Stargazing Guy

Attributed to Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642)

“And yet it moves.” (“Eppur si muove”)

Even if Galileo never spoke those words, they have much relevance for us currently, when even provable facts are under attack by science deniers. Galileo’s legendary intellectual defiance — “in spite of what you believe, these are the facts”—becomes more important than ever.

An appropriate story for the times, Mario Livio’s Galileo and the Science Deniers, is an autobiography of Galileo set against modern conspiracy theorists and science deniers, but not shying away form the fact that Galileo wasn’t always right!

Mario Livio’s invesitgation into Eppur si muove can be found here.

“Nevertheless … the Turtle Moves!” (“De Chelonian Mobile”)

Credit: Pratchett, Terry. Small Gods: (Discworld Novel 13) (Discworld series) (p. 180 and p. 24). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

Small Gods turns the story of Galileo and the Inquisition upside down: scientists know the Discworld is a flat disc on the back of a turtle swimming through space, but in Omnia, they hold the bigoted belief that it is a sphere orbiting the sun. A heretical thinker who pointed out the truth was heard to mutter that the turtle really moves, just as Galileo – after being forced by the Catholic church to deny Copernicus’s theory that the spherical earth orbits the sun – is said to have muttered: “And yet it moves.”

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PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message with a date and time and we can share it, remotely, at the same time, and think about the Cosmos.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else, too, because as Adam Smith said, “we naturally desire not only to be loved but to be lovely”.

Remember, hope lives here.

Opening image credit: justus_sustermans_-_portrait_of_galileo_galilei_1636.jpg

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