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The Conflict thesis suggests that science and religion have always been in conflict. The Galileo affair is commonly cited to support the conflict thesis, suggesting Galileo was imprisoned by the Catholic Church for his scientific observations supporting Copernican heliocentrism yet contradicting the Church's dogma.[1] However, the situation was far more nuanced. Galileo's telescopic observations, such as his observation of the phases of Venus, were fully consistent with Tycho Brahe's geocentric model which predicted that the planets, with the exception of the Earth, circled the sun, and the sun circled the Earth.[2]
House Arrest[edit]
Though Galileo was sentenced to imprisonment, his sentence was immediately commuted to house arrest.[1] The reasons for Galileo's house arrest were multifaceted. For one, Galileo had once received an audience of the Pope where the Pope shared with Galileo his view that it was, in principle, not possible to come to any conclusion about the geocentric or heliocentric status of the solar system. In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo placed this argument into the mouth of the foolish Aristotelian geocentrist Simplicio, which could have easily caused offense against the Pope.[3][4] However, it's not clear if Galileo's caricature played a role in his trial.[5] Secondly, Galileo also challenged the Church's authority over interpreting Scripture and a significant portion of Galileo's trial was devoted to addressing the fact that Galileo had asserted heliocentrism as demonstrated despite having legally promised earlier that he would only weigh heliocentrism as a hypothesis among other models, giving the appearance that he had betrayed the Church and the Pope himself.[6]
Galileo and Science[edit]
One of broader reasons that early proponents of Copernican theory promoted in defense of their views, including Galileo, was that heliocentrism was more elegantly able to explain Earth's apparent retrograde motion than Ptolemaic geocentrism, though retrograde motion was consistent with the Tychonic system.[7] Though Galileo argued that the Copernican system offered simpler explanations for apparent motion of sunspots across the solar disk and the speeds at whch bodies moved around a common center,[8] others noted that the simplicity of an argument is not enough to guarantee its truth.[9]
Parallax[edit]
Supporters of the Tychonic system were more swayed by observational evidence, importantly including that Galileo was unable to resolve the absence of observable parallax[10] combined with Tycho's star-size objection.[11] In order to explain the lack of observable parallax, Copernicus and supporters of heliocentrism up to Galileo's time suggested that the stars were simply too far away to be observed, up to the magnitude of a billion times further than contemporary estimates. This also had the consequence of suggesting, per the estimates of star size that existed with the telescopes of the day, that the size of every star, besides the sun, was larger than the Earth's orbit around the sun. This was widely considered a fatal problem for heliocentrism in Galileo's day for its significant violation of the principles of parismony.[11][12] Galileo proposed that even if one could not observe the absolute parallax of a star, one would be able to detect the relative parallax in a double star system as the spacing between the two of them shifted in measurement. However, in 2004, a letter was discovered showing that Galileo had conducted this trial but didn't publish it when it didn't support his theory.[13]
Galileo's argument from the tides[edit]
Galileo's crucial argument for the movement of the Earth around the sun - his theory of the tides - was erroneous.[14] Galileo theorized that because of the Earth's motion, borders of the oceans like the Atlantic and Pacific would show one high tide and one low tide per day. The Mediterranean had two high tides and low tides, though Galileo argued that this was a product of secondary effects and that his theory would hold in the Atlantic. However, Galileo's contemporaries noted that the Atlantic also had two high tides and low tides per day, which lead to Galileo omitting this claim in his 1632 Dialogue.[15][16]
References[edit]
- ^ a b Numbers, Ronald L., ed. Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion. No. 74. Harvard University Press, 2009, 68.
- ^ Lindberg 2008, pp. 42–44.
- ^ Lindberg 2008, pp. 52–54.
- ^ Hannam 2009, pp. 331–2.
- ^ Finocchiaro, Maurice A. Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical reasoning in the two affairs. Vol. 280. Springer Science & Business Media, 2010, 309.
- ^ Lindberg 2008, pp. 44–45, 52–56.
- ^ Richard Blackwell & Michael Shank. "Galileo Galilei," in Ferngren, Gary B., ed. Science and religion: a historical introduction. JHU Press, 2017, 102.
- ^ Finocchiaro, Maurice A. Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical reasoning in the two affairs. Vol. 280. Springer Science & Business Media, 2010, 241.
- ^ Lindberg 2008, p. 40.
- ^ Finocchiaro, Maurice A. Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical reasoning in the two affairs. Vol. 280. Springer Science & Business Media, 2010, 27-28
- ^ a b Hannam 2009, p. 276.
- ^ Graney 2015, pp. 52–53, 80.
- ^ Graney 2015, pp. 49–50.
- ^ Naylor, Ron. "Galileo’s tidal theory." Isis 98.1 (2007): 2. "Almost all historians think that the tidal theory in the Dialogue is physically incorrect, and most believe that it contains major contradictions."
- ^ Drake, Stillman. Galileo at work: his scientific biography. Courier Corporation, 2003, 273-4.
- ^ Naylor, Ron. "Galileo’s tidal theory." Isis 98.1 (2007): 16