Galileo in Rome

The condemnation of Galileo by the Holy Office in 1633 is one of the great dates in the history of science. It is usually seen as a tactical defeat but a great strategic victory in the struggle between science and religion. The merit of this book is that it makes it clear that this is not what the protagonists thought at the time. Galileo was a loyal son of the church, and remained so till his death. He had a number of highly placed friends in Rome, including two popes and a number of cardinals, one of whom had been his student. He himself was part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy holding two absentee canonries. How then did the condemnation happen ? The authors concentrate on Galileo's visits to Rome. Thus the truth of the legend that he dropped weights from the leaning tower of Pisa is not even mentioned. However the complex politics of Papal Rome were crucial. Galileo was a genius, and had the arrogance to know it: he thought he knew what church doctrine should be better than did the pope. What he saw through his telescope proved the Copernican hypothesis that the earth moved around the sun, therefore the church had to catch up with modern 17th century thought. Unfortunately the corrupt and tolerant church of the Renaissance had been replaced by the authoritarian church of the Counter Reformation. In their life and death struggle with each other Protestant and Catholic alike returned to the Bible. There it was written that the sun moved across the sky, and in 1600 Giordano Bruno has been burnt for denying this. In 1616 Galileo was warned not to teach the Copernican theory as true, but was allowed to use it as a useful instrumental trick. However when his friend Maffeo Barbarini become pope Urban VIII, Galileo was emboldened to a write a dialogue which pretended to refute Copernicus' heliocentric theory, but in fact demonstrated its superiority. Unwisely he put the pope's arguments in the mouth of a character Simplicio who is made to look foolish. Urban VIII may have been an amateur scientist, but he was head of the church, and he had been mocked. He was rather in the position of a school teacher who has an unruly class, and is cheeked by his favourite pupil. Galileo's condemnation was a creaking bureaucratic process that took months. The sentence of public recantation and house arrest was exceptionally lenient by the standards of the period: the Thirty Years War between Catholic and Protestant was raging in Germany at the time. Immediately afterwards Galileo was the guest of the Archbishop of Siena at a public dinner, and his confinement did not prevent him from later publishing his research in mechanics. Yet in retrospect the condemnation was as crucial as the traditional reading of the history of science proclaims. Pope John Paul II has recently revoked the condemnation, yet it is doubtful if this tardy pardon will repair the damage. The authority of the church and the Bible to pronounce on scientific matters was fatally undermined - and if science, why not everything else? If the cardinals had realised just how much damage Galileo had done, they might well have burnt him to get their revenge in first.