The Trial of Galileo
"On the first day of October in 1632, the dreaded Inquisitor of Florence, Italy knocked on the door of the famous astronomer, Galileo Galilei and served him with a summons to appear before the Inquisition in Rome within 30 days. The noted scientist was being forced to answer charges that he had promoted heresy in his latest book. Galileo was 68 years old, and these charges were extremely serious. Anyone found guilty of heresy could be sentenced to death."
What was Galileo's crime, according to the Catholic Church? Galileo had taken a stand against traditional views about the nature of the universe. He presented startling new evidence that our planet is not at the center of the universe. Galileo's own work, plus that of other scholars, had clearly convinced him that Earth and other planets moved around the Sun. These ideas seemed strange at the time. When people looked out from Earth, it certainly seemed that Earth was stationary and at the center of things, as if all bodies in the sky moved around us. The slow and difficult progress of Galileo's ideas shows how science works, sometimes in the face of opposition. Also, this new thinking was part of a famous revolution that affected the way all humans thought about their place in the universe.
After he received the summons to appear before the Inquisition, Galileo surrendered himself in Rome. The trial began in 1633. The surviving transcript shows the dilemma Galileo faced. At the beginning, Galileo was sure he could clear himself. One of the first questions from the Inquisitors was about what had happened during the cardinal's visit in 1616. Galileo described the visit and presented as evidence a 1615 letter from the Cardinal commending him for "speaking [only] hypothetically and not with certainty" about these issues. A second letter from the Cardinal, written in 1616, gave the order that "the Copernican opinion may neither be held nor defended, as it is opposed to Holy Scripture." Based on these letters, Galileo argued that his book debating the sides of the argument was within the spirit of the instructions he had been given.
Galileo faced an impossible moral dilemma. Should he risk death to defend his scientific observations in front of the secret Inquisition court, or should he recite a confession that would satisfy the judges and live to fight another day? He gave his answer. Even under the threat of death, he told them, he would never say that he was not a good Catholic or that he had tried to deceive anyone. However, under duress he would be willing to and say that he did not believe the new Copernican idea. In the end, he trusted that copies of his book would get out and that the scientific evidence would speak for itself. He begged the judges to "take into account my pitiable state of bodily illness, to which, at the age of 70 years, I have been reduced by ten months of constant mental anxiety." The trial came to a climax on June 22, 1633, when Galileo was summoned to kneel before the judges to hear his sentence and to recite a confession of error. The judges read a lengthy condemnation that included the Church's strong opposition to the Copernican revolution. Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for life.
The Inquisitors ordered his book banned. He had to repeat his confession in public, saying that he would "abandon the false opinion that the Sun is the center... and that the Earth is not the center and moves," and vowing to "abjure, curse, and detest the aforementioned errors and heresies...."
http://m.teachastronomy.com/astropedia/article/The-Trial-of-Galileo
