People forget that the personality of Galileo played a large role in his downfall. He befriended a man who became pope, sand then he played the same man as a fool in a book her wrote. The pope ended his friendship and left him in the hands of a Church Cour peopled by Aristotelians. The irony is that Galileo made many assertions that went fare beyond what the evidence available to him showed. It took Newton to come up with a solid theory that proved what Galileo assumed to be true.
Generally, people today argue this issue as stuff of children books: brilliant man-hero opposing obscurantism. In fact the same conflicts of personalities and institutional inertia permeate modern science just as much.