Galileo

In 1609 Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, using his own telescope, modeled on an invention recently made in the Netherlands, discovered that the Moon, far from being smooth and utterly unlike Earth, had mountains and craters. By using the lengths of their shadows, Galileo was even able to measure the heights of the Moon’s mountains. A number of nebulae resolved into swarms of individual small stars. Even the Milky Way was made of stars. Perhaps the most exciting find was the discovery of four moons revolving about Jupiter. These discoveries were announced in Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger, 1610), the book that made his reputation. Although none of these discoveries directly supported the Copernican theory, they all lent indirect support in that they made the new cosmology less objectionable. That Jupiter has satellites cannot prove that Earth goes around the Sun, but it showed that there was at least one other centre of revolution than Earth. It also showed that a moving planet could carry its satellites along with it (as Earth does the Moon in the Copernican view). The later discovery that Venus ran through a complete set of phases like the Moon definitely ruled out the Ptolemaic idea that Venus lay below the solar sphere, but it did not rule out a theory like Tycho Brahe’s, in which Venus circled the Sun while the Sun moved around Earth.

In 1616 the Roman Catholic Church placed Copernicus’s De revolutionibus on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books). In 1618 a list was issued of 10 specific corrections—passages dealing with Earth’s motion that were to be struck out. But outside Italy, this order was rarely followed. One curious exception can be mentioned. Jesuit missionaries to China in the late 16th and early 17th centuries carried European astronomy with them. The Jesuit astronomers were predisposed to the Tychonic system, which kept Earth at the centre of the universe but which otherwise shared the advantages of Copernicanism. After the condemnation of Copernicanism, they had no choice but to keep to the Tychonic system, and they continued to teach it in China long after it had gone out of fashion in Europe.

Galileo, even though he had been warned not to teach Copernicanism as literally true, decided to take advantage of the ascent of a more liberal thinker to the papacy, Pope Urban VII, and gambled on a work of popularization. In Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e copernicano (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican, 1632), three friends—an avowed follower of Ptolemy and Aristotle, a convinced Copernican, and an intermediary who guided the debate—discuss cosmology and astronomy. Naturally, the Copernican gets the better of the arguments. Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant, but the official condemnation of the book and the trial of Galileo did little to halt the advance of the new ideas.