Galileo's Battle for the Heavens

One common boilerplate for presenting Galileo Galilei's biography is that of the heroic free thinker battling a dogmatic and reactionary church. This clash is presented as just part of a repeating pattern. Church scientists do not come up with important advances in science, they resist them. In this boilerplate Johannes Kepler never existed. The church and especially the Jesuits are portrayed as monolithic and conspiratorial. For good measure, the fate of Giordano Bruno is raised repeatedly and the spectre of torture by the inquisition is painted as one of the possible fates for Galileo. The focus remains clearly on conflict. Galileo's many friendships throughout his life with senior members of the Catholic church (including his inquisitors) are either not mentioned or briefly mentioned in passing. One of many examples that use this boilerplate is the NOVA documentary "Galileo's Battle for the Heavens" [_1_] .

The NOVA documentary first aired in 2002 and won an Emmy award as best documentary for that year. The program also follows the formula for a good soundbite (see The Galileo Soundbite). The narrator's opening passage foreshadows the theme that would be developed throughout the rest of the program:

It was a time of discord in the Christian world. Threatened by the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church demanded strict adherence to its dogma, enforced by the violent threat of Inquisition. Fear of heresy was in the air. In this turbulent era, Galileo Galilei would become Europe's most celebrated scientist.

The documentary, like many Galileo biographies, presents Galileo's problems as just part of the "the recurring clash between religion and science". In the program, Giordano Bruno, a philosopher who did not contribute a single advance in either theory or practice to the scientific knowledge of the day, was mentioned 7 times. Johannes Kepler, whose scientific achievements were almost as important as Galileo's, was never mentioned. This in spite of the fact that Kepler had publicly declared his support of the Copernican model before Galileo. Discussing Kepler would not have contributed to the story structure because he had been aided throughout his career by various Catholic clergy. Neither would discussing the critical role the Jesuits played in the early development of the telescope (see Jesuits and the Telescope). The persistent efforts taken by the church to make certain Copernicus published his work were never discussed. The most important and valid scientific challenges to the Copernican model were also never mentioned. The documentary, like any modern soundbite, reported events as they fit into a chosen story structure.

The soundbite approach even applied to the program's discussion of Galileo's scientific achievements. In the 1630's Galileo had devised a brilliant experiment to prove the law of free fall. Because the means for measuring time in the 1600's were so crude, actually measuring the time of fall from any height was not an option. Galileo knew that the motion of a ball rolling down an inclined plane would obey the same rules as a ball in free fall. This was important because the speed of a ball rolling down an inclined plane could be measured using the crude clocks of the time whereas a ball in free fall could not. He was thus able to prove the law of free fall. He had proven a law that had been taught in Jesuit schools across Europe for over a half century, and one that Galileo had accepted as true for 30 years. A Roman Catholic priest, Domingo deSoto had actually described the correct law of free fall in a textbook published 75 years before Galileo's famous experiment. The textbook had gone through 8 printings before Galileo finished university in Pisa. The program oversimplified Galileo's inclined plane experiment by repeating an old myth that Galileo had 'discovered by experiment' the law of free fall. There was no mention in the program of any preceding work. The accompanying website also leaves the impression that the world had to wait for Galileo to perform simple experiments like dropping balls off a tower. There had been considerable experimentation on this before Galileo, including that by Galileo's immediate predecessor at the University of Padua, Guiseppe Moletti (see Classical Mechanics Timeline).

By the end of "Galileo's Battle for the Heaven's" there were no loose ends that could challenge a viewer. "Galileo's Battle for the Heavens" had been a battle with the Church. As with any good soundbite, there was closure. If one looks at what Galileo soundbites leave out, however, we are left with many questions.

Galileo had encountered much resistance to his ideas and arguments throughout his life. This was true even when he was considered a protege of both the Pope and the Jesuits. Surely, some of the resistance was dogmatic, as the Galileo soundbites suggest. But there were other reasons that may have played as important a role. Galileo soundbites ignore these reasons.

Why might scientists encounter resistance to their ideas? One reason might be that the scientist is either demonstrably wrong or hasn't proven his case sufficiently. There were glitches in the Copernican models of Copernicus and Galileo that are ignored in Galileo soundbites. A moving earth demanded that a phenomenon known as stellar parallax would be observed. This was not to be observed until almost 100 years after Galileo's death (see Stellar Parallax). In Galileo's Copernican model, the planets circle the sun in perfectly circular orbits. Partially as a result of this incorrect assumption, Galileo's model of planetary motion could not be shown to be any better in predicting planetary positions than the model it was supposed to replace. It is now known through the use of modern statistical techniques and computers that the Copernican model was actually worse in this regard than the Ptolemaic model.

Galileo probably would have encountered resistance to his ideas from the scientific community even if the church was not involved and he was more diplomatic in how he presented his arguments (which although compelling were not as conclusive as he believed). That is because he was arguing for a highly disruptive hypothesis. Even as a hypothesis, it was an immense challenge to the status quo of the time. Contrary to what is commonly believed, scientific communities (and other academic communities) will often resist disruptive ideas (also known as paradigm shifts). In modern times we have the example of Alfred Wegener and his Continental Drift theory. He was viciously attacked from established scientists in several different fields although he presented the concept only as a hypothesis. His critics were able to shut down discussion of the hypothesis for decades (see Wegener and Galileo). Wegener is only one of many scientists who have experienced aggressive resistance to ideas that challenged the status quo. In the field of history of science, Pierre Duhem's historical work was censored for decades when he challenged the prevailing belief that there was no significant scientific progress in the middle ages (see Duhem and the DaVinci Code).

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