Last night I looked at M13, M57, Jupiter and his four Galilean moons, the Swan Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy, and Comet Hartley, all through a majorly big telescope (24 inch Cassegrain) at Pine Mountain Observatory. The inside of the telescope looked like this (although this is actually the inside of the 32 inch experimental scope):
While I really enjoyed seeing all the space phenomena, the Jupiter and the Galilean moons was the real show stealer. It looked a lot like this, only we were able to see four moons:
So, the above image is what one can see with a 24 inch aperture telescope hooked up to a computer with an electric motor tracking device. This telescope magnifies an object more than 200 times. However, the first time that anyone saw Jupiter and these moons, he was looking through a .5 inch aperture telescope that magnified an object 15-20 times. It was wintertime in 1610 and Galileo had had a terrific idea on how to use the newly invented “Dutch perspective glass” (which appears to have mostly been used during the daytime hours).
On January 7th, Galileo made the first observations of Jupiter and the moons that surrounded it. At first he thought the moons were small stars, but as he observed their movement over the next several days, he realized that the “stars” were in orbit around Jupiter. Now to our modern ears this may not seem very shocking, but up until this point in history (and well past it too, unfortunately for Galileo) folks adhered to Aristotelean/Ptolemaic Cosmology, which states that everything orbits around the Earth. Galileo also observed the phases of Venus, which are only possible if Venus is orbiting the sun and not the Earth. Ptolemy’s model was proven untenable and anybody with one of them newfangled perspective scopes could see it. The Church’s most serious bout of scientist theory whack-a-mole had begun.
Galileo went to the Catholic Church to ask permission to write about his discoveries. While the Inquisition did not refuse Galileo’s request, they did require Galileo to adhere to a few key requirements. Galileo was not to “hold or defend” the idea of heliocentrism, he must also give arguments for geocentrism, and he must give forth the views of Pope Urban VII within the text. Galileo agreed to these requirements and his book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632.
Unfortunately and unwittingly (he claimed) Galileo chose to name the fictional character who spoke the Pope’s views “Simplicio,” a name which loosely translates into “simpleton” in Italian. The Pope didn’t think that was very funny. The Inquisition called him to Rome to defend his writings. In 1633, he was ordered to stand trial for heresy, of which he was found guilty. He was forced, with threat of death, to recant his belief in heliocentrism and placed on house arrest for the rest of his life (another nine years).
It’s not all a sad ending. During the last nine years of his life, Galileo wrote the book Two New Sciences on the mechanics and motion of objects and the strengths of different materials, which led to his title as the “father of modern physics.” Also, he did live to be 77 years old in an age where the average expectancy was 35. That’s pretty good too.
Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science. His renowned conflict with the Catholic Church was central to his philosophy, for Galileo was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and, moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world. –Stephen Hawking
So, does “house arrest” mean free rent and all for the rest of his life? If so, he was even smarter than they thought!
Well, he was living in his own house for part of it, so I think it was probably already paid for. But you never know…he was a pretty sharp tack:)