Galileo's Folly: Dissing the Big

No one should be surprised that there are things that are learned in school that aren't true.  We all learned as children that George Washington chopped down his father's cherry tree but fessed up to it because he was so honest that he 'could not tell a lie.'  Not true.  A certain Mason Weems concocted that tale to make his biography of Washington more interesting.  We all saw that Disney movie about lemmings where we learned that for some inexplicable reason the poor things felt it necessary to commit mass suicide by throwing themselves off a cliff, but this also isn't true; James Simon imported a bunch of lemmings to Alberta, Canada (not even their native habitat) and herded them off a cliff to make his movie more interesting.  Mass murder for grade-school entertainment under the guise of education.  We were taught in third-grade science class that diamonds are made up of compressed coal over millions of years, but in reality the carbon they're composed of comes from melted rocks in the upper mantle of the Earth.  Humans only use ten percent of our brains?  No dice.  That little factoid comes from an experiment where (apparently pretty creepy) scientists taught rats to run through a maze, then cut out a little bit of their brains after each run.  The rats continued to solve the maze until they only had about ten percent of their brain left, and somehow that led to the conclusion that we humans only use that much of our brain at any given time and the rest is empty, redundant space.  Whatever.  The list of these instances go on and on.

All of things piss me off, some more than others.  I hate being lied to, and I hate when lies have become so institutionalized that they are taught as truths without our teachers even knowing that they are lying to us. 

One such lie has been coming up a lot lately.  I have 'liked' a whole slew of Facebook pages involving atheism, and just as I figured, a lot of them are run by a bunch of angry people that carry on one-sided arguments against religions and the religious .  This kind of thing kinda turns me off, as I am not an angry or argumentative type of person.  I just don't believe in god, and I don't want to argue about it. I believe in the truth, and when people talk about how the Catholic Church persecuted and tortured Galileo because he taught that the Earth revolves around the Sun, I try to set the story straight.  That doesn't make a lot of people happy.  They like the idea and enjoy using it as a tool to get across their anger at the Church, and they get really pissy when someone tries to take away that tool.  I get it, the way we all learned it, it was a great story. Nice old white-haired guy, just trying to spread some science and enlightenment, gets arrested and tortured and thrown in jail for the rest of his life... Kind of a Jesus story, really.

But it's the truth; Galileo was never tortured by the Inquisition, nor did he ever spend one day in any prison.  He was threatened with torture and imprisonment, but he quickly recanted his story, which satisfied the Pope at the time (Pope Urban VIII, I think).  And it is true that he spent the last couple years of his life under house arrest, but this was both a kindness and a way of saving face for the Pope, as by then Galileo was blind from staring at the sun through a telescope, broke, and completely friendless as he had been such an asshole for most of his career.  Nor is it true that the Church was even particularly bothered with the whole heliocentric theory that Galileo was a proponent of. The Pope at the time was a pretty progressive guy and was interested in these "wondrous" new ideas and had asked Galileo to come to Rome and explain it all. Asked twice, I think.

So many of the things we learned in school about the guy are just plain wrong.  He didn't invent the telescope, sailors had been using them for years.  He was the first to call it a telescope, and might have been the first one to point it upwards to the sky instead of horizontally at the skyline, but no one really knows that for certain.  He didn't invent the microscope either, or the thermometer or the pendulum or pendular clock.  He didn't even throw down balls from the Tower of Pisa!  Goddamit!  It just pisses me off to think of all the crap I learned in school that simply isn't true.

The source of Galileo's problems weren't that he was teaching dangerous, new ideas that contradicted the Church.  His problem was that he wasn't the kindly, nice old brilliant guy like I learned in school.  He was, in fact, a big asshole.

Galileo rose to prominence as a scholar in his twenties, not based on his brilliance or his ideas.  He got famous as a debater, for his particular style of debate.  Regardless of the subject or how much or little he knew on the subject of debate, he won a lot of 'em because of his method; he didn't argue the merits of his knowledge or observations, he won by making his opponent look stupid.  He'd be right at home today, and as a matter of fact it's my opinion that if he were around now, he'd have a show on Fox News.  He was the original O'Reilly or Hannity or Limbaugh, who could sarcastically out-insult whoever disagreed with him so well that he could win any debate.  Facts didn't matter. Whenever and wherever he was on the bill, the gallery would be packed with people there to watch him destroy his opponents.  And not just academics, but farmers and farriers and merchants, guys from the Olde Swillhouse down the road, whatever. Whoever that had the opportunity to watch it.  It was the 1600's, and this was great entertainment, I suppose.

Naturally, he didn't make many friends this way, and a lot of people who might have supported him during his later troubles refrained from doing so because he had insulted them and their works at some point, maybe kicked their ass in a debate.  He'd made so many colleagues look like such asses so many times that a lot of people weren't so bothered by the idea of Galileo's body in a torture chamber or his head on a stake.  Add to that, the fact that whenever someone made any discoveries at all about the nature of 'the heavens and the stars', Galileo would claim credit, saying he'd already made those discoveries but just hadn't published them yet.  In a letter he wrote, "You cannot help it, Mr. Sarsi, that it was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else.  This is the truth which neither malice nor envy can suppress." What a dick!

As I mentioned before, the Pope at the time had invited him to come to Rome and enlighten him about all these new ideas.  Arthur Koestler, who supplied me with the story in his book 'The Sleepwalkers' described Galileo's reply as obsequious, the first time I'd ever encountered that word, thanks for that one! He wrote back, saying that he was far too unimportant for such distinguished company and he wouldn't want to waste His Holiness' time with such foolish trivialities that won't ever amount to much, but in a letter to a friend he made a comment that he didn't want to waste his time or energy explaining such lofty and complicated ideas to the ignorant louts of the Church who wouldn't understand them anyway.  Not a smart move, for such a smart guy.  That little bit got around, and the Pope eventually heard about it.

To top it off, in one of his final publications, he made the Pope look stupid.  They didn't have professional peer-reviewed trade journals or magazines back then, when someone wanted to put out their ideas and theories and results of experiments, they (kind of weirdly) wrote them in the form of a dialogue.  There typically would be two characters talking, one being the voice of the author and would put out the author's ideas and the other character would be the voice of the status quo, of what was commonly accepted, and the two would debate through dialogue, and you always know who won in the end.  In 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems', Galileo had three characters, two scientists and an idiot named Simplicio, a guy who spouted out inanities and absurdities and couldn't follow the basic arguments of the other two guys.  This character was a conglomeration of two of Galileo's professional enemies and the Pope.  THE POPE.  The guy who had an army of Inquisitors and torturers at his command, not to mention the armies of actual soldiers.  Again, not a bright move.

Galileo was told to knock it off.  He didn't.  He was told he would be tortured and imprisoned if he didn't.  So he did.  He recanted, kissed a lot of asses, said he wouldn't teach anyone anything anymore.  He went back to his laboratory and stared through his telescopes until he was blind (such a genius, and couldn't figure out that maybe it would be a bad idea to stare at the sun through a series of magnifying glasses).  Like I mentioned before, he eventually was put under house arrest for the rest of his life, but was 'imprisoned' in the Tuscan ambassador's quarters overlooking the Vatican grounds, with a full staff of servants to wait on his blind ass until he died.  Not exactly a punishing or brutal way to go.

I read the story of Galileo in Arthur Koestler's 'The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe.'  Koestler might have himself been a creep, but he knew how to write a good book, and it has some fairly shocking lines considering it was written in 1959.  Like this one, on a certain Joachim Rheticus who was a disciple of Coperincus:

     "He was twenty-five when he arrived in Frauenburg "at the extreme outskirts of the Earth", with a determined purpose to get the Copernican Revolution going which Copernicus tried to suppress; an enfant terrible and inspired fool, a condittiere of science, an adoring disciple and, fortunately, either homo- or bi-sexual, after the fashion of the time.  I say "fortunately" because the so afflicted have always proved to be the most devoted teachers and disciples, from Socrates to this day, and History owes them a debt."  Pretty gutsy, coming from the Eisenhower era!

The moral of the story... I'll leave that up to others to decide.  It's not a crime to be an asshole, at least not anymore, and it's perfectly normal for people to go around making other people look like assholes just to make themselves appear to be on the right side of a topic.  We do, however, still torture, imprison and kill people who disagree with us.  Especially if they're Muslims.  The Inquisition continues, they just don't wear such flashy costumes anymore.  The search for Truth goes on, and so does the struggle to Deny.

And still, today and more than likely tomorrow and days after that, teachers will teach kids shit that just ain't right.