Actually I was reading that the Tychonic system is mathematically equivalent to a standard geocentric one which is what I think the RCC went with after this. (Then again Tychonic still is kind of a Heliocentric system, since everything except the moon and the earth go around the sun.) Still I can see what you mean, Newtonian mechanics isn’t that far away at that time and once you have that you really can’t have an earth centered system.
Actually these days when I read about this it amazes me anybody could think the RCC was a bunch of literalists at that time. (It’s my understanding that during those days pretty much the only people that could actually read the bible were members of the church since they didn’t translate it. So they would have controlled the information and could have told the public it said ANYTHING since it’s not like they could check.)
Reading the Internet, which is a world wide and a centimeter deep, it’s hard to get detailed information. However, this is what I see…
The church’s decree mentions not just Galileo but also Zuniga, and his commentary on the book of Job. From what I can find, Zuniga was pushing something called Pythagorean principles. From what little I’ve found, this suggest attempting to reconcile the teachings of Greek philosophers with the church’s teachings. In this, he seemed to be forcefully pushing his own interpretation of the bible, guaranteeing a conflict with the church hierarchy.
Also remember that Pythagoras in those contexts probably includes numerology and other non- scientific, non-religious mysticism. (No triangles need apply) Buried in the Greek teachings were the speculations of Anaxagoras who suggested the sun was the central fire and the earth revolved around it (with much the same reception Galileo got in his time).
Zuniga apparently found some backing for this in an ambiguous passage in the book of Job. Because of the ambiguity, he suggested that church was wrong in its translation and interpretation. He argued (in the book banned along with galileo’s) that the correct interpretation could be found once the original Chaldean version could be found and interpreted. Note this also suggested even the Hebrew second temple version might not be accurate. Heliocentrism was just one more point where “the Greeks are right and the church is wrong”
It’s one thing to argue astronomy or other details. By backing heliocentrism and putting himself in the company of someone(some group or faction) who suggested the church had the Holy Scripture all wrong, someone promoting some pagan mysticism, Galileo inadvertantly put himself squarely on the wrong end of a nasty theological dispute. Hence the nastiness and vindictiveness with which the church responded…
I wish I could find that article. I thought it was Scientific American, but I can’t find it in the index; it’s been 30 years or so. IIRC the author was among the first allowed to read some of the original Vatican archive documents.
That raised the interesting possibiliyt that the decree concerng Galilieo’s interrogation was intended not so much to provide that he would be shown the instruments of torture (i.e. subject to stage 1 above) as to ensure that the interrogation would not proceed beyond stage 1 to stages 2 and 3 (more detailed threats, actual torture). This interpretation is consistent with njtt’s point that Galileo’s age and infirmity precluded his being actually tortured.
Yes, Gingerich is a very well respected historian. I cannot reach the page you mention on the Amazon preview (your link certainly does not lead there) so I can’t comment on what appears there. However, my point was simply based on the meaning of the word “sentence”. The passage about torture you quoted earlier is clearly about Galileo’s pre-trial interrogation, not his post trial sentence. If Gingerich’s book refers to it as a sentence, “sentence” must be being used in some non-standard sense (it might be how the word, orits Italian or Latin equivalent, was used then, but it isn’t how it is used now).
[ol]
[li]follow the link I gave,[/li][li]click on the book cover beneath “Click to Look Inside!”,[/li][li]enter “torture” into the text field labeled “Search Inside This Book”, and then[/li][li]click on the search result labeled “page 119”.[/li][/ol]
What I was saying was that it was Kepler’s work that provided the first strong empirical case against geocentrism. Although Kepler based his work on Tycho’s data, his theory was very different from Tycho’s: not only was it unequivocally heliocentric, but it postulated elliptical orbits. Tycho, like Copernicus, had continued to believe in traditional circular orbits, and Galileo, even after having been confronted with Kepler’s case for elliptical ones, still insisted on circles.
You are right, I think, that it is Newtonian mechanics that put the final nails in the coffin of geocentrism, but Newton himself pretty much took heliocentrism for granted, and developed his mechanics on that basis. He was able to take it for granted more thanks to Kepler than thanks to Galileo. (On the other hand, Newton’s mechanics is founded upon Galileo’s work.)
Galileo was living in a post renaissance and post reformation culture. Protestantism was all about reading the Bible for yourself, so no, printed Bibles were readily available at this time, and were being widely read (by Protestants, at any rate, but I am sure by many Catholics too). The peasants may not have been literate, but the better off classes were. However, you are quite right that the Catholic Church was not then (and, in fact, has never been) a bunch of Biblical literalists. That is a Protestant aberration (and largely a 20th-21st century American aberration at that.)
OK, I have looked at it now. I think you are just getting hung up by a rather ambiguously worded caption to that picture. I stand by what I said already: the torture threat was part of the pre-trial interrogation, not part of the eventual sentence. The actual quoted passage, as opposed to the caption, clearly has the sentencing occurring after the torture threat. Furthermore, given the fact that no actual torture took place, and that at the commencement of the trial Galileo was still confidently proclaiming his innocence, the threat probably did not play a very significant part in the affair as a whole. It may not even have scared him very much.
About the issue of “suspicion of heresy”. It’s something that mystifies me, probably because legal norms and reasonnings of this time are so much at odds with ours. And also because “suspicion of heresy” might be used nowadays either to refer to the historical formal “indictment” or to what we understand now by “suspicion”, making articles mentionning it unclear, because you don’t know what the author is refering to exactly.
My understanding, that could be extremely wrong, is the following :
There was an actual “charge” of “suspicion of heresy”. It could be :
Because you put yourself, by your actions or declarations, in such a position that the Church could legitimately have doubts about your adherence to the dogma even though you aren’t obviously or overtly an heretic.
2)Weider, and I’m not really sure of this one, though it could apply in Galileo’s case : you did not follow Church’s prescriptions regarding something that the Church had not declared to be a dogma, but suspect could be heretical. For instance, assuming that it applied to Galileo : the RCC isn’t sure that supporting heliocentrism runs afoul of the scriptures, but it might. To stay on the safe side, you’re forbidden to teach it but then do not comply, putting yourself (and others) in a potentially dangerous position (spiritually).
In any case, the inquisition (or other court) is perfectly justified in sentencing you, for, sort of, “reckless behaviour” that could have caused spiritual damage to yourself and whoever could have listened to you or followed your example. The sentences, in this case, were much lighter than for actual heresy, but nevertheless you had to formally and publicly reaffirm your obedience to the Church teachings on the matter, and to recant, for now and for ever, the heretic doctrine you were suspected to have or were possibly heading towards. This means that in case you would at some future point hold said doctrine, you would be considered to have relapsed rather than being, as somebody else, a “first offender”.
Again, I might be mistaken, and welcome any correction about this issue.
That is too strong of a statement. Galileo himself had contributed two critical observations which cast doubt on geocentrism–Venus shows a complete cycle of phases, and Jupiter has satellites.
The former couldn’t be explained at all under classical geocentrism. The latter didn’t directly bear on the behavior of the planets, but provided proof that at least some objects didn’t revolve around the Earth, and removed the anomalous status of the Earth and Moon under geocentrism.
It’s true, certainly, that until Kepler’s work was published and accepted, there were good arguments on both sides and the matter was open to legitimate debate. But I wouldn’t say the heliocentric arguments were “very weak”.
As othrs have pointed out - until Kepler, most people seemed to be tied to the idea of regular circular motion in the heavens, which is why heliocentrism did not work well although, not as badly as geocentric theory. IIRC, the Ptolomeic system involved adding epicycples within epicycles to explain retrograde motion of the planets.
Kepler showed that the best explanation was elliptical orbits, and motion that was not constant but constant with the area swept out between the planet and the sun located at one focus of the ellipse. Newton later showed how the same gravity seen on earth could explain orbital motion in accordance with Kepler’s laws.
I am quite aware of Galileo’s astronomical discoveries. Several of them (not just the two you mention) certainly weakened the case for the classical Aristotelian/Ptolemaic system, but the Tychonic system provided fairly ready (and, at the time, popular) rebuttals to any attempt to depict them as refuting geocentrism. Geocentrists, apart from having commonsense and millennia of scholarly tradition on their side, could point to two very salient facts as quite strong evidence of a stationary Earth: the lack of observable stellar parallax (even given Tycho’s unprecedentedly accurate data), and the sheer commonplace observation that the Earth does not seem to be moving: it feels still and solid under our feet, things do not fall to the west, etc. It is true that Galileo did a brilliant job of taking apart the latter argument in the Dialog (the very book that got him into trouble), but I was talking about a time when the Dialog had only just appeared and nobody had yet had time to assimilate it. In any case, these arguments do not show that the Earth is moving, only that the case for it being stationary is much weaker than had been thought. The main argument, in the Dialog, to the effect that the Earth actually is moving is the tides theory, which (quite apart from now being known to be wrong) was badly flawed in fairly obvious ways.
The evidence of Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables was of a quite different order. They quite unambiguously gave much better predictions than any other astronomical tables available before (whether based on Ptolemaic theory, or on Copernicus’ original version of heliocentrism), but there was also clearly no way you could derive Kepler’s numbers from a geocentric model. After the publication of the *Rudolphine Tables *(and of Galileo’s Dialog) it was irrational to cling to geocentrism (and it was quite rapidly dropped by the scientific/philosophical community); before the Rudolphine Tables, despite what Galileo had seen through his telescope, and even despite the arguments in the Dialog, I would say that for a rational, impartial observer, the preponderance of the evidence would have pointed quite strongly to geocentrism, and the majority of informed observers did indeed remain geocentrists.
Yes, the Tychonic variant of geocentrism was harder to refute, in the 1620’s, than the Ptolemaic. But even the Tychonic version had trouble explaining the annual variation in sunspot tracks. Longomontanus then moved to a modified Tychonic which allowed for Earthly rotation but not revolution (although this still required annual precession of the solar axis).
But with each departure from Ptolemaic geocentrism, some of the “advantages” were lost. Already in moving to the Tychonic the “millennia of scholarly tradition” to which you refer were weakened, and in allowing for rotation many of the arguments against terrestrial motion were lost. Even in the 1620’s, there were compelling arguments both ways.
Bumping this thread, instead of making a fresh one. Did the Church have any opinion on heliocentric models? I always thought they were agnostics to the idea, and their issue with Galileo was his attitude rather than teachings.
Opposition to Galileo did not derive solely from the simple question of which of the Earth and Sun orbits the other (after all, we might now think of this as just picking an arbitrary frame of reference).
Instead the problem was the whole philosophic outlook of Galileo (and his predecessor Giordano Bruno who was burned for heresy).
In the new thinking of the Age of Science which Galileo introduced, the Earth was just one of many worlds, some of which might also have life. The heavens were not subject to the Will of God, but observed the same physical laws man could observe on Earth. It was the whole basis of science, and not just a small matter of orbits, that was anathema to the Church.
Read my earlier post. Back in the late 70’s or early 80’s, some fellow who was given access to the Vatican archives wrote an article about Galileo’s trial.
Essentially, Galileo promoted the heliocentric model at about the time the church was in the midst of a dispute over heresy with some other group. Zuniga suggested that the church’s interpretation of scripture was wrong, and promoted a numerological philosophy; buried in that was a Greek notion that the sun was the center and the earth went around it.
This wasn’t a trial some “flat earth” type of medieval ignorance. If a noted scientist said that science also suggested that the earth went around the sun, then he gave the heresy a boost at just the wrong time. The pope just wanted Galileo to STFU.
It was standard practice, part of the procedure, sort of. As a first attempt to get an accused to admit to whatever he was charged for without actually resorting to torture.
For instance, I visited the other day a tower in Rouen and it was mentioned that it was there that she was presented with the instruments of torture during her trial. And, like Galileo, she wasn’t actually tortured.
Doesn’t answer the question of what was actually asked from Galileo, though.