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Born on this day in 1564, Galileo Galilei (more) published his Starry Messenger in 1610, in which he used his newly perfected telescope to discover, among other things, the ‘Medicean stars‘ (new revisionist book on Galileo’s rise and fall), or, as we know them, the Galilean Moons.  

In the history of science, the Starry Messenger:

• provided the first direct evidence that not everything orbited the Earth (geocentricity),
• provided an explanation for the retrograde motion of the planets, and
• indicted that a theory of Copernicus might be correct. 

It took only 346 years for the Catholic Church to apologize for persecuting him (‘The Galileo Affair‘) – I guess science and religion can coexist in the long run. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 11:27 am and is filed under Books, Math & Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.