400 Years Ago, Galileo Discovered Four Jovian Moons

krswan writes "OK, the moons themselves are much older, but on January 7, 1610 Galileo first observed '4 fixed stars' surrounding Jupiter. Observations of their changing positions led Galileo to postulate they were really moons orbiting Jupiter, which became further evidence against Aristotelian Cosmology, which led to problems with the Roman Catholic Church, etc... Jupiter will be low in the southwest (in the Northern Hemisphere) after sunset this evening — nothing else around it is as bright, so you can't miss it. Celebrate by pointing binoculars or a telescope at Jupiter and checking out the moons for yourself."

Comments

Re:I missed something

[MaXintosh]

400 years since the observation by an eminent scientist, who then turned that observation into a revolution of astronomy? The life and times of Galileo? The rise of Heliocentrism?
You know. Stuff that they said in the slashdot article?

Well, to be fair...

[FooAtWFU]

which became further evidence against Aristotelian Cosmology, which led to problems with the Roman Catholic Church

To be fair, he also came up with this crazy-wrong idea about how the earth's motion was responsible for the tides. Also, making fun of any 17th-century Italian nobleman (Pope or otherwise) by naming a character in your book "Simpleton" (Simplicio) and strongly implying that you based it off of him.... after he's trying to give you a chance and says "write it up, try to fairly represent both points of view, okay?" ... Well, that's the just sort of social/political ineptitude that's going to get you into serious trouble. (Think of that next time you stumble into office politics.)

Re:Well, to be fair...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

To be fair to the pope, Galileo was a bit of a prick.

To be fair to everybody who isn't a medieval reactionary, the pope used state power against Galileo just because of an argument they were having.


That's the thing. It isn't that the pope is the villain of the piece because he opposed a specific idea, it is that the pope is the villain of the piece because he stands for everyone who is willing to meet criticism with force, which is ultimately far more important than being on the wrong side of a single scientific dispute. Had Galileo been a crackpot, with some absurd turtle-based cosmology, the pope would still have been the villain(though Galileo would have been the comic relief, rather than the hero).

Even a cursory glance at the history of science suggests that, at any given time, most people(laymen or scientists) are wrong about enormous amounts of stuff and, where they are right, it is mostly because somebody else figured it out for them. Being on the wrong side of a scientific debate is not a character flaw or a sin. Using force instead of reason is both.

Re:Well, to be fair...

[Anonymous Coward]

That page is squirming around facts: Church was not ready for any real debate (how the fuck can you discuss if you can't express your opinion), used force to silence scientists, banned publication of scientific works.

Whether or not better scientific rigour or better political skill could have saved Galileo from his fate does not really add much nuance to the issue. The church was pro-science when it suited them and against science when it was even slightly inconvenient.

I notice you didn't really mention what common belief about Galileo is wrong...

Re:I missed something

[Chris Burke]

In the event that you are or ever become married, you'll probably want to rethink your position regarding anniversaries.

A little ignorance never hurt anyone, eh?

[gillbates]

further evidence against Aristotelian Cosmology, which led to problems with the Roman Catholic Church, etc...

I know that people who repeat such things are only showing their ignorance (heck, even Wikipedia explains the controversy better), but I feel this lie gets repeated often enough that it should be addressed.

According to Wikipedia:

In its opening passage, Galileo and Guiducci's Discourse gratuitously insulted the Jesuit Christopher Scheiner,[56] and various uncomplimentary remarks about the professors of the Collegio Romano were scattered throughout the work.[57] The Jesuits were offended,[58] and Grassi soon replied with a polemical tract of his own, The Astronomical and Philosophical Balance ,[59] under the pseudonym Lothario Sarsio Sigensano,[60] purporting to be one of his own pupils.

And later:

Pope Urban VIII personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book,

Indeed, it was Galileo's political antagonism, not his ideas, that got him trouble. Imagine that.

There is a very simple question one can ask to determine if a someone is genuinely objective and dispassionate in their search for the truth:

• Does the Church suppress science?

The manner in which this question is answered is often quite revealing:

1. Someone with no critical thinking skills, nor ability to understand anything but absolutes, will almost invariably mention Galileo and blame the Church for suppressing science and free thought. The irony, of course, is that it's a moot point: it hardly matters if free thought is suppressed when the speaker goes to considerable lengths to avoid doing so. Even though he may publicly laud free inquiry and study, he simply dismisses any source which disagrees with his predisposed notions of the world.
2. Someone who answers that "there's no proof" that Galileo is correct is probably heading off on a tangent which will end in a discussion about evolution. Again, probably not a very insightful individual, but at least his own views are consistent with his internal model of the world.
3. Someone who explains that while the Church did create the university system; and continues to fund science to this day; while also allowing that at times in the past it has been used for political ends is probably someone with a very educated opinion. He's demonstrated the ability to deal with concepts in varying degrees, and to understand the difference between a *political* objection, and a doctrinal one.

In much the same way that there exist Creationists who refuse to accept any evidence contrary to their opinion, even to the point of committing logical fallacies, there exist individuals who really don't read history, and just blindly accept whatever they've been told. Worse, they often repeat things which are provably false, which - aside from the damage done to the Church - call into question their ability to think rationally and perform rigorous analysis.

The Galileo fiasco - that is, the belief that the Church is somehow anti-science because of what happened to Galileo - is an interesting teaching moment. The outworn argument against Creationists, Flat-Earthers, Global-Warming deniers, etc... has always been that science is objective, dispassionate. And yet, in the Galileo fiasco, you have people who in matters of science are otherwise logical and objective, repeating something they know (or should know) is false.

Interesting.

It seems the failings of human nature apply to everyone, after all.

Re:A little ignorance never hurt anyone, eh?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I've read extensively on the Galileo incident and I see no reason to change the the long accepted wisdom that it is a classic case of conflict between religious dogma and authority against scientific investigation..

I have however encountered quite a large number of people who have been persuaded by recent post-modernist type logic that in fact no; it was perfect alright and indeed correct for the church to threaten to burn Galileo alive because either/or
1) He was rude,
2) His finding would overturn centuries of dogma
3) Galileo's concrete observations were not good enough because he lacked the mathematics to describe them

Needless to say, I find such arguments unconvincing.

The Catholic church suppressed science. They threatened to kill Galileo and forced him to retract his theories. People often forget that last part. Galileo went to his grave holding that the Sun went around the Earth. You don't believe me? There's an official confession signed by him to that effect? You think he privately though otherwise? Tough; that confession is the end of the story. The church got what it wanted. Galileo and his works were suppressed.

I don't know exactly where this new apologia for the churches behaviour in the Galileo affair comes from, but I suspect it has more to do with US Culture Wars than actual critical thinking. Ironic, as for years the Galileo affair was a classic incident that Protestants held as demonstrating the abusive and backward position of the Catholic church. It's unfortunate that the relevant Wikipedia pages have been dragged into such revisionism, and in so doing have given it far more credit than it deserves. That's just another problem with Wikipedia and its monopoly on knowledge and viewpoints, but I'll leave that rant for another day.

Re:A little ignorance never hurt anyone, eh?

[gillbates]

The main problem I have with seeing it as a conflict between religious dogma and scientific investigation is that the Church waited almost a full century before acting, and when it did, it seemed almost reluctant. During the same time period, a person could be hanged for denying the Holy Trinity.

1. Copernicus had proposed a heliocentric system almost a century before Galileo, and yet suffered no persecution by the Church because of it. Even Luther commented that his ideas were revolutionary.
2. Tycho Brahe had been cataloging astronomical observations for decades, and it was upon this data that Galileo relied. If the Church disagreed with the heliocentric model as much as we are led to believe, why didn't the Church also persecute Brahe or ban his works?
3. Why is Galileo credited primarily with the heliocentric model, when Copernicus first put forth the mathematical model and Brahe collected the observations necessary to support it? Could it be because he was prosecuted for heresy, and *someone* wants to paint the Church as anti-science?

In light of the above, it is much more plausible that Galileo's persecution was political, rather than religious. The Pope at first indicated a willingness to be open minded regarding the issue; at least one Cardinal was likewise open minded, but not convinced. However, Galileo spurned the Pope, and it seems his political rivals finally found - in an otherwise minor doctrine - a noose in which to hang Galileo. Except that the Church seemed almost reluctant to prosecute; in a time when heretics were hanged, he got away with house arrest. And the Pope made him look like a fool, in much the same way Galileo had treated him in his book.

history

[TheSHAD0W]

OK, the moons themselves are much older...

Oh really? How do you know? Until they were observed, they might have been indeterminate. Paging Schrodinger!

Re:I missed something

[CheshireCatCO]

How is Halley's comet more significant than the discovery of the first moons in our solar system, apart from our own? (Long thought to be a "planet", not a moon in the modern sense.) With a stroke, Galileo established that other planets could have systems around them, not just Earth. Given that conventional views were that Earth was the center of all heavenly motions, that was pretty major.

Re:The church isn't a bunch of biblical literalist

[Anonymous Coward]

Good points since the Catholic Church is often criticized for not adhering to the Sola Scriptura philosophy. But the Bible in Latin a problem? What was the language of science/education at the time? Copernicus was the latinazation of Kopernek, a Polish sir name. Most educated people at the time conversed and corresponded in Latin and were perfectly capable of reading and understanding a Latin Bible. The rest of the populace were, by and large, illiterate at the time and printing books was still expensive.

Incidentally, we eat fish on Fridays because Fridays are a day of penance. In the U.S., the bishops chose to remove the abstinence from meat on Fridays but Catholics are still expected to perform some sort of penance on Fridays (and with what's happened lately, there's a lot of penance that needs to be done).

Finally, I have to mention a hero of mine. Father Gregor "Father of Genetics" Mendel, an Augustine priest who's study of plant inheritance spawned the science of genetics. The Church never condemned his findings, however, one can see how the simplest desire to understand nature can lead to pure evil. The discovery of genetics allowed us to to create that most evil movement called eugenics. So even the best science can go bad when in the wrong hands.

there's a reason for that

[misanthrope101]

"Wow, somebody else is pointing out other things that got left out when people talk about the Saint of Science."

The issue isn't that Galileo was a saint, but that he had to recant under threat of torture. He's become a symbol of a time when religious powers told people what they could say, under threat of torture, prison, or death. When people exaggerate how great Galileo really was, what they're really saying is that they're thankful that part of history is behind us. Whether you love James Dobson or cringe at his name, I don't know anyone who would want to empower him with the authority to have someone tortured and killed because they published a scientific paper, right or wrong, that went against his religious views. We should all be thankful that our culture has moved beyond that.

Re:Cue the wrath of amazing atheists

[koiransuklaa]

organised religion has, over the millennia, worked with science and technology rather than against it

You make the mistake of assuming they can't do both. As any power that was larger than it should have been, the church logically rooted for science when it suited them and silenced scientists when they were inconvenient.

The once silent minority polarised viewpoints of strong atheism and literal, reason-rejecting interpretation of religious texts have become so loud! What happened to the healthy scientific scepticism of yore, where doubt and questioning rather than certainty and dogma was the foundation of knowledge?

The scientific method is now stronger than ever, IMO. In Ye Olde Days only a select few could write their ideas on paper so it may seem like idiocy is on the rise, but I'm ready to bet that's not true -- there are quite certainly more scientists-by-heart alive now than ever before. I think you may be looking at history with rose-tinted glasses.

And the GP was a troll: as mdwh2 said his straw men arguments are so far fetched that there's just nothing to discuss.