[extropy-chat] re: embedded in open hearts

[Amara Graps]

(to Olga and others)

It is a nice soundbite to say that Galileo's teaching of
Copernican theory was persecuted by the church, but the
subject is complicated. Here you'll find an interview
with Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit priest and very good
astronomer who is trying to give the context (and
background) of the times for Galileo's arrest and (much
later) pardon by the Church. Oh yes, Galileo at one point
was in danger for his life, and at the end was placed
under house arrest, but it helps to see the whole
picture.

HEAVEN'S OBSERVER
Interview by Hazel Muir from New Scientist
http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/2000/20000331.txt

Also this book give more details:

Galileo and the Scientific Revolution
by Laura Fermi and Gilberto Bernardini

As I've told my Astronomy 100 students, the picture of
the Church's role in astronomy is not black-and-white
against astronomy. We would be ignoring facts if we
claimed that.

In Medieval and Renaissance times we have many examples
of the brutal persecutions and today, people in science
use both Bruno being burned at the stake (a statue in
Campo di Fiori in Rome marks the spot today) and Galileo
Galilei under house arrest in Florence for his remaining
days, as examples of that persecution, but, do people
know that Galileo (and Copernicus and Kepler) were
actually deeply religious men? They might be surprised
also to know that the most dedicated astronomers were
Jesuit priests and the Catholic Church worked very hard
to amass astronomical tools for equinox measurements, and
to have a suitable place for the Jesuit astronomers to
make their work. For example, the best solar
observatories in the world before the emergence of higher
quality telescope optics (16th, 17th, and 18th
centuries), were the Roman Catholic churches. Besides
being a place of worship, the churches provided the only
buildings tall enough for 'meridians', where the gnomon
(a precisely-placed hole near the roof) tracks the Sun.
Giovanni Cassini (a Jesuit priest) used the Great
Meridian in the San Petronio Church in Bologna to make
4,500 observations, some of which were used to confirm
Kepler's Law that planets move around the Sun in
elliptical orbits. The discovery of astronomical
spectroscopy the middle 1800s was made by the Jesuit,
Angelo Secchi, using another church (in Rome) for his
laboratory. Those examples show something of the
religious 'grayness' in astronomy.

I have an Italian scientist friend that thinks that the
Catholics/Church will eventually accept everything
(euthanasia, married priests, women priests, contraceptives, 
etc.), but that it will happen _slowly_ (as slowly as they 
accepted that the Earth is not the center of the Universe). 
He said (smilingly) that "it is simply a matter of time, they 
measure time in millennia, quite boring for ordinary humans 
like us..."


Amara