The Crime of Galileo Galilei

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                                      T H E   C R I M E   O F   G A L I L E O   G A L I L E I





Papal Condemnation (Sentence) of Galileo
(June 22, 1633)



Whereas you, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, were in the year 1615 denounced to this Holy Office for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable and that the Earth moves, and also with a diurnal motion; for having disciples to whom you taught the same doctrine; for holding correspondence with certain mathematicians of Germany concerning the same; for having printed certain letters, entitled "On the Sunspots," wherein you developed the same doctrine as true; and for replying to the objections from the Holy Scriptures, which from time to time were urged against it, by glossing the said Scriptures according to your own meaning: and whereas there was thereupon produced the copy of a document in the form of a letter, purporting to be written by you to one formerly your disciple, and in this divers propositions are set forth, following the position of Copernicus, which are contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture:

This Holy Tribunal being therefore of intention to proceed against the disorder and mischief thence resulting, which went on increasing to the prejudice of the Holy Faith, by command of His Holiness and of the Most Eminent Lords Cardinals of this supreme and universal Inquisition, the two propositions of the stability of the Sun and the motion of the Earth were by the theological Qualifiers qualified as follows:

The proposition that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from its place is absurd and false philosophically and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scripture.

The proposition that the Earth is not the center of the world and immovable but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false philosophically and theologically considered at least erroneous in faith.

But whereas it was desired at that time to deal leniently with you, it was decreed at the Holy Congregation held before His Holiness on the twenty-fifth of February, 1616, that his Eminence the Lord Cardinal Bellarmine should order you to abandon altogether the said false doctrine and, in the event of your refusal, that an injunction should be imposed upon you by the Commissary of the Holy Office to give up the said doctrine and not to teach it to others, not to defend it, nor even to discuss it; and your failing your acquiescence in this injunction, that you should be imprisoned. In execution of this decree, on the following day at the palace of and in the presence of the Cardinal Bellarmine, after being gently admonished by the said Lord Cardinal, the command was enjoined upon you by the Father Commissary of the Holy Office of that time, before a notary and witnesses, that you were altogether to abandon the said false opinion and not in the future to hold or defend or teach it in any way whatsoever, neither verbally nor in writing; and upon your promising to obey, you were dismissed.


And in order that a doctrine so pernicious might be wholly rooted out and not insinuate itself further to the grave prejudice of Catholic truth, a decree was issued by the Holy Congregation of the Index prohibiting the books which treat of this doctrine and declaring the doctrine itself to be false and wholly contrary to the sacred and divine Scripture.

And whereas a book appeared here recently, printed last year at Florence, the title of which shows that you were the author, this title being: “Dialogue of Galileo Galilei on the Great World System:”; and whereas the Holy Congregation was afterward informed that through the publication of said book the false opinion of the motion of the Earth and the stability of the Sun was daily gaining round, the said book was taken into careful consideration, and in it there was discovered a patent violation of the aforesaid injunction that had been imposed upon you, for in this book you have defended the said opinion previously condemned and to your face declared to be so, although in the said book you strive by various devices to produce the impression that you leave it undecided, and in express terms as probably: which, however, is a most grievous error, as an opinion can in no wise be probable which has been declared and defined to be contrary to divine Scripture.

Therefore by our order you were cited before this Holy office, where, being examined upon our oath, you acknowledged the book to be written and published by you.  You confessed that you began to write the said book about ten or twelve years ago, after the command had been imposed upon you as above; that you requested license ot print it without, however, intimating to those who granted you this license that you had been commanded not to hold, defend, or teach the doctrine in question in any way whatever.

You likewise confessed that the writing of the said book is in many places drawn up in such a form that the reader might fancy that the arguments brought forward on the false side are calculated by their cogency to compel conviction rather than to be easy of refutation, excusing yourself for having fallen into an error, as you alleged, so foreign to your intention, by the fact that you had written in dialogue and by the natural complacency that every man feels in regard to his own subtleties and in showing himself more clever than the generality of men in devising, even on behalf of false propositions, ingenious and plausible arguments.

And a suitable term having been assigned to you to prepare your defense, you produced a certificate in the handwriting of his Eminence the Lord Cardinal Bellarmine, procured by you, as you asserted, in order to defend yourself against the calumnies of your enemies, who charged that you had abjured and had been punished by the Holy Office, in which certificate it is declared that you had not abjured and had not been punished but only that the declaration made by His Holiness and published by the Holy Congregation of the Index has been announced to you, wherein it is declared that the doctrine of the motion of the Earth and the stability of the Sun is contrary to the Holy Scriptures and therefore cannot be defended or held.  And, as in this certificate there is no mention of the two articles of the injunction, namely, the order not “to teach” and “in any way,” you represented that we ought to believe that in the course of fourteen or sixteen years you had lost all memory of them and that this was why you said nothing of the injunction when you requested permission to print your book.   And all this you urged not by way of excuse for your error but that it might be set down to a vainglorious ambitions rather than to malice.  But his certificate produced by you in your defense has only aggravated your delinquency, since, although it is there stated that said opinion is contrary to Holy Scripture, you have nevertheless dared to discuss and defend it and to argue its probability; nor does the license artfully and cunningly extorted by you avail you anything, since you did not notify the command imposed upon you.

And whereas it appeared to us that you had not stated the full truth with regard to your intention, we thought it necessary to subject you to a rigorous examination at which (without prejudice, however, to the matters confessed by you and set forth as above with regard to your said intention) you answered like a good Catholic.  Therefore, having seen and maturely considered the merits of this your cause, together with your confessions and excuses above-mentioned, and all that ought justly to be seen and considered, we have arrived at the underwritten final sentence against you:

Invoking, therefore, the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His most glorious Mother, ever Virgin Mary, but this our final sentence, which sitting in judgment, with the counsel and advice of the Reverend Masters of sacred theology and Doctors of both Laws, our assessors, we deliver in these writings, in the cause and causes at present before us between the Magnificent Carlo Sinceri, Doctor of both Laws, Proctor Fiscal of this Holy Office, of the one part, and your Galileo Galilei, the defendant, here present, examined, tried, and confessed as shown above, of the other part—

We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare that you, the said Galileo, by reason of the matters adduced in trial, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself in the judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely, of having believed and held the doctrine—which is false and contrary to the sacred and divine Scriptures—that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world; and that an opinion may be held and defended as probably after it has been declared and defined to be contrary to the Holy Scripture; and that consequently you have incurred all the censures and penalties imposed and promulgated in the sacred canons and other constitutions, general and particular, against such delinquents.  From which we are content that you be absolved, provided that, first, with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, you abjure, curse, and detest before use the aforesaid errors and heresies and every other error and heresy contrary to the Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church in the form to be prescribed by us for you.

And in  order that this your grave and pernicious error and transgression may not remain altogether unpunished and that you may be more cautious in the future and an example to others that they may abstain from similar delinquencies, we ordain that the book of the “Dialogues of Galileo Galilei” be prohibited by public edict.

We condemn you to the formal prison of this Holy office during our pleasure, and by way of salutary penance we enjoin that for three years to come you repeat once a week at the seven penitential Psalms. Reserving to ourselves liberty to moderate, commute or take off, in whole or in part, the aforesaid penalties and penance.

And so we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, ordain, and reserve in this an din any other better way and form which we can and may rightfully employ.


[Signed:]


     F. Cardinal of Ascoli
    B. Cardinal Gessi
   G. Cardinal Bentivoglio
  F. Cardinal Verospi
   Fr. D. Cardinal of Cremona
  M. Cardinal Ginetti
     Fr. Ant. s Cardinal of. S. Onofrio

[Three judges did not sign the sentence: Francesco Barberini, Caspar Borgia, and Laudivio Zacchia.]


Source:  Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (University of Chicago Press 1955), pp. 306-310.

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                                "EPPUR SI MUOVE" - ("And yet it does move")






Mumbling these words quietly to himself, or so the story goes, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) left the session of the Inquisition that had found him guilty after a trial for "grave suspicion of heresy".

The "heresy" was in connection with his publication of a book, "Dialogue on the Tides" in which his belief in the Copernican notion of a Sun centered universe had sort of "slipped in".

In Italy in 1633, suggesting that the earth, that rock solid center of God's universe actually moved around another body, the Sun, was not the wisest thing to do. In fact that idea could get you killed... or worse. Galileo got off easy since he was sentenced to life in prison which lucky for him, became permanent house arrest instead.

Oh, and in addition, he was commanded to never mention the idea again, his book was burned and the sentence against him was to be read publicly in every university.


"And yet it does move".

He may not actually have said it, in fact it would have been extremely dangerous for him to do that, but he no doubt thought it.

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So who was Galileo really and why was the church court so upset about his claims? He was born near Pisa, on February 15, 1564. Although he wasn't overly radical in his views he was inclined to 'march to his own drummer' a trait evidently inherited from his father Vincenzo Galilei. After an elementary education he entered the University of Pisa in 1581 to study medicine. He didn't graduate, however, and in 1585 he left the university having studied mostly philosophy and mathematics instead.

After university he pursued an interest he had developed in natural motions and the behavior of bodies of water. It was the latter that got him going on his book on tides but I'm getting ahead of myself. In spite of not having earned a degree, Galileo did manage to get a teaching post at his old alma mater in 1589 but by 1592 that career path came to an abrupt end because he had the audacity to challenge one of the fundamental teachings of an old Greek, named Aristotle.

Aristotle's beliefs and principles had achieved the status of divine writ in the Christian Church which was especially ironic since he lived and died over 300 years before the birth of Christ in pagan Greece.

How this came about is a subject for another piece but getting back to our story, Galileo was inclined to doubt at least one of his assertions namely that objects of different weights fall to earth at different rates of speed. He was interested in motion, remember.

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As I said before, he wasn't all that radical and except for the odd assertion contradicting Aristotle and by extension God himself, Galileo pretty much kept most of his ideas to himself. This allowed him to neatly slip into another teaching post this time at the University of Padua. This one lasted eighteen years until 1610. During this period he further developed his interest in math and physics doing more extensive work on falling bodies and the like.

One subject that he did not pursue especially was astronomy. In spite of this he became interested in the theories of a Polish astronomer by the name of Nikolaj Kopernik (1473-1543) who is better known by his Latin name, Nicholaus Copernicus. Kopernik came up with the notion that the traditional model which placed the Earth at the center of the universe, was probably wrong and it was more likely that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

As we've already seen this was not exactly a popular idea with the Church establishment since it was in direct conflict with the Truth namely Aristotle's idea that in God's perfect universe the Earth was the center of it all. Copernicus was no fool and he made sure not to make his heresy public in his lifetime. It should also be mentioned that his idea wasn't all that obviously superior.

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If you are standing on the earth watching the Sun rise and set you can just as easily imagine the heavens revolving around you, as the earth rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun. Besides, the perfectly circular orbits described by Copernicus didn't really fit the true motion of the heavens all that much better than the traditional model. The real problem of course had to do not with science but with theology and that is what eventually got Galileo in trouble.

Underlying the tenacity with which the Church of Galileo's day clung to what to us were the utterly indefensible theories blamed on poor old Aristotle was a rather curious notion. It was this. The correct way to understand how the world functioned was to probe divine revelation. There really was only one truth and that was God's truth. If you should have any idea that did not square with God's truth then it obviously came from that other fellow, the Devil.

In such a climate any theory you might dream up, even if it was supported by actual observation, had to be wrong if in some way it violated divine law. End of story! Galileo should have known better. He knew the rules but as I said before, he tended to march to his own drummer. For one thing, the Copernican model worked much better to explain his theory on tides (that book again, remember). So he made a bold decision.

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He had heard in 1609 that in Holland they had invented a crude telescope. Seizing on this idea, he set out to perfect this marvelous device. Don't forget, his interest lay in physics. Working feverishly he succeeded in building a successful model which he promptly presented to the Doge of Venice. The latter seeing its potential as a navigational device immediately doubled his salary.

By the end of the year he had managed to build a model with 20 times magnification. Then he made a fateful decision. He pointed it to the heavens. The first object to appear in his wonderful glass was the Moon. Poor old Galileo. What was he going to do? You see according to divine revelation a-la-Aristotle, the moon being part of the heavens was smooth and divinely perfect. Now here, right in his telescope it was plain to see that it was anything but.

Fortunately for him, his discoveries, which subsequently also included the fact that the planet Venus had phases like those of the moon and that another planet, Jupiter had moons of its own did not get him in trouble with the Church even when he published these findings in March 1610 in "The Starry Messenger". In fact it gained him an appointment as court mathematician at Florence.

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His charmed existence did not last however. Events overtook Galileo Galilei and, as we saw at the beginning of
this article, his "wayward ways" eventually caught up with him. His story has been used to illustrate different things such as for example that the Church was a villain that for many years stood in the way of scientific progress. In some respects that was certainly the case.

However, was their position all that unreasonable? Given what was known at that time, the new ideas themselves required quite a leap of faith, never mind that accepting them would also mean risking the wrath of God. It should also be pointed out that the Church represented the establishment of its day and like the establishment of any age they had the weight and burden of their position to contend with.

I mention this, because as we look around us today we still see many examples of tradition-bound institutions that more often than not act as an impediment to the very endeavors they are supposed to promote. Not only do we see this in the creaky institutions of government, law enforcement and the like, even in the halls of science there are more examples of hide-bound intransigence than we like to admit.


http://www.scienceandyou.org/articles/ess_02.shtml

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                                                         EPPUR SI MUOVE!





From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:


The Italian phrase "E pur si muove" or "Eppur si muove" means AND YET IT MOVES.
Pronunciation in IPA: [ep'pur si 'mwɔ:ve].

Legend has it that the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei muttered this phrase after being forced to recant in 1633, before the Inquisition, his belief that the earth moved around the sun.

At the time of Galileo's trial, the dominant view among theologians and philosophers was that the Earth is stationary, indeed the center of the universe. Galileo's adversaries brought the charge of heresy, then punishable by death, before the Inquisition. Since Galileo recanted, he was only put under house arrest until his death, nine years after the trial.

There is no contemporary evidence that Galileo uttered this expression at his trial; it would certainly have been highly imprudent for him to have done so. The earliest biography of Galileo, written by his disciple Vincenzio Viviani in 1717, does not mention this phrase, and depicts Galileo as having sincerely recanted.

The legend first became widely published in Querelles Litteraires (1761), recounting a tale published by an Italian living in London in 1757 (124 years after the supposed utterance).

In 1911, the famous line was found on a Spanish painting owned by a Belgian family, dated 1643 (1645?). The painting is obviously ahistorical, since it depicts Galileo in a dungeon, but nonetheless proves that some variants of the "Eppur si muove" legend had been circulating for over a century before it was published, perhaps even in his own lifetime.

Although the Galileo affair resulted in a temporary reverse for the cause of heliocentrism, the work of Galileo, Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton ultimately vindicated the theory.

Even if Galileo never uttered "Eppur si muove," the phrase accurately reflects the empiricist spirit he helped to foster in early modern Europe.