The Solar System

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 Craters and mountains on the moon

 Moons of Jupiter

 Phases of Venus

 The Milky Way consists of innumerable stars.

 Sunspots move across the sun’s face.

All of these favored the Copernican (heliocentric) model.

Slide 15

Galileo’s sketch of the moon as seen from his telescope

A photograph of the moon

“What do you think of the foremost philosophers of this university? In spite of my oft repeated efforts and invitations, they have refused, with the obstinacy of a glutted adder, to look at the planets or Moon or my telescope.” (letter to Kepler)

Slide 16

Galileo made many specific discoveries in astronomy, through observations by telescope.

The general implications…

● The planets are objects like the Earth – masses – rather than some kind of special heavenly objects. Or, to put it another way, the Earth is just another planet.

● The planets, including Earth, travel around the sun.

● The Universe is a lot bigger than we can see by the naked eye.

These ideas could be dangerous.

Slide 17

The Trial of Galileo

His Church decided that the heliocentric model was a heresy.

But Galileo continued to argue in favor of the theory, and published his reasoning. The Inquisition in Rome accused him of heresy, and required him to answer.

Found guilty of “suspicion of heresy,” Galileo recanted publicly. [A story, probably not true, is that he muttered “Eppur si muove” – “And yet, it does move.”]

He was put under arrest and sentenced to prison. But because of his fame and age (70 years old at that time) he was allowed to serve under house arrest in Florence, for the remaining years of his life.

Slide 18

Is there a conflict between Science and Religion?

There is no major conflict today, but there have been conflicts in the past, e.g. the trial of Galileo. Another example is the conflict between Darwin’s theory of evolution and the literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis ().

 That latter conflict survives today in the controversy about teaching Creationism in public schools.

Pope John Paul II ordered a review of the trial of Galileo. Did the Inquisition make mistakes?

Slide 19

Their work was finished in 1992.

On October 31st, Cardinal Poupard delivered the final report during a papal audience. The fifth paragraph reads:

“Certain theologians, Galileo’s contemporaries, being heirs of a unitary concept of the world universally accepted until the dawn of the seventeenth century, failed to grasp the profound, non-literal meaning of the Scriptures when they described the physical structure of the created universe. This led them unduly to transpose a question of factual observation into the realm of faith.