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Statue of Galileo Planned for Vatican
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Mar 05, 2008 06:34 AM
from the isn't-it-ironic dept.
from the isn't-it-ironic dept.
Reservoir Hill writes "Four hundred years after it put Galileo on trial for heresy the Vatican is to complete its rehabilitation of the scientist by erecting a statue of him inside Vatican walls. The planned statue is to stand in the Vatican gardens near the apartment in which Galileo was incarcerated. He was held there while awaiting trial in 1633 for advocating heliocentrism, the Copernican doctrine that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The move coincides with a series of celebrations in the run-up to next year's 400th anniversary of Galileo's development of the telescope. In January Pope Benedict XVI called off a visit to Sapienza University, Rome, after staff and students accused him of defending the Inquisition's condemnation of Galileo. The Vatican said that the Pope had been misquoted and since the episode, several of the professors have retracted their protest."
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cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:cool (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:cool (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:cool (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:cool (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Galileo is not being rehabilitated (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:cool (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
True. I had an electrical engineering professor try to argue Creationism with me. He couldn't quite grasp that having a Ph.D. in EE did not magically give him expertise in Evolutionary Biology and Cosmology. His arguments (same old rehashed ones you can find at the Di
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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I think you'll find a lot of Christians out there who are perfectly at home with evolution and other scientific thought because they're
Re:cool (Score:5, Funny)
You must be new here. Everyone who ever posts on
There, I said it. Now do me!
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Re:cool (Score:5, Interesting)
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They've got to be kidding (Score:3, Insightful)
They could also get rid of child molesters and stop paying (lots of) money to keep things under wraps, which obviously is not the best way to solve the problem.
These kind of news really pisses me off. A statue to Galileo 400 years late? WTF?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Like the papacy?
-jcr
Re:They've got to be kidding (Score:5, Funny)
That should pretty much even things out for you.
Parent
Re:They've got to be kidding (Score:5, Informative)
According to the New York Times - June 12, 1988, there were 135 cases of sexual molestation by priests were reported from 1983 to 1986.
Time frames are different, but in one city there were more reported child molestations in the public schools than in the catholic church nationwide.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They could also get rid of child molesters and stop paying (lots of) money to keep things under wraps, which obviously is not the best way to solve the problem.
Maybe not, but what are they supposed to do? Publicly admit their Holy Men to be as sin-full as everybody else, sometimes even more so?
That would have a pretty high chance of causing/accelerating their downfall, and such an organization of course has some interest in selfpreservation.
I'm not convinced their downfall is a good thing either, as I prefer Christianity/Catholisim over Islamism as the leading world religion. A lot.
Re:They've got to be kidding (Score:5, Informative)
Whether or not that's something to fix or apologize for... up to you. I'd think of it as more of an anniversary story (400 is a big one) rather than an "apology" story.
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It's even funnier than that (Score:5, Informative)
Well, as you correctly note: the Pope was actually a friend of Galileo's originally and was actually a pretty open minded guy. He actually listened to Galileo, and although he wasn't convinced about this radical departure from all existing science, actually encouraged him to write about it. All the pope did ask for, was that Galileo presents both points of view fairly -- his _and_ the Aristotelian one -- and, basically, explains exactly what his own system explains better than the old one. Which is IMHO very much in line even with the modern scientific method.
Galileo, however, reacted like your average run-of-the-mill self-righteous nerd. He was incensed that the pope didn't immediately see that he's right. The book he wrote, yes, presented both points of view. However the old system was distorted and ridiculed. But the real faux pas was: he distorted the Pope's words and put them in the mouth of a character called Simplicius. I.e., pretty much "The Stupid". This character was furthermore portrayed as, basically, a stupid simpleton who couldn't grasp even elementary logic, and got repeatedly caught up in his own errors. That was the defender of the Aristotelian view in Galileo's book. (Which incidentally also presented the Pope as the zealot of a dogma where he was actually very much neutral.)
In a nutshell, Galileo thoroughly flamed the Pope. In public. In some of the most annoying ways possible. If someone did that on Slashdot, he'd end up at -5 Flamebait in 5 minutes flat.
What followed, well, basically had nothing to do with science-vs-religion. It's at most a case of why totalitarian power is bad. The Pope was an absolute monarch in Rome, and Galileo flamed him on his own turf. People ended up with their head on a spike for _much_ lesser offenses towards secular kings just as well. By contrast, Galileo ended up only with house arrest.
The accusation of heresy was mostly just a heavy-handed abuse of the law, to make it fall under the Pope's own tribunals' jurisdiction. (Things which weren't of a religious nature, otherwise fell under the jurisdiction of the secular authorities.) But make no mistake, it wasn't about science _or_ heresy. It was simply that the Pope didn't take lightly to heavy-handed public ridicule.
And if I'm to be a supporter of science in the whole science-vs-religion circus, I'd actually say the opposite: Galileo there actually did science a disservice. He created a conflict with the church where one hadn't existed before. The pope (and popes) before couldn't care less what rotates around what. The pope only became opposed to heliocentrism all of a sudden, so he could prosecute Galileo for the thorough public flaming. The whole incident _created_ an official position and a precedent, where one didn't have to exist, and turned the church from a potential supporter of the whole thing to an (at least implied) enemy.
So, yeah, I propose Galileo for sanctification. It's about time we too had our patron saint
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Mod parent down for historical revisionism (Score:4, Informative)
Papal Condemnation (Sentence) of Galileo, June 22, 1633 (translated from the Latin), in Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo, University of Chicago Press, 1955, pp. 306-10.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It ain't perfect, ain't ever gonna be, was never and won't happen. It's chocked-full of bad history, yet it's done tons of good. Calvin put it best (not "and Hobbs" dude), "The church spans all time from the first man until now, has no walls, canno
Re:The church IS a dictatorship (Score:5, Interesting)
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Because that's one of the things that dictators do. Including the Roman Catholic Church who burned people at the stake for heresy.
I'm a little bothered (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm a little bothered (Score:5, Insightful)
He was a personal friend of the then Pope, and got prosecuted not because he divulged Heliocentrism itself. Other Heliocentrists at the time didn't have any problem with the Church, and in fact some of them were funded by the Church itself. He was prosecuted:
a) Because he insisted that all the details of his theory, such as that, despite Kepler, whose works he read but dismissed, planetary orbits are perfectly circular since circles are "perfect" and ellipses aren't, were absolute certainties, even though he couldn't prove any of them (the first actual proof of any version of Heliocentrism appeared only in the 19th century, 200+ years after Galileo's time);
b) Because he thought that everyone should accept his hypothesis just because, no matter the lack of proofs;
c) And because he did make the point clear by adding a character to his book, named "Simpleton", who "defended" Geocentrism by mocking actual speeches of his friend the Pope, what Galileo cluelessly hoped he would find funny, not offensive. Obviously, it didn't happen.
Considering that at the time people were tortured and burned for doing much less, being held in his own house was a very soft punishment. The Church really wasn't harsh on him. It's only by comparing what Galileo was subjected to with 20th century style freedom of speech that one finds it "evil". But comparing it to what was the standard practices in the 17th century puts things in a very different light.
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Citation needed! (Score:5, Informative)
Galileo basically disproved Aristotelianism - the belief that the Universe was made of 5 elements, that 4 of them comprised the corruptible lower Universe, and that the perfect outer Universe was made of the 5th element. He did this experimentally by pointing a telescope at the supposedly perfect bodies and showing that they had surface features.
He also identified the orbits of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, thus demonstrating that, in the Universe, small bodies could orbit round a large one. He showed that a system of satellites was not unique.
He also did valuable early work in dynamics - the cannon ball story is long exploded - by building precise apparatus and timing systems for measuring the movement of balls rolling down slopes. It was not his fault that he did not know that gravitational potential energy was partly converted into rotational kinetic energy as well as translational energy, or that, in the absence of a definition of velocity, he did not get the formulae of motion into their modern forms. It is also not his fault that he got frustrated because the reaction of the people who he tried to demonstrate his evidence to was, in effect, to stick their hands over their ears and scream "can't hear you". It is also not his fault that Kepler was addicted to mystical ideas (such as that the orbits of the planets fit inside a nesting of the Platonic solids), and lacked a modern marthematical framework, which, at the time, greatly obscured the value of what he was doing.
As for suggesting that Galileo would "cluelessly" hope the Pope would find Simpleton funny, anybody who knows anything about Italian society at that era would know that to be nonsense. This was a society in which men fought to the death over perceived insults. My guess is that Galileo hoped the Pope would see arguments he supported being made by an idiot, and decide to forget about them quietly.
However, the Inquisition and its mates had far too much invested in Aristotle (and not being made to look ridiculous) and the rest is history.
Revisiting this before posting I am tempted to add that there is a great deal of misunderstanding of people like Newton, Galileo and Kepler due to anachronism. They did not live in a modern society, they did not have access to modern mathematics, instruments and communications. You cannot write about them without researching their background. But, believe me, if you do it is endlessly fascinating and there is much to learn for our own time. There is a huge amount of published material, in fact these were guys who could write their own books. They are worth reading. Both the Dialogue (Galileo) and at least part of the Principia (Newton) should be on every nerd's reading list, if only because it cures you of the idea that everything exciting in science happened since 1940.
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Re:Citation needed! (Score:4, Informative)
As for Galileo's inquisitor, Saint Bellarmine, if you read him you'll see he saying it didn't matter whether Geocentrism or Heliocentrism was the correct explanation, as both were compatible with the Church's teaching and as far as the faith is concerned it doesn't matter either way. The whole issue really was of a different nature, and Aristotle plays almost no role there.
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Evil is as evil does. Just because it was acceptable treatment back then doesn't mean it was ok. Today
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No, not really. Tycho Brahe was of the opinion that the Earth was fixed in the middle, the Sun and the Moon rotated around the Earth as its two satellites, and the other planets rotated around the Sun as its satellites. Thus, a Geocentrist might as well take Jupiter's moons as good evidence for Brahe's system, since
Re:I'm a little bothered (Score:4, Informative)
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i want a giordano bruno statue (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Giordano_Bruno/ [wikipedia.org]
Thunderbolt and lightning! Very very frightening! (Score:5, Funny)
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The Museum of History of Science (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly for Giordano Bruno, he didn't have Galileo's powerful protectors and was a bit too all-out mystical. Roger Bacon just got locked up for years for suggesting that Arab science should be adopted to ease the work of the poor - can't have peasants having free time to think about things. However, the Church at least has a history of adopting ideas once they've been safely mainstream for a few hundred years. Some of the Protestant sects seem intent on actually going backwards, hence the drive towards Bible literalism (which wouldn't have been understood by most of the early Church fathers, but is a peculiar product of 19th century Protestantism separated by an ocean from its roots.)
The other side of this (Pope) Urban legend? (Score:5, Informative)
Read here:
http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/scheiner.html [rice.edu]
Also read this excerpt from Columbia Humanities Professor Robert Nisbet:
http://www.bible-researcher.com/nisbet1.html [bible-researcher.com]
My my (Score:4, Funny)
Breath of fresh air... (Score:5, Interesting)
Though I'm not Catholic (atheist), I respect the Vatican for trying to understand how science merge with their faith, instead of bending science to their faith. Considering the horror stories that I see and hear about creationist faith (cringe!), this is a breath of fresh air!
My $0.02 CAD
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so... (Score:3, Funny)
my money is on the year 2578
In all the things to say about this.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, as a non-theist (I don't care for the term atheist as it implies hostility toward religious people), all I can do is respect these great men for their part in helping explain the universe.
Galileo would have been deeply honored (or so I believe), so I respect what the Church is doing here.
traditional greeting.... (Score:5, Funny)
Void Where Prohibited by Newton's Law (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully (Score:4, Funny)
Did anyone read Benedict's controversial remarks? (Score:4, Interesting)
I managed to find a translation -- the BBC pointed me in the right direction when the news story broke. The translation is pretty difficult reading, because it's full of flowery language and doesn't come right out and give you convenient bullet points. However, here were my take-aways from my reading of this document:
Of course, every time Pope Benedict opens his mouth to insert his foot, the Vatican handlers around him are certain to claim that his remarks were taken out of context. It's really hard to see how they can claim that with a straight face this time. I'm willing to acknowledge that the translations available are not perfect, but I can't believe they'd be so bad as to say the opposite of what the source material appears to be saying.
John Paul II is a tough act to follow.
Re:Vatican, Church.... (Score:5, Insightful)
And the universe in Animal Farm was fictional, and therefore had nothing of value to say.
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Maybe I am too sleepy to get the sarcasm.
An Addendum for the Wise (Score:3, Informative)
Spiced with polemic I see.
Science does not require politeness. In fact it is sometimes necessary to be considered rude, particularly when dealing with those whose positions or faiths are threatened by your work.
As to peer review, since the very concept was in its infancy, or had not yet emerged, it's hard to justify the accusation that Galileo did not subject himself to it. In fact, by publishing at all, I'd argue that he
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Provably false. The Heliocentric model was supported by data which had been gathered by Brahe as far back as 1580's. More to the point,