Meme stuff

When I was researching the life and work of Galileo a few years ago I came across a quotation attributed to him that I think needs to be repeated time and again when confronting science deniers and stubborn skeptics....

"They call me a heretic but they will not come and look through my telescope"

That refers to his discovery that Jupiter has moons orbiting it and it helped to overturn the conventional belief in those times that only the Earth has other bodies orbiting it.

This was a simple enough example of science in practice but it helped to re-shape peoples view of their Cosmos. It doesn't cause the end of civilisation!

Good memes! 

Couldn't find the quote. Perhaps you can provide a link.

Also, it would be too simplistic of us to reduce the Galileo debate to science v. religious science deniers. Those events were much more complicated than our modern Post-Enlightenment narrative lets on, which is unfortunate because it distorts history. For example, some of Galileo's science was wrong or didn't fit. And so-called religious "science deniers" used scientific arguments against Galileo like the lack of observed curved trajectories falling objects should take if the earth was rotating (i.e., the Coriolis Effect that they didn't have the instruments to detect). Also, some of their telescope observations were themselves incorrect, because they didn't yet understand the problems with light aberration and lens focusing.

If this is true, then Galileo never actually said, "They call me a heretic but they will not come and look through my telescope." I don't personally know enough about it to say definitely, but I could not find where Galileo actually said this, but if anyone can provide a definitive source....

Well, at least Albert Einstein went to look at Hubble's telescope and changed his mind about a static universe.

The pope looked through Galileo's telescope too and financed a lot of Galileo's work. The observation of moons orbiting Jupiter was not a challenge to the geocentricism.

Sadly I can't find it with a simple search and I've long forgotten the context in which I found it first time around. Of course not every piece of text on the internet is searchable.

But that doesn't detract from the point that Galileo was derided for some of his claims which observation, had his detractors made the effort to look through his telescope, would have borne out. For example, the moons of Jupiter which demonstrated for the first time that other celestial bodies have objects orbiting them, something that Catholic orthodoxy had previously denied.

Yes, that's what scientists do - they discard their most cherished theories when evidence demands they do so.

Let's not romanticize history. There are plenty of examples where scientists don't in fact do that. Scientists can be just as stubborn, pig headed and close minded as religious. That's because at root it's not a problem with science or religion, but humans.

It was some years ago and I'm cautious about the sites I trust to represent the facts but I vaguely remember it being said in a letter to a friend of his.

But are you seriously suggesting that you've never heard about Galileo being shown the instruments of torture by the Inquisition? Galileo was an old man by then and it was enough to terrorise him into submission. That's a well documented event.

Well admittedly this isn't my strongest subject, but is one I've always wanted to get better educated on, so I started a new post on it. And as far as I can tell (which could be wrong, since this is still just a preliminary review), but from a preliminary review it doesn't seem like there were any objections to his telescope or telescopic observations. Moons orbiting Jupiter did nothing to counter the belief and science of the day that the Earth didn't move--which scientifically seemed to be true and hold up with the evidence. To my knowledge, it wasn't against Catholic orthodoxy for there to be moons orbiting Jupiter, and the pope did look through Galileo's telescope.