Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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The story of the surviving documentation is fascinating. Galileo allegedly recanted his Copernicanism in a letter to a friend, who then tried to erase the recantation from history. Here's the text from a book on my shelf:
Few are aware that a year before he died Galileo renounced, quite dramatically, all his claims that the Earth went around the sun. In 1641 his colleague Francesco Rinuccini had written a letter to Galileo claiming that the astronomer Giovanni Pieroni, by discovering a case of stellar parallax, had proven that the Earth moves. Galileo, who by this time had had a dramatic conversion back to the Christian faith two years earlier in 1639, wrote the following letter back to Rinuccini later in 1641:
| The falsity of the Copernican system should not in any way be called into question, above all, not by Catholics, since we have the unshakeable authority of the Sacred Scripture, interpreted by the most erudite theologians, whose consensus gives us certainty regarding the stability of the Earth, situated in the center, and the motion of the sun around the Earth. The conjectures employed by Copernicus and his followers in maintaining the contrary thesis are all sufficiently rebutted by that most solid argument deriving from the omnipotence of God. He is able to bring about in different ways, indeed, in an infinite number of ways, things that, according to our opinion and observation, appear to happen in one particular way. We should not seek to shorten the hand of God and boldly insist on something beyond the limits of our competence. |
Rinuccini was so disturbed by the letter that he attempted to erase Galileo's signature from off the last page. The editor of Galileo's works states: "The signature 'Galileo Galilei' has been very deliberately and repeatedly rubbed over, with the manifest intention of rendering it illegible." Stillman Drake, one of the premier Galileo historians of our day, states:
| Among all Galileo's surviving letters, it is only this one on which his name at the end was scratched out heavily in ink. I presume that Rinuccini valued and preserved Galileo's letters no matter what they said, but did not want others to see this declaration by Galileo that the Copernican system was false, lest he be thought a hypocrite. |
What was it that made Galileo change his mind? Why did he come to believe that the Copernican heliocentric system was inferior to the geocentric system? We will see that the scientific and historical facts we will uncover in this book may have been the reason for Galileo's sudden change of heart.
Since it appears that Galileo recused himself from the debate, we can no longer lay the burden on him. It is solely on the shoulders of modern science. Modern science claims to have all the sophisticated instruments that Galileo lacked to prove the Earth moved. Truth be told, four hundred years later modern science has also failed to provide the human race with proof that the Earth is moving.
As one honest scientist put it in a book endorsed by Albert Einstein in 1948:
| ...we can't feel our motion through space, nor has any physical experiment ever proved that the Earth actually is in motion. | | |
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