1633: Galileo bucks government spin, lands in jail

It was on this day in 1633 that Galileo Galilei (books by this author) was put on trial by the Inquisition, for supporting the theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. He had angered Pope Urban VIII with a book about his views. The case was referred to the Inquisition and in 1633 Galileo was brought to Rome to undergo his trial. His book was officially banned by the Church, and Galileo was sentenced to an unlimited period of house arrest in his home in Florence. He gradually went blind and died in 1642.

In 1835, Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was finally taken off the Vatican's list of banned books. But it wasn't until 1992 that the Catholic Church formally admitted that Galileo was right.

One of the most common cultural mythologies in the history of science is that the Vatican said that Galileo was wrong, in his support of a solar-centric (vs. terra-centric) model.

There are letters showing that the Vatican was, instead, exercising spin control.  Still rather mired in medieval cultural time scales, disseminating (propaganda comes from the same root as propagating seedlings) new ideas through the culture was something that the Church reserved for itself, when the new information could be seen to challenge Church teachings.  Especially during the counter-reformation, they had been taking a beating for years.  One more controversy among the common people would be too many.

So they traded a controversy among the people for a controversy among intellectuals -- traditionally governements have considered this a lower price to pay.

Although the Vatican didn't disagree with Galileo's findings (which had already been promoted through the intelligentsia in the 1500's, with the retranslation of any number of astronomy classics from Arabic), they did object to his lack of diplomacy in his book, and also in the way that he tried to forward a reconciliation with scripture for heliocentrism.

Today, Galileo is promoted as being a martyr of science.  Although the Church was not exactly with the angels in this case, neither is it true that they were scientifically dense.  They were guilty of trying to preserve "spin" in the culture.  Galileo was guilty of being a typical geek who couldn't deal with authority.

Galileo lost, but I doubt he'd be remembered at all as a pioneer of science if he hadn't, as an unintended consequence, become a symbol of church repression of information in the rise of scientific cultures independent of the Church -- a culture still fledgeling since the first higher education for non-priests had be pioneered by the deMedici in Florence in the early 1500's.

Gallileo's information was no more empirically verifiable at the time than opposing viewpoints, even with his telescope.  His theories about the sun being at the center of the solar system were not novel in the West and had be current again for nearly 150 years among intellectuals (although not as popular, since many social institutions, astrology among them, were built on the terracentric model).

Galileo was engaged in a controversy similar to that between quantum and traditional physics in the 1920's and 1930's.  Einstein, as the closest to "infallable authority" among the traditionalists, merely intoned that "God does not play dice with the universe" -- and by strength of his reputation discredited a whole school of innovation in his field to some.  Many physicists read, understood, yet would not accept quantum theory.  They claimed that it was just a theory made to fit the facts, as opposed to a "true" theory. 

The only difference was that no one went to jail, but there were physicists losing their jobs and marring their careers by adhering to the quantum camp for quite a while.

Today, if we searched hard enough, we would probably find the most of these fights going on in the biological sciences.  The Galileos of the present day may only be recognized in the history books, as was the case with Galileo himself.