Galileo Galilei was tried by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for advocating that the Earth orbits the Sun. What was his sentence?
Galileo recanted his Copernican views publicly under threat of torture and was sentenced to house arrest. He spent the last nine years of his life at his villa at Arcetri near Florence, where he continued working on physics and mathematics in private; his *Two New Sciences* (the foundational work of modern mechanics) was written under house arrest and smuggled out for publication in the Dutch Republic in 1638. He went blind in 1638 and died at Arcetri on 8 January 1642. The Inquisition had burned Giordano Bruno in 1600 for related heretical positions; the Catholic Church formally rehabilitated Galileo in 1992.
Read the full story →In 1610 four astronomers in four countries pointed early telescopes at the Sun and saw spots. They spent the next decade arguing about who had seen them first.
Related questions
- Who was Galileo's main rival in the 1610s sunspot priority dispute?
- On Christmas Day in what year did Pope Leo III crown Charlemagne Emperor of the Romans in St Peter's Basilica?
- Robert Koch identified the cholera bacterium in 1883 in Alexandria and confirmed the finding in Calcutta a few months later. But an Italian had identified the same comma-shaped organism nearly 30 years earlier, and been ignored. Who?
- Who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — the 1,100-square-metre fresco that has *The Creation of Adam* in the middle?