientific opposition is a good thing. Religious is not.

jabbanobodder 10y ago

Scientific opposition is expected, that is the method in which science works. Scientist want proof for a claim, the church didn't want to be wrong.

bduerst 10y ago
That's not true at all. In fact, the church was okay with Galileo's models, but they were not okay with how he was slandering the leadership.

gpvos 10y ago

The importance of this article for our current times is in the last two paragraphs.

nsxwolf 10y ago

The comments here are very good and I'm glad people care about the real story and its nuances. For too long people have been taught that Galileo dared to contradict the bible, the church threw him in prison, and that's that.

pippopascal 10y ago

Ultimately, the argument for the helio-centric model is aesthetic. It is more elegant than the geo-centric when describing the dance of the stars. So, are both systems equally right and equally wrong? - Ultimately we're talking about a change in reference frame, which is a vector subtraction. They're mathematically transformations of each other. - Since the Sun doesn't have infinite mass it, in fact, also orbits the Earth - Neither system is an inertial reference frame. If we assume the Earth is infinitesimal, at the very least the Sun orbits the Jupiter-Sun barycenter (which is almost outside the Sun proper). So if anything we should speak of a "J-S centric model" - Both are useful. The geo-centric model is quite useful and still used in astronomy (Never-mind tracking satellites, try understand your coordinates in the heliocentric reference frame.) - The "corrections" of the geo-centric model are higher order harmonics, and can fit any motion and it's an early application of harmonic analysis. In fact, they're not actually corrections to the model, they are motions that naturally arise when describing circular motion wrt a point outside its axis. - What's wrong with non-inertial reference frames anyway? Consider them "fictitious" or consider them real, we can calculate and consider the non-inertial forces.

smallnamespace 10y ago

Stupid question: given General Relativity, and in particular that all reference frames are equally valid, including rotating and accelerating ones, in what sense is heliocentrism more 'true' than geocentrism? E.g. you can pick a geocentric reference frame and all the math works out (albeit you'd need to define large fictitious forces, etc., but again, they are only 'fictitious' from the perspective of a different reference frame; in the chosen frame they look quite real!). Isn't the choice between geocentrism and heliocentrism purely one of convenience, and we can simply pick and choose whichever reference frame is most convenient for calculation purposes? For example, if I'm interested in things happening in daily life, I pick a reference frame at rest with respect to the ground beneath my feet. If I am figuring out satellite orbits, I use a geocentric frame. If I'm calculating a trip to Mars, I use a heliocentric frame (perhaps a rotating one). If so, why do we still define heliocentrism to be more correct? Is the argument really an implicit throwback to Newtonian absolute space and time, which Relativity rejected?

kevinwang 10y ago
I think most simply, the entire solar system revolves around the sun and not the earth.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  Isn't that simply begging the question though? If you adopt a geocentric reference frame, then the Sun appears to rotate around the Earth, and all the other planets also appear to follow epicyclic paths around the Earth. You can predict the motions of every planet and star equally well, the equations are just different. So again, why is one more 'correct' than the other, besides calculational simplicity?
  - hsitz 10y ago
    The simple answer of why one is more correct, is because it's deemed as correct by the scientific community, which comprises the scientific experts on that issue. The larger issue you raise is one that was especially prominent in mid-20th century philosophy of science, specifically in Thomas Kuhn's concept of a "paradigm shift". A radically new scientific theory does not displace an existing theory because it is more "correct", since ad hoc modifications (e.g., epicycles) can always be made to the existing theory to account for new evidence that appears not to fit. However, at some point the existing theory will come to have so much baggage, and the new theory will explain the world so much more elegantly (e.g., with calculational simplicity) that the new theory will overthrow the old one and become the new "paradigm". Note that this is not because the old theory could not accommodate all the facts; any old theory can if you modify it enough, but at some point when you have to make all sorts of strange adjustments to the existing (old) theory it just becomes wildly implausible when compared with the new theory. At some point scientific consensus changes and the the new "paradigm" is accepted. You can read more about this at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn

neves 10y ago

The ironic thing in this debate is that almost all arguments in Galileo "Dialog" were wrong. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/galileo-big-mistake.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/galileo-big-mistake.html Do 2 wrongs make a right?

imagist 10y ago

> What were those problems? A big one was the size of stars in the Copernican universe. Copernicus proposed that certain oddities observed in the movements of planets through the constellations were due to the fact that Earth itself was moving. Stars show no such oddities, so Copernicus had to theorise that, rather than being just beyond the planets as astronomers had traditionally supposed, stars were so incredibly distant that Earth’s motion was insignificant by comparison. But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun. Tycho Brahe, the most prominent astronomer of the era and a favourite of the Establishment, thought this was absurd, while Peter Crüger, a leading Polish mathematician, wondered how the Copernican system could ever survive in the face of the star-size problem. This is a fascinating observation, and given the information they had at the time, I can see where Locher is coming from. Given two possibilities, one involving absolutely enormous stars and one involving a earth that circled the sun, both extraordinary claims, and no sure way (yet) to evaluate which was true, it's human that he supported the more comfortable hypothesis, and he wasn't provably wrong given the information they had. > That is unfortunate for science, because today the opponents of science make use of that caricature. Those who insist that the Apollo missions were faked, that vaccines are harmful, or even that the world is flat – whose voices are now loud enough for the ‘War on Science’ to be a National Geographic cover story and for the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to address even their most bizarre claims – do not reject the scientific process per se. Rather, they wrap themselves in the mantle of Galileo, standing (supposedly) against a (supposedly) corrupted science produced by the ‘Scientific Establishment’. The problem with this is that it conflates the public social debate with an internal scientific debate. Galileo vs. Pope Paul V is not the same debate as Galileo vs. Locher. The former is a debate driven by social needs that tries to drive opinion starting from what the pope wanted rather than observation (which is in fact a rejection of scientific process). The latter is two competing scientific hypotheses. Likewise, picking one of the example debates (do vaccines cause autism?) there are two possible debates. The public debate is driven by social needs--mostly people trying to find meaning in the suffering caused by their child's autism, and people trying to take advantage of that need. This is absolutely a rejection of scientific process: scientific process attempts to explain phenomena, not find explanations that make people feel better. The internal scientific debate is largely not a debate, because the evidence that vaccines don't cause autism is, at this point, so overwhelming. "Wrapping oneself in the mantle of Galileo" IS inherently an unscientific position: being pro- or anti-establishment is irrelevant to scientific process. The fact that Galileo happened to be anti-establishment at the time is irrelevant to the fact that ultimately his hypotheses were proven correct. The real problem here is that a large part of the scientific community doesn't recognize that the social debate and the scientific debate are two different debates. Scientific evidence which is persuasive in a scientific context (studies have shown no correlation between vaccines and autism) does not persuade everyone in a public social context. Emotional approaches are also necessary (would you rather your child died of whooping cough? Or as one person with autism said, "It's painful that some people would rather have a dead child than a child like me.").

lootsauce 10y ago

By far the best writing on this subject I have found is over at the fantastic Renaissance Mathematicus blog. Galileo, the Church and Heliocentricity: A Rough Guide. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/galileo-the-church-and-heliocentricity-a-rough-guide/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/galileo-the-church-a... Galileo, Foscarini, The Catholic Church, and heliocentricity in 1615 Part 1 – the occurrences: A Rough Guide. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/galileo-foscarini-the-catholic-church-and-heliocentricity-in-1615-part-1-the-occurrences-a-rough-guide/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/galileo-foscarini-th... And part 2 https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/galileo-foscarini-the-catholic-church-and-heliocentricity-in-1615-part-2-the-consequences-a-rough-guide/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/galileo-foscarini-th... Acceptance, rejection and indifference to heliocentricity before 1610. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/acceptance-rejection-and-indifference-to-heliocentricity-before-1610/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/acceptance-rejection...

amoruso 10y ago

The opposition to Galileo was not really religious or scientific. More than anything, it was political. You can't understand what happened outside the context of the religious wars of the time. His findings undermined the authority of the Catholic Church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion There are plenty of examples of political suppression of science in our own time. The Nazis and Communists were two extreme examples. In our own society, religion doesn't have this kind of power any more. But there are still political pressures on researchers to be PC. I'll let you think up some examples yourself.

Houshalter 10y ago

A somewhat better article on this is here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_the_side_of/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_th... There were also politics involved. Galileo insulted the pope and did some other controversial stuff. He wasn't persecuted for his scientific beliefs.

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meetri 10y ago

Do you have to believe that the sun orbits the earth in order to believe that the earth is the center of the universe? Is it possible that the Earth is the center of the universe given all light in the universe points in the direction of Earth.

jhbadger 10y ago

The problem with saying that there was scientific in addition to religious opposition to Galileo kind of misses the point. That would like saying there was scientific in addition to ideological opposition to genetics in the Soviet Union in the Lysenko years. The reason while both Galileo and Soviet biologists were put on trial was because the power structure at the time opposed them, not because of legitimate scientific concerns.

woodchuck64 10y ago

> But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun. What?? Oh, Wikipedia fills in some crucially missing info in this hypothesis. > However, early telescopes produced a spurious disk-like image of a star (known today as an Airy disk) that was larger for brighter stars and smaller for fainter ones. Astronomers from Galileo to Jaques Cassini mistook these spurious disks for the physical bodies of stars, and thus into the eighteenth century continued to think of magnitude in terms of the physical size of a star. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_(astronomy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_(astronomy)

novaleaf 10y ago
Thank you so much for this. I was wondering about this so much and it really gnawed on me that the article didn't bother explaining further.

lazyant 10y ago

I found the book "Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love" by Dava Sobel fascinating, really clarifies many misconceptions about Galileo.

yawaramin 10y ago

So, here's the funny thing. The Church has been vilified over this for centuries, but as it turns out they weren't actually wrong to believe in geocentrism; in a relativistic worldview either belief is equally correct.

Iv 10y ago

I am tired of the Catholics trying to rewrite history. I got deep into this issue several times. First, go to the source. We have the documents from Galileo trials, so first, read what was actually said. http://www.tc.umn.edu/~allch001/galileo/library/1616docs.htm http://www.tc.umn.edu/~allch001/galileo/library/1616docs.htm Here is the most relevant part: Proposition to be assessed: (1) The sun is the center of the world and completely devoid of local motion. Assessement: All said that this proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and the doctors of theology. (2) The earth is not the center of the world, nor motionless, but it moves as a whole and also with diurnal motion. Assessment: All said that this proposition receives the same judgement in philosophy and that in regard to theological truth it is at least errouneous in faith. Here, "philosophy" more or less means science. So, yes, Galileo was criticized on scientific grounds, which is totally fine as indeed, there were some problems with his theory (like the lack of movement of stars). But Galileo was called an heretic because he contradicted the literal meaning of the bible. "formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and the doctors of theology" : this is your regular creationist saying that the bible has to be interpreted literally and that you are a heretic if you don't. Problem: said creationist can throw you in jail if you don't abide to his worldview. That's why from this time (from a bit earlier actually) universities found it primordial to gain independence from the clergy and that science and religion diverged from each other. Is this religious assessment coherent with others? Of course not! Religion is not much about coherency. Copernicus heliocentrism was well accepted by the church as he was less confrontational, richer and more religious. Did Galileo act like an asshole? Maybe, though church did need some trolling at this time. Was his condemnation political? Most certainly! But the salient point is that the motivation may have been political, the justification was religious. And that was unacceptable to scientists that you could justify dogmatism and rewrite science books for political motives. The refusal of this is what gave us modern science.

gsmethells 10y ago

The opposition was not scientific. Read the book "The War on Science" and keep thr enlightenment from slipping away.