Assignment 1

Galileo Sentenced to Life Imprisonment

Italian physicist and astronomer, Galileo Galilei, was finally sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday for heresy. Even though Galileo was given great recognition by the doge of Venice for creating a telescope, he has done nothing good since then. Galileo used his telescope to observe the planets and make absurd “discoveries,” as he called them, which contradicted the well fact that only perfectly spherical bodies could exist in the heavens. In 1589 Galileo made an attempt to prove the great Aristotle’s wrong by dropping objects of different weight off the Leaning Tower and seeing if they fall at the same rate. (The actual results from that experiment are not known.)

Galileo is a follower of the Copernican theory, which states that the earth revolves around the sun, and is much despised by the Roman Catholic Church. Galileo was warned by Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine that he must no longer hold or defend the concept that the earth moves, but only use it hypothetically. Galileo lay low for a while but not long enough. In 1926 Galileo began a book he whished to call “Dialogue on the Tides,” in which he discussed the Copernican hypotheses in relation to the physics of tides. When it was licensed for printing by the Roman Catholic censors at Rome, God Bless them, they renamed it “Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems.” Shortly after, Galileo was summoned to Rome by the Inquisition for “grave suspicion of heresy.” Yesterday they finally sentenced him to life imprisonment; thank God we finally got this heretic off our streets.

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