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How Did Galileo See In The Heavens

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How Did Galileo See In The Heavens
Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer who provided many scientific insights that paved the way for later scientists. His explorations of the laws of motion and improvement of the telescope helped him further understand the universe and world around him. The two caused him to dispute the then current beliefs at the time that all things in the heavens revolved around the Earth.
Galileo made history with his observations of the heavens. In 1610, he wrote a book revealing his observations, Sindereus Nuncus (The Starry Messenger) regarding the surface of the Moon, Milky Way, and Medicean. Galileo was expecting the Moon to be a perfect, smooth sphere since it was the Aristotelian assumptions that the heavens were perfect. The ancients believed the heavens were made of a presumably perfect element, the aether, and this aether moved in perfect circles, hence the motion of the planets. …show more content…
But the two were about two very different things; as Galileo says quoting Cardinal Baronius “the Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go” [Professor Dauben Week IV AWA]. Jacob Bronowski concurs with Galileo saying,: “The news was sensational…And yet is was not altogether welcome, because what Galileo saw in the sky, and revealed to everyone who was willing to look, was that the Ptolemaic heaven simply would not work. Copernicus’s powerful guess had been right, and now stood open and revealed. And like many more recent scientific results, that did not at all please the prejudice of the establishment of his day” [Bronowski 1973 pg. 204].
Galileo reconciles the conflict between science and religion by saying that to “abandon reason and the evidence of our senses in favor of some biblical passage” would be “contrary to the sense of the Bible and the intention of the holy Fathers” [Galileo quoted from Drake pg. 179]. Galileo points out that Copernicus never mentions matters of religion and faith, nor does
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