ABSTRACT
Bertolt Brecht’s play, Life of Galileo, is helpful here. In it, and in his reflections on the history of its writing, Brecht gives a voice to some passionately held negative reactions to Galileo and his role in furthering the Copernican revolution. Those reactions flowed naturally from a social and cultural consciousness in which authoritative patterns of interpretation, laid down by and reinforced through Christian teaching, almost guaranteed rejection of what Galileo said. By expressing that rejection dramatically, Brecht helps us once again to make an imaginative leap into a worldview so apparently different to ours. I say apparently, for, as we shall see, while we no longer say we believe that the earth is the centre of the universe, we have not moved much, if at all, from the then vehemently expressed corollary of that belief: that we are at its centre.
