This compelling account of a scientific martyr did not even begin to take shape until well over a century later when it was recruited to vilify the institution of the Catholic Church rather than Christianity more generally. There is no hard evidence that Galileo ever said ‘And yet it moves’. While he emphasised the significance of tiny details to convince his readers that the latest scientific data conformed with biblical narratives, Galileo also relied on persuasion rather than demonstration: instead of supplying incontrovertible proof, he argued rhetorically, mocking his opponents and flattering the patrons who supported his projects. Riccioli was an eminent Jesuit, but however strongly he may have been influenced by his theological beliefs, he did make some powerful points. Hard evidence is supposed to be what counts in science, but at the time of Galileo’s trial discrepancies remained and influence counted. A third contender, the earth-centred model proposed many centuries earlier by Ptolemy, lies discarded at her feet. Like a god of justice, she reveals that the evidence for Riccioli’s system is weighing down the scale-pan, while Galileo’s less substantiated suggestion rises upward. In his allegorical frontispiece, Urania, the muse of astronomy, holds up her balance for inspection by Argos, the all-seeing god. An expert on the moon, Riccioli paid generous tribute to his rival by giving Galileo’s name to a lunar crater (reserving one for himself as well). In 1651 Giovanni Battista Riccioli published his massive New Almagest, a modernised version of the renowned second-century treatise by Claudius Ptolemy. Galileo never did iron out all the objections to his sun-centred universe and, even after his death in 1642, some of Europe’s most distinguished astronomers claimed that the jury was still out – that his case was not proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Yet the original conflict was no straightforward clash between reason and religion. After the war, he gave his script a further twist to condemn the American bombing of Japan and was hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In Nazi Germany, the playwright Bertolt Brecht fictionalised Galileo’s experiences to condemn political authoritarianism. This conveniently versatile story has been hyped up to represent struggles not only against the Catholic Inquisition, but against other oppressive ideologies. He condemned the heretical astronomer to the relatively mild punishment of house arrest, although melodramatic illustrations show a handcuffed elderly man being thrust down the steps of a dark dungeon as he vainly proclaims the truth. In the face of all the facts – or so runs the mythology – Pope Urban VIII had refused to accept that the earth is in perpetual motion around the sun. Galileo Galilei’s muttered protest symbolises the triumph of scientific rationality over blinkered, obstructive theology. It is one of the most famous quotations that was never said: Eppur si muove (And yet it moves). Map of the universe according to the theories of Tycho Brahe, from Andreas Cellarius' Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1660 © Granger/Bridgeman Images.
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