Galileo to Have a Statue in the Vatican

It’s true! The Catholic church is formulating an apology after nearly four hundred years. Okay, maybe it’s not a true apology, but at least they’re admitting that their treatment of Galileo was wrong.

If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, Galileo  advocated a worldview called heliocentrism, which means that the sun is at the center of the solar system, and that the Earth orbits the sun. The belief at the time was that the Earth was stationary and fixed in the heavens. As such, the sun and all the stars moved around the Earth. This view was called geocentrism, and was backed by several instances of Old Testament scripture. We know from empirical observation today that our sun isn’t even the center of the universe, so even Galileo’s heliocentrism has been superceded by subsequent astronomers and physicists.

There is a bit of drama surrounding Galileo’s arrest and censure at the hands of the Inquisition that you can read about in the (actually) well-written wikipedia article on the subject. His arguments against established doctrine were hardly diplomatic, which damaged his credibility with those in the church who might have otherwise supported his viewpoints. Galileo was eventually tried for heresy and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. As a condition of his sentence, he had to falsify his previous research. His treatise on the practice of science was banned for nearly one hundred years after his lifetime. Legend tells of Galileo saying “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”) after being forced to recant his scientific work at the conclusion of his trial.

As a side note, it is this situation in particular which provides some of the inspiration for the world of Alchemist. I have always been enamored with the collision of religion and science in our culture, and in few places is it more tragic than in Galileo’s case.