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.
