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Galileo really didn’t have any coherent theory of his own. Being smart-assed with the Pope, his former friend and supporter, lost him the Pope’s protection. He was really good at making enemies. The Church had avoided the heliocentricism contraversy, in part because a lot of smart people worked at the Vatican, some of them Jesuits, and realized that it was not in the Church’s interest to inject itself into unresolved scientific contraversies. Galileo gave the geocentricists an opening and they seized it, much to the detriment of the Church. (Things we take for granted, like Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press were very much foreign concepts in every civilization and culture up to that time.)

Anyway, his conviction cemented his reputation as a free thinker and made his place in history. If they ignored him, he would probably be a minor player, ranking somewhat below Robert Hook in the history of science. Hook published “Newton’s” law of motion nine years before Newton in almost identical form. Hook’s publication was sterile because he lacked Newton’s genius. Newton created the calculus of variation to show that Hook’s law lead to Kepler’s empirical laws as a solution to the two body problem. Without the calculus of variations and Kepler’s law, Hook’s statement of the laws of motion are little more than sterile speculation. BTW, the “Hook’s Law” we all learn in high school physics isn’t really a physical law, it’s at best an engineering approximation, used to illustrate some elementary principles.