Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuckerfan
Galileo lived in dangerous times, however, and was no doubt aware that the Church took a dim view of anything which contradicted their views on things.
|
In astronomical matters, there was not that much negativity until around 1616, six years from this time frame. Copernicus had no problems with how the Church saw his anti-Geocentric book written over 50 years before the time of Galileo.
Quote:
|
IIRC, just saying that Moon was pock marked got him in trouble, since it was thought by TPTB that heavenly bodies were "perfect" in form.
|
Yes, and some clergy thought that this was more damaging than his "Medician Stars" discovery, as it established corruptibility where none was suppose to be.
But the clergy took pride in knowing the truth. To their credit, IMO, they wasted little time dumping their most beloved Aristotle/Ptolemy/Thomist model as soon as they confirmed the phases of Venus. They were not all that dumb to not adopt the Copernican model since it predicted that stars would demonstrate stellar parallax, and that finding did not come for centuries. [It was still better than the Tychonic model they adopted, but gravity was not well understood or appreciated at the time.]
Quote:
|
Discovering the moons of Jupiter was a big deal, not merely because it was something no one had ever seen before, but because the doctrine of the Church at the time was that everything went around the Earth, and this threw that right out the window.
|
The moons were still important. One of the big arguments favoring why things went around the Earth was that if the Earth moved, then the Moon would fall away, along with our atmosphere, etc. But this argument was clearly erroneous with the discovery of those Jovian satellites.
Quote:
|
(None of this should be considered as a slam against the Catholic Church or religion in general, mind you. Things were very much different way back when, and even saying you didn't completely agree with a member of nobility on some minor issue was enough to get you thrown into jail.)
|
If you find any jail terms due to astronomical viewpoints, I'd be interested.