Talk:Galileo affair

The Earth

From Earth:
"In general English usage, the name earth can be capitalized or spelled in lowercase interchangeably, either when used absolutely or prefixed with "the" (i.e. "Earth", "the Earth", "earth", or "the earth"). Many deliberately spell the name of the planet with a capital, both as "Earth" or "the Earth". This is to distinguish it as a proper noun, distinct from the senses of the term as a mass noun or verb (e.g. referring to soil, the ground, earthing in the electrical sense, etc.). Oxford spelling recognizes the lowercase form as the most common, with the capitalized form as a variant of it. Another common convention is to spell the name with a capital when occurring absolutely (e.g. Earth's atmosphere) and lowercase when preceded by "the" (e.g. the atmosphere of the earth). The term almost exclusively exists in lowercase when appearing in common phrases, even without "the" preceding it (e.g. "It does not cost the earth.", "What on earth are you doing?")." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Editor2020 (talk • contribs) 4 May 2013

Addition to "List of artistic treatments"

I would like to add the entry below to the "List of artistic treatments" section; however, I don't appear to have sufficient permissions.

Galileo [1] is a rock musical written Danny Strong [2] with an original rock score and lyrics by Michael Weiner [3] and Zoe Sarnak. It was first performed in 2024 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre [4] where it was directed by Michael Mayer [5], and starred Raúl Esparza [6] as Galileo.

Note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei already includes the following: A rock musical about Galileo's life, called Galileo, premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in May 2024. Michael Mayer directed the musical, which had a book by Danny Strong and music and lyrics by Zoe Sarnak and Michael Weiner. Raúl Esparza starred as Galileo. Halcabes (talk) 05:37, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

This is pure WP:TRIVIA and thus it should not be present in a WP article. Veverve (talk) 12:20, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

The myth of the Galileo affair lives large on Wikipedia

The article doesn't waste any time:

"Galileo was prosecuted for his support of heliocentrism, the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the centre of the universe."

This makes it sound like Galileo had compelling evidence for heliocentrism and that the Church, feeling threatened by the new evidence, tried to silence him. As we will see, this is very far from reality.

"Galileo's discoveries were met with opposition within the Catholic Church, and in 1616 the Inquisition declared heliocentrism to be "formally heretical".''

And he was also met with opposition from virtually all of his scientific contemporaries; Galileo was an exception to the then-consensus that heliocentric models were flawed cosmology. His observations (or "discoveries") regarding the moons of Jupiter and phases of Venus were no doubt consistent with the Copernican model, but they were also predicted by Tycho Brahe's model in which the planets circled around the sun, while the sun itself orbited a fixed Earth. So, the Tychonic system predicted the same Venusian phases that Galileo observed, and was published two decades before Galileo observed Venus evolving into a crescent (the same observations were made independently by at least 3 other astronomers, none of whom supported the Copernican model -see Simon Marius). This deflects from the fact that the notion that the Earth itself was in motion was regarded as utterly absurd in Galileo's lifetime, not just by clergy but virtually everyone working in mathematical astronomy (more on this below).

In the section on modern views of Galileo's "scientific arguments" it begins:

"While Galileo never claimed that his observations themselves directly proved heliocentrism to be true, they were significant evidence in its favor and removed many of the objections of the day; more importantly, they were devastating to the Aristotelian model."

Devastating? Number one, they were not "significant evidence" (see above), and secondly, Aristotelian cosmology, which posited a common center of rotation for all celestial bodies, was already violated by the Ptolemaic epicycle-deferent model. This, again, says nothing about the truth or falsehood of geocentric or heliocentric cosmology.

The fact is, there was nothing Galileo could've observed at the time that would've flipped the consensus to favor heliocentrism. While modern science requires empirical evidence, science at the turn of the 17th Century and even in Newton's age favored mathematical theory over observation. Galileo conceptualized the idea of calculus (as did Democritus and Archimedes ~2000 years prior), but he had no formalized way of calculating continuous, instantaneous change (ie nonlinear rates of change). What was needed was a new mathematics to associate gravitational pull with geometry, and anything short of that would've never convinced scientists that a moving, spinning Earth wouldn't fling people out to space. Galileo actually died the day Newton was born, so the math simply didn't exist.

About the only observation that probably would've demonstrated the revolution of the Earth about the sun (to the satisfaction of 17th Century scientists) is the annual stellar parallax, as it was long known that a planet in orbit would produce a minute effect in the position of stars as the Earth's vantage point changed over the course of a year. But the technology to detect the parallax of stars didn't exist in the 17th Century and the phenomenon wasn't officially observed until 1838 -although by that time it wasn't even a big deal, as virtually all astronomers had long been convinced of heliocentrism since the mathematical proofs of Newton and Leibniz were published. Copernicus was aware of the stellar parallax problem and asserted, quite rightly, that it was unobservable because the stars (which were really distant suns) were too far away and the changes too tiny. Unfortunately, science doesn't work on assertion.

Also in this section, Maurice Finocchiaro is cited to support this statement:

"According to Finocchiaro, defenders of the Catholic church's position have sometimes attempted to argue, unsuccessfully, that Galileo was right on the facts but that his scientific arguments were weak or unsupported by evidence of the day; Finocchiaro rejects this view, saying that some of Galileo's key epistemological arguments are accepted fact today"

I'm not one to defend any church or religious apologist, but they happen to be right on the point that Galileo's evidence was weak. And in any event, Finocchiaro also states that "moving Earth" models were widely viewed as "philosophical absurdity" and offers absolutely no evidence of any shift in consensus on the basis of Galileo's work (never mind that his scientific reasoning -not conclusions -is accepted as valid today, it isn't clear this was the case at the time). The myth of the Galileo Affair was that it was a classic science vs religion ordeal (see Conflict thesis), which obscures a more complicated picture that scholars like Finocchiaro try to present (although he often exaggerates the significance of Galileo's discoveries). There were bishops sympathetic to Galileo's ideas while most scientists were not, while the Church had good scientific reasons to doubt him.

I apologize for the length of this post but there are so many confused, garbled statements in this article that I felt detailed context was necessary before citing sources. To close I'd offer the work of science historian James C. Ungureanu who's published at least one book on this subject and several journal articles:

"As many contemporary historians of science have argued, including Maurice A. Finocchiaro in his article in Galileo goes to Jail, the Church had understandable reasons for refusing to accept Galileo’s heliocentric model of the solar system: Galileo was unable to produce the proof he needed; the waters were also muddied by Galileo’s academic enemies and by several misunderstandings, basic mistakes, missed opportunities, and complex theological debates"[7]. Jonathan f1 (talk) 06:46, 19 June 2024 (UTC)