Category Archives: Galileo

The Galileo Myth

Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Article 4 pages Level: all audiences This article, published in the Jesuit magazine America in October 2020, provides a discussion of the scientific reasons behind opposition to Galileo, a discussion called for because the opposition to Galileo had recently been described in terms of “science denial”.  The authors are Guy Consolmagno, Director of the Vatican Observatory, and Christopher Graney, a historian of science and Adjunct Scholar with the Vatican Observatory.  From the article: [T]he stories we tell ourselves are never really about the past or the future; they are about the times in which they are written…. We study what happened in history to imagine a better future. That is the immediate relevance of the Galileo story to us today. But we must be careful that the stories we tell ourselves do not fit too neatly into contemporary stereotypes like “science denialism.” If we do not diagnose problems correctly, we cannot come up with good solutions. Click here to access … Continue reading →

The Holy Office in the Republic of Letters

Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Article 23 pages Level: university This 2019 article by Daniel Stolzenberg, published in the history of science journal Isis, discusses the treatment of the Copernican theory by Roman officials in the decades after Galileo’s death, as seen in the case of the 1660 book Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius and its review by Fr. Athanasius Kircher, S. J.  Stolzenberg argues for a reading of the of role of the Holy Office that is different from the usual one (where it is thought of as only serving to hinder the creation and communication of knowledge).  The abstract of “The Holy Office in the Republic of Letters: Roman Censorship, Dutch Atlases, and the European Information Order, circa 1660” is as follows: This essay reconstructs the story of hidden collaborations between the Amsterdam bookseller Johannes Janssonius and the Roman Inquisition in 1660. It provides evidence that the papacy tacitly permitted the circulation of an explicitly Copernican book at a surprisingly early date and … Continue reading →

Galileo’s Newly-Discovered Letter

Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Article (blog post) 2800 words Level: high school and above In 2018 the journal Nature announced that a previously-unknown copy of one of Galileo’s letters had been discovered in the archives of the Royal Society—and Nature stated that the new copy showed Galileo to have lied.  Christopher Graney discusses this letter (which was arguably the event that set the “Galileo Affair” into motion) in a posting on the Vatican Observatory’s blog, The Catholic Astronomer, and also discusses the Nature announcement, the science of Galileo’s time, and the people involved with the letter. Click here to read the entire blog posting from The Catholic Astronomer.    

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Discovery of Galileo’s long-lost letter

Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Article 1500 words Level: all audiences This September 2018 article in Nature by Alison Abbott discusses how a newly-rediscovered document “shows that the astronomer toned down the claims that triggered science history’s most infamous battle — then lied about his edits”.  The document in question is apparently the original version of a letter Galileo wrote in 1613 to his friend, Fr. Benedetto Castelli.  This letter would eventually (in 1615) be the basis of a complaint filed against Galileo with the Inquisition—a complaint that would eventually lead the Inquisition to consider and reject the Copernican theory in 1616.  Galileo at the time complained that the version of the letter that was filed with the Inquisition was an altered version—altered to sound more inflammatory.  He produced a different version, with less inflammatory language, claiming it to be the original one.  This new discovery seems to indicate that Galileo lied about this. Click here to access this article via Nature‘s web page. Click … Continue reading →

La astronomía de Ptolomeo y el caso Galileo: dos aportes histórico-epistemológicos

Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Article 31 pages Level: university In this article by Gonzalo L. Recio of the Universidad de Quilmes-Conicet, Argentina and published in the journal Scientia et Fides in 2017, the author uses the example of Ptolemy, astronomy, and physics to analyze the debate over the Copernican system in the early seventeenth century.  The author discusses the extent to which Ptolemy believed that astronomy could tell us much about the structure of the universe, and what that tells us about Galileo.  Recio writes: La incoherencia no es buena amiga de la ciencia. Eso, sin embargo, no significa que no puedan vivir juntas. De hecho, al menos desde hacía trece siglos ambos cuerpos teóricos, la astronomía ptolemaica y la física aristotélica, habían convivido en las comunidades científicas musulmanas y cristianas. Esta convivencia despertaba, como vimos, rispideces. No obstante ello, la experiencia mostraba que no era suficiente para derrumbar a ninguna de las dos partes. Ambos paradigmas existían juntamente. El advenimiento de la hipótesis … Continue reading →

Galileo Revisited: The Galileo Affair in Context

Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Book 312 pages Level: university Fr. Paschal Scotti’s 2017 book Galileo Revisited offers another look at the Galileo story; a look in which there are no heroes and no villains; a look that makes a special effort to include the broad historical and cultural background in which that story took place. Fr. Scotti is a Benedictine monk at Portsmouth Abbey in Rhode Island, and teaches at his monastery’s school, Portsmouth Abbey School. Click here for a preview, courtesy of Google Books. From the publisher, Ignatius Press: No other work on Galileo Galilei has brought together such a complete description of the historical context in its political, cultural, philosophical, religious, scientific, and personal aspects as this volume has done. In addition to covering the whole of Galileo’s life, it focuses on those things that are most pertinent to the Galileo Affair, which culminated in his condemnation by the Inquisition in 1633. It also includes an extensive discussion of the relationship between … Continue reading →

Mathematical Disquisitions – The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo

Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Book 176 pages Level: high school and above This 2017 book by Christopher M. Graney is the first complete English translation of an astronomical text written by scientists who stood opposite Galileo in the debate on the question of Earth’s motion. Galileo painted a very unfavorable portrait of Mathematical Disquisitions and its Jesuit authors, but the book itself turns out to be a competent scientific work and not much like Galileo’s portrayal of it. From the publisher, the University of Notre Dame Press: Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo offers a new English translation of the 1614 Disquisitiones Mathematicae, which Johann Georg Locher wrote under the guidance of the German Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner. The booklet, an anti-Copernican astronomical work, is of interest in large part because Galileo Galilei, who came into conflict with Scheiner over the discovery of sunspots, devoted numerous pages within his famous 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican to ridiculing Disquisitiones. The brief text (the … Continue reading →

Galileo’s Jesuit Connections and Their Influence on His Science

Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Article (book chapter) 28 pages Level: university In this article William A. Wallace, O. P., takes his reader into the details of various manuscripts to document Galileo’s interactions with various Jesuits and their influence on him and his work. This article is a chapter in the 2003 book Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, edited by Mordechai Feingold and published by The MIT Press. Wallace concludes: Admittedly this exposition of Galileo’s relationships with the Jesuits has been brief and sketchy, leaving many questions unanswered. But perhaps it serves to show that Galileo’s Jesuit connections were not insignificant, that they extended over a considerable period, and that in the long run they bore considerable fruit. To sum up: Galileo’s contacts with Clavius surely gave him his start, his borrowing from Vallius provided him with a sound logic of discovery and proof, and his polemics with later Jesuits pushed his genius to the extreme that was needed to found a new … Continue reading →

Popular perceptions of Galileo

Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Article 6 pages Level: all audiences This 2010 article by Dava Sobel, best-selling author of the book Galileo’s Daughter (and other books), was published in Galileo’s Medicean Moons: their impact on 400 years of discovery, Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, IAU Symposium, Volume 269: Abstract: Among the most persistent popular misperceptions of Galileo is the image of an irreligious scientist who opposed the Catholic Church and was therefore convicted of heresy-was even excommunicated, according to some accounts, and denied Christian burial. In fact, Galileo considered himself a good Catholic. He accepted the Bible as the true word of God on matters pertaining to salvation, but insisted Scripture did not teach astronomy. Emboldened by his discovery of the Medicean Moons, he took a stand on Biblical exegesis that has since become the official Church position. Click here for this article from NASA ADS. Click here to download a PDF of this article from NASA ADS.  

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The Parallel Worlds of Christoph Scheiner and Galileo Galilei

Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Article 14 pages Level: high school and above This 2016 article—written by Oddbjørn Engvold of the University of Oslo, Norway, and Jack B. Zirker, of the National Solar Observatory, USA, and published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy—provides an overview that compares and contrasts the solar observations made by Galileo Galilei on one hand, and by Christoph Scheiner of the Society of Jesus on the other. While Galileo is better known, Scheiner would go on to study the sun far more extensively that Galileo, and to become the world’s first true solar astronomer. Engvold and Zirker write: Scheiner was a keen observer, who shares with Galileo the credit of discovering and describing many of the sunspot phenomena we know today. He recorded the behaviour of sunspots, sometime several times per day, allegedly over 16 years. From this mass of data, he deduced several important properties of the Sun, such as the latitude variation of rotation, as well as … Continue reading →