Given how polarizing a figure Galileo has become if you cut him out of the equation would Newton have gleaned enough cosmological knowledge from Kepler and others to have come up with his Principia?

In My Humble Opinion
6

In 1999, Time/Life Books released The Life Millennium: The 100 most important events and people of the past 1,000 years.

In their list, they ranked Galileo as being the #4 most influential person of the past 1k years, which I think is too high. But since these people put Edison as #1, a case can be made that the list makers were morons.

Anyway, if there isn’t a controversy, we can most assuredly make one: Galileo is extremely overrated, nothing more than a media creation of anti-Catholic, pro-Protestant interests which should not be trusted. “Oooh, look, he rolls balls down a ramp! Brilliant!” :stuck_out_tongue:

In our game of a decade ago, we put Galileo @ #56, a much more sane ranking: