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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."
Galileo!
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Talk about a late slashdot story
Table-ized A.I.
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?
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.)
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"By Jove, another moon!"
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I'd ask you to turn in your geek card on the way out the door but I'm afraid you wouldn't be able to find it in your wallet with that level of reading comprehension.
... back in 1985, while underway on my ship in the U.S. Navy, middle of the Indian Ocean.
I was off watch, and went and visited a Signalman friend up above the wheel house. They had a set of huge binoculars, which they called "big eyes". The sky was crystal clear, you could clearly see the bands of the Milky Way across the sky. Found Jupiter and zoomed in as far as I could, and clearly saw some of the moons around it. It was a neat experience seeing them myself for the first time.
That's no moon!
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Didn't they use a different calendar 400 years ago?
They did indeed use a different calendar 400 years ago in some countries, but the Italian states (where Galileo did his observations) had already adopted the Gregorian calendar by then.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
A minor quibble with the summary above. On January 7, 1610, Galileo only recorded 3 "fixed stars" next to Jupiter. Two of the Galilean moons, Io and Europa, were too close together for Galileo to separate with his 20x power telescope. He continued to observe three moons at most, either because one or more moons were too close to Jupiter and were lost in the glare of the planet, Callisto was too far from Jupiter and was thus out of his telescope's field-of-view, or two of the moons were too close together, during subsequent nights, until January 13, when he was able to see all four for the first time.
Wikipedia is wrong on one point. True, his first observation of all four moon at once didn't come until January 13 and he didn't realize that there were four and not three until that time, but that doesn't mean that one moon's discovery (in Wikipedia's case, Ganymede) should be attributed to that date. By that point, he had observed all four on multiple occasions, just not all four at once. And to that point he hadn't even come to the conclusion that they were in orbit around Jupiter with their own separate orbits, moving a different speeds, until two days later, let alone ascribe identities to each of the stars he saw, connecting one star he saw with another from a different day, beyond the one to the east, the one to the west, and the one in the middle.
The Gish Bar Times - Blog covering Jupiter's moon Io
In the event that you are or ever become married, you'll probably want to rethink your position regarding anniversaries.
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Dude, they used a different calendar 1 year ago.
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:
The manner in which this question is answered is often quite revealing:
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.
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Heliocentrism was NEVER a problem for the Catholic Church, Copernicus never had a problem with that many years earlier. Galileo was the pope's cousin and constantly defied the pope on his writings, never touching heliocentrism, heliocentrism was just the way they used to get him some punishment.
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.
I can miss it, because I'm living in the middle of a snow storm. Insensitive clod, etc.
You live on Titan?
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Don't worry. It'll be duped in 100 years.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
OK, the moons themselves are much older...
Oh really? How do you know? Until they were observed, they might have been indeterminate. Paging Schrodinger!
Wow, somebody else is pointing out other things that got left out when people talk about the Saint of Science. On top of what you've added the church actually updated their position to the Tychonic model. (Where the Sun and Moon orbit the Earth and the planets orbit the Sun.) The big problem with the Earth going around the Sun is the stars should exibit parallax. There's a few explainations for this. One is the Earth moves but the stars are so far away that they couldn't measure it. The other is it's not actually there because the Earth doesn't move. Tycho's system had the Earth not moving which was a valid point of view given the evidence. (Of course in the 1800's they could finally see the parallax and they knew the Earth moved. Well actually they knew about it before then because Newtonian mechanics pretty much require the Earth to move but they didn't have that either when G was kicking around.) Anyway like you say, if you play around with politics at that time period it could work out badly. (Because that's how politics were at that time.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I mean be fair. It's annoying when people talk about the RCC as a bunch of biblical literalists. (One step above creationists.) As a Catholic I can tell you they're not, they're control freaks. That's what they like, to control information. Then let that information out slowly. I mean they kept the bible and masses in Latin for centuries. (It's kind of hard to interpret the bible for yourself if you don't understand the language it's written in.) Of course there's loads of stuff that they did over the centuries where it's kind of hard to figure out where in the bible it said that.(Like indulgences. I still haven't heard an explaination for why we're supposed to eat fish on Fridays that made any sense.) Hell, go to a Catholic mass for once. It's all "Stand, sit, stand, kneel." It's like the priest is a gym teacher putting the parishioners through calisthenics.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
When does it snow on Titan? Rain, yes. Lots of Rain, sure. A gentle drizzle from the stratosphere, why not? But, nope, no snow... not cold enough for methane or ethane to fall as snow on Titan, even at the winter pole.
The Gish Bar Times - Blog covering Jupiter's moon Io
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.
The Italian city-states of the time weren't terribly friendly to non-conformists, actually. Galileo got off lucky. Violation of sumptuary laws, i.e. wearing clothes that were above your station (there was a hierarchy of rankings, and only the Doge himself could wear Cloth-of-Gold), resulted in the offender being found the next morning buried upside down in a shallow pond, head deep, with their legs tied to a pole (sort of like a Hipgnosis album cover). A conformist society, that, but inventive in a way that wasn't to be matched until the development of formal defenestration by Russia in the 19th century. If you wanted security it helped to have patronage, though that required you to make moral compromises at times (such as DaVinci touring around Florence with Cesare Borgia, documenting plant poisons around 1510-ish). From all this, I suspect Galileo was taking a stand on more than scientific principles (or was dreadfully naiive, perhaps).
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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.
The Eastern bloc was more backward even then. Kepler has to return in a hurry to Regensberg at one point to defend his mother who was accused of witchcraft. Galileo on the other hand was a very important man, the top technical expert in Florence, the public face of the most advanced science of the day. He was the equivalent of Edison, Fermi, Einstein and Feynman rolled into one. Of course he thought he could push his views further than could much lesser academics. We need Galileos to stand up to be counted in a world where people can take a Sarah Palin seriously.
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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 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.