Giordano Bruno: A Martyr, Yes, but Not for Science

Using basic English: that whatever action that caused Galileo to be arrested was not science-ing.

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@PdotdQ

Lots of postings… with the upshot being your zeal to equate Galileo to Bruno. That’s a load of malarkey.

All you gotta do is produce the Vatican text that says what you think must have been said.

Oh… and then you have to prove the Church was RIGHT about that charge!

I already delineated my reasons in the post I linked. It has nothing to do with the Vatican. My professional opinion as an astrophysicist is that what Galileo did to get arrested is not science. I said and claimed nothing of what the Church thought.

You seem to be a person who wants beyond all else to be right. It is a waste of time to argue with you.

Perhaps a clarification would help. What did Galileo do to get arrested? What were the charges? Why wasn’t it science?

Again, what exactly caused Galileo to get arrested I leave to historian of science such as @TedDavis. However, it wasn’t science because of the reasons I wrote here. He was advancing his personal pet theory without any support of scientific evidence.

@PdotdQ

So, im forced to GUESS that what you mean is that your credentials as an astrophysicist gives you the insight that Galileo was arrested (please allow me to paraphrase):

  1. for being snide,
  2. arrogant,
  3. and disagreeable.

Thank goodness you have that PhD in astrophysics! We laymen might have missed those subtle nuances!

Well, of course he was all these things! But he acted this way in defense of his science.

I go back to my complaint about you making “a distinction without a difference.”

For you to be right, Galileo would have had to be under house arrest WHILE HIS BOOK was free to be published.

But his book was suppressed as well. Even after Galileo’s death, it was the book that was the problem!

Sigh, I never claimed any of these. My problem is that:

What he was defending was not science. It was his personal pet theory without any support from scientific evidence. That is all. This discussion has gone long enough.

@PdotdQ

In your absence, I will summarize:

Galileo was arrested and his book suppressed because: he didnt have enough evidence to be able to assert his conviction about his hypothesis!

Well heck… we should have burned him alive then! How dare he treat his hypothesis as true???

News Flash: Scientists treating their hypotheses as statements of TRUTH is STILL going on to this day.

It may not be “the ideal” behavior, but allowing a Scientist his convictions (without jailing them) is the part of Western Tradition that the Church found so disagreeable!

Fortunately, the Church rehabilitated their views on this… just in time for the fringe element of Protestant Churches to start interfering with the work of Science.

I keep saying, I did not claim that:

As I did here

Here

And here:

I don’t know why this is so difficult for you to grasp.

@swamidass,

Wasnt this a fascinating exercise? I bet you had no idea how many different shades our astrophysicist friend would have to exercise to bolster the idea that Galileo was not persecuted for Science…“so he was just another loser like Bruno.”

@PdotdQ

Because you cant equate Galileo with Bruno. Period.

I never did this. You’re the one who brought Galileo to the thread:

@PdotdQ

Yes… I affirm that it was I who brought up Bruno in this thread…to divert you from the goal of dismissing the brutal treatment Galileo received.

We have already seen Bruno’s courage turned into clouds of ego… because he held fantastic theological ideas.

Then came Ted Davis’ prior critiques of Galileo acting disagreeable…

… followed now by this thread where you say Galileo was persecuted for something OTHER than science. [Typo “wasnt” now corrected to “was”]

Pure balderdash.

Some corrections:

This thread is originally about Bruno. You brought up Galileo, not the other way around. I also have no such goal.

My claim is that Galileo was persecuted for something other than science, not “wasnt”.

That seems odd. He wrote a book about the evidence. Some of it, like his theory of the tides, was incorrect. But much of it was find. Why, for example, aren’t the phases of Venus scientific evidence?

The phases of Venus ruled out the Ptolemaic geocentric model, but not more complicated models such as those proposed by Tycho Brahe or Giovanni Riccioli. This is true for much of the evidence: they ruled out Ptolemaic models but are consistent with more complicated geocentric models.

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OK, what about the observation that in the observed system, the smaller object always orbits the larger, as with the moons of Jupiter? There is no case (other than, in Tycho’s system, the earth) in which the larger orbits the smaller. When, in your opinion, was there evidence to distinguish the Tychonian model from the Copernican?

And hey, his dialogue concerned the two chief world systems, not multiple systems.

Back then they did not know the sizes and masses of planets and stars. Indeed, they thought that the Earth is the most massive thing that is too sluggish to move - hence the geocentric system makes sense. As Tycho Brahe said about the Copernican system why he thinks Copernicus was wrong:

Yet it ascribes to the Earth, that hulking, lazy body, unfit for motion, a motion as quick as that of the aethereal torches, and a triple motion at that.

I am not sure, but in 1806, the first measurement of stellar parallax was performed. The absence of measured stellar parallax was a big problem in Galileo’s model.

@PdotdQ

The obvious typo (“wasnt”) has been corrected to “was”.

Yes… i agree…i brought Galileo into the discussion. It needed to be done.

@PdotdQ

For the record, John was the one to first mention Galileo.