ABSTRACT
Galileo Galilei was years, maybe a century, ahead of his time. As Adam Gopnik (2013, 106) writes of Galileo in 1609:
One night in December, he turned it [a telescope he built] on the moon, and saw what no man of his time had seen before. Or, rather, since there were Dutch gadgets in many hands by then, and many eyes, he understood what he was seeing as no man of his time had before …
Galileo posited that the earth revolved around the sun, supporting the earlier ideas of Nicholas Copernicus. This idea was sharply at odds with a number of tenets of the Catholic Church. John Heilbron (2010) argues that Galileo made needless trouble for himself. Had he argued that his (and Copernicus’) ideas were a theory to be taught alongside the traditional Aristotelian views (a dispute that bears more than a faint resemblance to the argument over the “theory” of evolution today), the Church would not have reacted with the equivalent of a sixteenth-century nuclear option. Indeed, for a generation, the Church took no action. But in the increasingly virulent reaction to the Reformation, the Roman Inquisition, a form of “low-level background terrorism” (Heilbron 2010), ordered Galileo to recant. Ultimately, he did and lived out his life in mental and physical exile.