Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious • Hacker News Board

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#61

Post by frandroid » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:07 PM UTC

santaragolabs wrote: post #3

santaragolabs wrote: post #2

This is basically the thesis of Paul Feyerabend who used it as his main argument against there being a scientific method. His book "Against Method" is one of the best works on Philosophy of Science I've read during my university education.

And to follow-up; several works on the history of science are great and it is great for learning that history is very messy. Also in science things are never as black and white as people several decennia down the line tend to think about how those scientific discoveries went went down. I really liked "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton which I read a couple of months ago. A Guardian review of that work can be…

Genesis: The Evolution of Biology by Jan Sapp (https://www.amazon.ca/Genesis-Evolution-Biology-Jan-Sapp/dp/... talk about a trolling title :]) is pretty good in that vein too.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#62

Post by davidw » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:07 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #53

cpr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, excommunication simply means being outside the sacraments. It had nothing to do with public society. Galileo was under house arrest at some point, but that had no canonical relation to any excommunication.

Your technical definition is correct, but you need to consider the practical implications. When you got excommunicated from the Church, people basically stopped taking you seriously, and no one wanted to associate themselves with you. As a consequence, you had no choice but to move elsewhere, i.e. self-banishment.

Interestingly, Galileo called his years in Padua (Padova) the happiest of his life. Florence was much more directly influenced by the church, whereas Padova was part of the Republic of Venice, which was not under the thumb of the church, despite of course being catholic.

If you ever get to visit Padova, there's a great tour of the university that shows a lectern that he used. To put it bluntly, it's a pile of junk, but the story behind that is pretty interesting: rather than hire actual skilled craftsmen to build it, his students - who were not "blue collar" types -wanted to build it themselves as a sign of devotion.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#63

Post by dacohenii » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:09 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #49

I tl;dr'ed the article (sorry), but I wanted to say one thing about epicycles. They are not wrong and certainly can be used to explain motion, but the problem with them is that you can keep adding epicycles to fit any continuous orbit at all (this actually is because a Fourier series can converge to any continuous periodic function). This is my favourite visualisation of this fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVu…

Exactly. From a geocentric perspective, it's not wrong as long as you're explaining past events (which, as you noted, can be done by adding epicycles).

The reason the model is not so useful (to paraphrase my college physics professor) is that you can't use it to predict things in advance with reasonable certainty (i.e. you don't know what epicycles you need until after you've observed it).

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#64

Post by baldfat » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:14 PM UTC

edko wrote: post #6

There is no question that there was religious opposition to Galileo within the Catholic church. However, it was not unanimous, and there were some notable exceptions. José de Calasanz (saint), the founder of the Piarist order, was a friend of Galileo, and had some of the teachers of his congregation study with Galileo, so that the science they learned could be taught in his schools. Moreover, when Galileo fell in dis…

Also worth mentioning: geocentric view was based on Aristotle and not scriptures. My undergraduate was in Theology and graduate degree was Historical Theology. Back then the dominate foundations of Theology in the Church was Plato vs Aristotle and one would consider themselves to be in the camp of one or the other and well Aristotle kind of won the popular vote back in those times.

Here is the article on Artistole's thoughts on The Heavens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heavens

"Aristotelian geocentric view that the earth was the center of the universe..." https://books.google.com/books?id=MHnwAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchw...

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#65

Post by Amorymeltzer » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:19 PM UTC

Anyone who is interested in Astronomy and development of historical models of the heavens should check out this season of the Scientific Odyssey podcast (http://thescientificodyssey.typepad.com/). I found it through HN and Chad Davies does a fantastic job of creating a narrative from early civilization, and we are just now discussing Galileo. It's very niche but fairly accessible, and one of my favorites.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#66

Post by invalid_action » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:25 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #53

cpr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, excommunication simply means being outside the sacraments. It had nothing to do with public society. Galileo was under house arrest at some point, but that had no canonical relation to any excommunication.

Your technical definition is correct, but you need to consider the practical implications. When you got excommunicated from the Church, people basically stopped taking you seriously, and no one wanted to associate themselves with you. As a consequence, you had no choice but to move elsewhere, i.e. self-banishment.

This is just not true in general. The implications were very dependent on where you lived.

You should look up Paolo Sarpi who was a leading figure in the Venetian Republic who Galileo corresponded with frequently. Pope Paul V tried to have him assassinated at one point. If anything he became a more influential leader in Venice after the assassination attempt.

The freedom to work without the more extreme elements of the church getting in the way that was possible in the Republic of Venice at that time is one of the many reasons the position that Galileo opposed the church is hard to defend. If he opposed the church then why did he return to Florence in 1611 instead of staying in the republic.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#67

Post by duaneb » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:26 PM UTC

athenot wrote: post #57

edko wrote: post #6

There is no question that there was religious opposition to Galileo within the Catholic church. However, it was not unanimous, and there were some notable exceptions. José de Calasanz (saint), the founder of the Piarist order, was a friend of Galileo, and had some of the teachers of his congregation study with Galileo, so that the science they learned could be taught in his schools. Moreover, when Galileo fell in dis…

The opposition by the church was two-fold. It was on the grounds that Galileo had not sufficiently proven the Copernician system. Nevertheleless, it endured 9 popes before controvery was stirred up when the debate moved into the venacular and his theory started getting pitched against Scripture, instead of just continuing the debate among astronomers. But even the authors of the judgement against Galileo didn't consi…

I don't believe there are any geocentric claims in scripture. To what scripture are you referring?

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#68

Post by brlewis » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:27 PM UTC

baldfat wrote: post #64

edko wrote: post #6

There is no question that there was religious opposition to Galileo within the Catholic church. However, it was not unanimous, and there were some notable exceptions. José de Calasanz (saint), the founder of the Piarist order, was a friend of Galileo, and had some of the teachers of his congregation study with Galileo, so that the science they learned could be taught in his schools. Moreover, when Galileo fell in dis…

Also worth mentioning: geocentric view was based on Aristotle and not scriptures. My undergraduate was in Theology and graduate degree was Historical Theology. Back then the dominate foundations of Theology in the Church was Plato vs Aristotle and one would consider themselves to be in the camp of one or the other and well Aristotle kind of won the popular vote back in those times. Here is the article on Artistole's…

I think the "religious" opposition was more based on power politics than on scriptures, faith, etc.

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#69

Post by livingparadox » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:29 PM UTC

duaneb wrote: post #67

athenot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposition by the church was two-fold. It was on the grounds that Galileo had not sufficiently proven the Copernician system. Nevertheleless, it endured 9 popes before controvery was stirred up when the debate moved into the venacular and his theory started getting pitched against Scripture, instead of just continuing the debate among astronomers. But even the authors of the judgement against Galileo didn't consi…

I don't believe there are any geocentric claims in scripture. To what scripture are you referring?

To my understanding, its just a number of verses that express things in the same kinds of phrases we use today (e.g., "the sun stood still", "the sun rose").

Re: Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious

#70

Post by antognini » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 4:33 PM UTC

Strangely, the article omits a reference to the preferred model of the time, namely the Tychonic system [1]. In the Tychonic system, all the planets revolve around the Sun, but the Sun and moon revolve around the Earth. It was seen to be a very tidy theory that took advantage of the best aspects of the Copernican theory, but resolved the problem of the lack of observed parallax.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system