It's not good that people who come up with important new scientific theories should be forced to recant if they're jerks. Seriously, the progress of civilizati

It's not good that people who come up with important new scientific theories should be forced to recant if they're jerks. Seriously, the progress of civilization depends on unreasonable men. Galileo's ideas about planetary motion weren't perfect but they were the seeds of our present understanding of planetary motion. And really he was persecuted more for saying that the planets were mutable with weather and so forth rather than perfect and eternal than he was for the whole heleocentrism thing. And he was perfectly right about that last bit.