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According to Dan Brown, the ‘Galileo Affair’ was a simple matter; Galileo
had dangerous new scientific data that the Church repressed. The reality is
far, far more complex. As with the other inaccuracies, the truth would
undoubtedly have bogged down Brown’s fast-paced story, but it’s important to
know that while Langdon claims his (Galileo’s) “data were incontrovertible”
(p28) in fact his data were not compelling, and it would take many years before
experimental evidence would become persuasive. And Galileo did not know
that the Geocentric model of the solar system was “dead wrong” (p168). Of
course, with hindsight, we can say his hunch was an extremely good one.
It's not widely known that Galileo’s research was initially funded by the
church. This is hard to reconcile with the suggestion that the church
simply murdered scientists wherever they could be found. While it’s true that
Galileo was forced to water-down the description of his theory so that it was
merely a proposed alternate mathematical model, and then held under house
arrest for the rest of his life, he was never jailed. In fact, he was permitted
to continue his research, and published his most important work after the
trial.
For
more see The Galileo
Affair and Galileo and
the Sun-Centered Solar System
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| Contributed by: Adrian Wyard
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