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>>> Those who refuse to consider an unconventional idea in science are disturbingly similar to those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope While that

>>> Those who refuse to consider an unconventional idea in science are disturbingly similar to those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope While that's a headline and not the text of the article (hence possibly added by an editor), it is worth clarifying the history. When Galileo reported his telescopic observations, the Vatican astronomers went so far as to buy a telescope from him, and after some initial difficulty with it, confirmed his observations. The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened. As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved. An odd issue that we face with extraterrestrials, or non-earthly beings in general, is that they can be introduced as an explanation for anything, and have been for 5000+ years. We don't have a good way of scientifically investigating extraterrestrial hypotheses.

TravelnSalesman 5y ago
Ok, why did Inquisitor Bellarmine have the Copernican follower Giordano Bruno burned at the stake?
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into religious, er, flamewar. Not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- analog31 5y ago
  As I understand it, Bruno was accused of heresy. The same fate would have awaited Galileo, but the Church stopped one step short of accusing Galileo of heresy. The words that I recall reading was that he was "vehemently suspected of heresy."
  - ilteris 5y ago
    Is there a documentary or a book i can watch or read to learn about these events? Thanks.
    - analog31 5y ago
      I read a book, "Galileo's Daughter" that was not strictly about the heliocentrism affair, but gave enough of the details, plus what I thought was good insight into the surrounding social and political issues. One interesting political issue is that the Church hierarchy was facing accusations from lower level clergy, of being "soft on heresy" in the aftermath of the Reformation. Some people saw the Galileo affair as a test of whether the Church was willing to assert its authority or not. Also, Galileo had two trials, that were conducted under two different Popes. And some of the issues were clouded by the fact that it was actually hard to communicate between A and B in Italy. Apparently many of the letters back and forth were held up because they would not carry mail through towns that were under quarantine when a plague came through. The text of Bellarmine's letter to Galileo is worth reading. Note that I'm not defending the Church with my comments, but only documenting what I think was the technical difference between the Galileo and Bruno cases.
- speeder 5y ago
  Because he defended reincarnation, pantheism, denied the trinity and so on. Basically the church got upset he was preaching religious stuff against the church, it had nothing to do with his science.
baryphonic 5y ago
> As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved. This is close, but a little off. First, the (Catholic) Church had little problem with heliocentrism, provided that it was phrased as a hypothesis. Copernicus was even a Catholic priest when he published his heliocentric ideas, and the Church allowed full publication as long as he called it a hypothesis. The religious authorities that had theological problems with heliocentrism were almost all Protestants. Martin Luther was extremely critical of Copernicus and apparently applied one of his many insults toward the Pole. Calvin and other reformers were also quite critical. The Catholic Church wasn't (and even today isn't) too concerned with literal interpretation of scriptures, but the Church of the time was very into Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas' fusion of Classical Greek philosophy (principally Aristotle's ideas) with the theological, moral and even epistemic and metaphysical teachings from the Bible. When the Catholic Church got upset at Galileo, they were upset that he was contradicting Aristotle, not the Old Testament. And Galileo was wrong. First, the Copernican model of heliocentrism held that orbits were perfectly circular, and even preserved epicycles to correct for the observational deviations from the model. Occam's razor would seem to say this made it a worse theory than Ptolemy's. Additionally, Galileo made a pretty serious mistake when calculating the distance to stars based on his telescope observations, underestimating the distance to the nearest stars by around 1000x. The Church correctly noted that if the stars were as close as Galileo proposed, then measurable deviations in their positions and/or sizes should have been observed from earth at parallax positions; however, the star field remained fixed. To the Church, extraordinary claims necessary to overturn Aristotle required extraordinary evidence, and Galileo failed. Not only that, but he was fairly arrogant about it, insisting he was correct when his theory was clearly contradictory. I strongly disagree with the Church's decision to punish Galileo, but the Church was in fact defending science, both consensus and the scientific method, albeit overzealously. When Kepler published his heliocentric model that incorporated elliptical orbits tuned using Tycho Brahe's observational data, the reception was quite a bit better across Europe. However, Kepler himself ended up excommunicated from his own Lutheran Church because he believed the moon was solid, which allegedly contradicted the Old Testament, though Kepler appears to have been devout and dedicated much of his life toward reconciling Biblical and scientific truth.
bobthechef 5y ago
> As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved. I don't think this is entirely true. First, because there is no "dogmatic stake", as it were, in either geocentrism or heliocentrism. That is, the Church does not hold a position on this matter and a moment's thought will make it obvious that the Church isn't in the business of making scientific pronouncements anymore than a lawyer makes pronouncements affirming or denying what his mechanic says is wrong with his car (bad metaphysics and ideology masquerading as science, on the other hand...). True, the Church has been an energizing force behind the development of science, but this is a reflection of the Christian spirit and worldview, one which embraces Creation as good, beautiful, rational, and intelligible and thus capable and worthy of study. There never was a need to reinterpret the Bible because there's nothing in the Bible that depends on one or the other model being true. The Bible is not a scientific textbook. It doesn't matter which orb revolves around which. The whole Galileo affair is routinely misrepresented because the fable we're given is the result of Enlightenment propaganda desired to create the false narrative that there is some grand battle between SCIENCE(tm) on one hand, and faith (Christianity) on the other. The historical accounts of the affair say otherwise. Mostly, Galileo was kind of an ass and it took years of making enemies before things turned for the worse.
antognini 5y ago
> The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened. Yes, the discoveries Galileo announced from his telescope also touched off an interesting set of debates about whether or not his observation of sunspots and craters on the Moon were actually real features on those bodies, or just artifacts of the telescope itself. Those debates are still with us today in a more general form. Anytime we use instruments to observe something, we have to be careful to make sure that we are observing something in the outside universe rather than an artifact of the instrument itself.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  I would mentioned the Duhem-Quine thesis here. The notion of a "critical experiment" is generally quite naive in the grand scheme of things. Parsimonious perhaps, but any falsifying experiment tests not merely the theory under consideration, but all human knowledge, as it were.

TravelnSalesman 5y ago

Ok, why did Inquisitor Bellarmine have the Copernican follower Giordano Bruno burned at the stake?

dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into religious, er, flamewar. Not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
analog31 5y ago
As I understand it, Bruno was accused of heresy. The same fate would have awaited Galileo, but the Church stopped one step short of accusing Galileo of heresy. The words that I recall reading was that he was "vehemently suspected of heresy."
- ilteris 5y ago
  Is there a documentary or a book i can watch or read to learn about these events? Thanks.
  - analog31 5y ago
    I read a book, "Galileo's Daughter" that was not strictly about the heliocentrism affair, but gave enough of the details, plus what I thought was good insight into the surrounding social and political issues. One interesting political issue is that the Church hierarchy was facing accusations from lower level clergy, of being "soft on heresy" in the aftermath of the Reformation. Some people saw the Galileo affair as a test of whether the Church was willing to assert its authority or not. Also, Galileo had two trials, that were conducted under two different Popes. And some of the issues were clouded by the fact that it was actually hard to communicate between A and B in Italy. Apparently many of the letters back and forth were held up because they would not carry mail through towns that were under quarantine when a plague came through. The text of Bellarmine's letter to Galileo is worth reading. Note that I'm not defending the Church with my comments, but only documenting what I think was the technical difference between the Galileo and Bruno cases.
speeder 5y ago
Because he defended reincarnation, pantheism, denied the trinity and so on. Basically the church got upset he was preaching religious stuff against the church, it had nothing to do with his science.

baryphonic 5y ago

> As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved. This is close, but a little off. First, the (Catholic) Church had little problem with heliocentrism, provided that it was phrased as a hypothesis. Copernicus was even a Catholic priest when he published his heliocentric ideas, and the Church allowed full publication as long as he called it a hypothesis. The religious authorities that had theological problems with heliocentrism were almost all Protestants. Martin Luther was extremely critical of Copernicus and apparently applied one of his many insults toward the Pole. Calvin and other reformers were also quite critical. The Catholic Church wasn't (and even today isn't) too concerned with literal interpretation of scriptures, but the Church of the time was very into Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas' fusion of Classical Greek philosophy (principally Aristotle's ideas) with the theological, moral and even epistemic and metaphysical teachings from the Bible. When the Catholic Church got upset at Galileo, they were upset that he was contradicting Aristotle, not the Old Testament. And Galileo was wrong. First, the Copernican model of heliocentrism held that orbits were perfectly circular, and even preserved epicycles to correct for the observational deviations from the model. Occam's razor would seem to say this made it a worse theory than Ptolemy's. Additionally, Galileo made a pretty serious mistake when calculating the distance to stars based on his telescope observations, underestimating the distance to the nearest stars by around 1000x. The Church correctly noted that if the stars were as close as Galileo proposed, then measurable deviations in their positions and/or sizes should have been observed from earth at parallax positions; however, the star field remained fixed. To the Church, extraordinary claims necessary to overturn Aristotle required extraordinary evidence, and Galileo failed. Not only that, but he was fairly arrogant about it, insisting he was correct when his theory was clearly contradictory. I strongly disagree with the Church's decision to punish Galileo, but the Church was in fact defending science, both consensus and the scientific method, albeit overzealously. When Kepler published his heliocentric model that incorporated elliptical orbits tuned using Tycho Brahe's observational data, the reception was quite a bit better across Europe. However, Kepler himself ended up excommunicated from his own Lutheran Church because he believed the moon was solid, which allegedly contradicted the Old Testament, though Kepler appears to have been devout and dedicated much of his life toward reconciling Biblical and scientific truth.

bobthechef 5y ago

antognini 5y ago

> The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened. Yes, the discoveries Galileo announced from his telescope also touched off an interesting set of debates about whether or not his observation of sunspots and craters on the Moon were actually real features on those bodies, or just artifacts of the telescope itself. Those debates are still with us today in a more general form. Anytime we use instruments to observe something, we have to be careful to make sure that we are observing something in the outside universe rather than an artifact of the instrument itself.

bobthechef 5y ago
I would mentioned the Duhem-Quine thesis here. The notion of a "critical experiment" is generally quite naive in the grand scheme of things. Parsimonious perhaps, but any falsifying experiment tests not merely the theory under consideration, but all human knowledge, as it were.