Comment on Hails
niktemadur@lemmy.world 6 months agoDIDN’T like it. Then they learned their lesson to not interfere with astronomers, to the point that it was an ordained Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, who delved into the math of Relativity and came up with the concept of “the primordial atom”, later popularly coined as The Big Bang, back in the 1920s. Which put Lemaître at odds with Einstein, who insisted on an eternal, “Steady State Universe”.
In fact, I remember reading that the Vatican itself proudly owned this fact to the point that they financed, built and still run an observatory in Arizona, doing authentic cosmological research.
AEsheron@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Not to mention it wasn’t really “the church” as much as one egotistical asshat in the church that had beef with Galileo and more or less made up a reason to persecute him. And when more level headed parts of the church told Galileo to chill and he’d be fine he just doubled down and thumbed his nose at the pope. It was never really about the science at all, he was being funded by the church to do his research in the first place.
niktemadur@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That is another very important consideration, I’ve heard about Galileo’s pride and ego, explosive temper and big mouth. How he would not listen to reason, and would burn all bridges behind him.
The pope even considered Galileo a friend, gave him all sorts of opportunities to get out of trouble, but then Galileo wrote a Plato-style dialogue between three people, one of them a simpleton, and gave that character the same speech patterns like the ones his pope friend had.