The Galileo story, as embedded in the general consciousness, is that Galileo looked through his new-fangled telescope at Jupiter, saw 4 moons orbiting it, and realised that he finally had proof that not everything orbited Earth… that we weren’t the centre of the universe. The overbearing church put him on trial for this heresy, found him guilty, and forced him to recant his views. Defiant to the last, Galileo tells them E pur si muove, normally translated these days as, “Fuck you, Mr Pope, you can silence me, but the truth remains true.”

In that form, it has become a parable for everybody who believes that they are the little guy, but with the facts on their side. 

In a way it’s a strange position to want to be in. Sure, Galileo is revered now and the four moons he discovered are collectively named after him, but he was hardly a winner at the time. After his trial he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. Everything he’d ever written was banned by the church, with his final work having to be printed in protestant Holland. His parting quip, if it was delivered at all, almost certainly wasn’t delivered as defiantly as it is in the popular imagination. When the court has just commuted your sentence of imprisonment at the hands of the inquisition to house arrest, but absolutely has the power to reverse that, and throw a spot of torture or death into the mix, you tend not to leave the building yelling, “Urban warfare now!”

Nor was the church’s position as irrational as we like to think. They did support geocentrism – the belief that the Earth lies at the centre of the universe – for scriptural reasons, but there were scientific arguments for it as well. The one we commonly overlook is that it worked. It allowed astronomers to calculate, quite precisely, where planets would be.

If you’re puzzled as to why a fundamentally wrong model delivered correct results, the answer is that it had been wrong for a very long time, and had gradually been gamed to match observations. Because a simple model of everything going circles around the Earth wouldn’t fit with the motion of the planets in the sky, they had been modelled so that they not only orbited the Earth, but also went in their own little circular orbits, called epicycles, which matched predictions to observations.

Also, without geocentrism, there was no mechanism to explain why things fell down when you dropped them. Newton’s theory of gravity was still half a century away. In its stead the idea that everything fell towards the centre of the universe seemed to make some sort of sense.

It’s easy to laugh now, but just how sure are you that if you’d been alive in the 1630s you’d be calculating the gravitational constant, rather than olde-times tweeting, “Just what does everything fall towards, Galidildo?”

There are lots of other factors at play as well. Although we often think of the battle as being between the church’s geocentric model, dating back to Ptolemy, and the heliocentric model of Copernicus, there was a third system in play. Developed by Tycho Brahe, the 2nd most famous person to have an artificial nose, after Michael Jackson, this model still had the Earth at the centre, with the sun orbiting it, but now the other planets orbited the sun. The church was fine with this – geocentrism was what they were wed to – so presumably would have been fine with Galileo’s moons orbiting Jupiter, as it orbited the sun, which orbited Earth.

While it’s not exactly elegant it does skewer the simplistic view that Galileo had observed something orbiting a body other than the Earth, and this was concrete proof that the Earth wasn’t the centre of everything.

There’s also the matter of the timeline. The church ordered Galileo to stop supporting the heliocentric model in 1616 after, it must be said, a fairly disastrous work by him, that suggested the movement of the Earth orbiting caused the tides (which had to side-step its own conclusion that there should only be one tide per day, by hand-waving and suggesting the second tide was probably just the water sloshing around). Yet Galileo’s trial wasn’t until 1633. Just what had happened in the 17 years between?

The answer, rather fatally for the Church vs Galileo view, is that the Pope asked Galileo to write a book comparing the arguments for and against geo- and helio-centric models.

In 1623 Maffeo Barberini had become Pope. Although he believed the Earth was the centre of the universe he was a friend of Galileo, admired his intellect, and had opposed the church’s sanction of him, 7 years earlier.

The Pope laid down some ground rules for this new book; Galileo had to be neutral and not clearly favour the heliocentric model, and he had to present the Pope’s own views and arguments as part of the work.

This should have been the turning point. This was the motherfucking Pope sanctioning a book that could fully discuss an idea that had been absolute heresy only a few years earlier. Heliocentrism was a much simpler, more elegant, idea than the wheels-within-wheels of the Earth-centred models, Galileo had answers to many of the more obvious questions it raised, like How come it doesn’t feel like we’re moving, and it even explained phenomena, such as the newly observed phases of Venus (like the phases of the Moon, caused by the comparative positions of Earth and Venus in relation to the Sun) that the other models couldn’t. A side-by-side comparison of the two should have been an open goal.

So what went wrong?

Well, Signor Tides-Are-Splishy-Splashy-Water screwed it up.

Because the book was intended for the educated, but not necessarily scientific, audience it was not written as a dry textbook. Instead it takes the form of a conversation, over the course of 4 days, between two educated natural philosophers and a lay-person.

Salviati takes the side of the heliocentric model, while the Pope’s favoured geocentric system is represented by…

Simplicio.

He called him Simplicio.

Simplicio gets muddled by his own arguments, has his points against Salviati easily answered, and his own assertions disproved.

Which kind of brings me back to what my point was, 1,000 words ago – Galileo was cancelled, to use modern terminology, but he was cancelled because, given a platform, and with the facts firmly on his side,  he wrote a whole book to which the glaring subtext is The Pope is a stupid shit-head.

And perhaps that’s the real lesson of the Galileo story – not defiantly shouting that you’re right as you’re dragged out of the room, but remembering that, even when you’re right, powerful people who’ve been wrong for a very long time are still powerful people, and if you’re given a chance to change their minds it might be wise to avoid hubris.

After all, nobody really wants to be Galileo, and it’s better to be proven to be on the right side of history before it becomes history.