Would Galileo save his own butt?

Galileo contributed so much in the realm of modern day astronomy. He challenged the way we perceived our surroundings at that time. I still have no idea how a man would even come up with the notion to even do such a thing as to look up at the moon and observe its contour, but he did, or spend hours in the dark staring at Jupiter through a telescope trying to make sense of the “stars” that surround it. But if he had not done it, we might still live in a world where we think the moon is just a smooth silvery ball in the sky or that Jupiter has its own system of planets, but we now have the opportunity to explore the possibilities of life on Europa, and take clues from the moon and form theories on the formation of the solar system. Not to discredit any of Galileo’s discoveries, but they are stepping-stones to the plethora of opportunities we have today to explore new ideas and understand old ones more wholly.

This picture really has no academic merit,

its just a really funny looking tattoo.

Although Galileo knew that what he was discovering was important, I really don’t believe he knew the significance of these discoveries. It seemed to me that Galileo was doing all this observing for fun, and that he happened to notice some of these peculiarities while looking at the moon and stars. I personally feel that if Galileo knew the impact that these discoveries would have had on the scholars of his time that he would have really pushed for these ideas (at the time) to become more pronounced in the scientific community at the time.

http://failblog.org/2009/08/31/fox-news-fail/ click this only if you want to see a semi-innappropriate news caption

Having taken an astronomy course in high school, I have first-hand experience in viewing what Galileo observed. I have seen the valleys and rifts on the surface of the moon from a telescope and have viewed Jupiter (and what I assume to have been its moons) and found them to be extraordinary. And could only have wished to be there and fell what Galileo felt when he was just first observing these things (if you couldn’t have guessed it, that’s my attempt at being heartfelt, but being semi-truthful).

Lucretius’ On The Nature of Things taught me how far we have come as a civilization and how we have come to accept new ideas and take to change more positively (not to say there are a couple of exceptions to this statement). But in Galileo’s time, it was not very common to challenge the precedents, especially when it went against what the church had said. It could have left you labeled as a heretic or even have gotten you killed.

As most of the population in Europe in the 1600s was Roman Catholic, many scholars who could disprove the teachings of the church kept quiet about what they have discovered for fear of their lives and families. So to avoid any of this conflict at all, many scholars simply refused to even consider challenging the church at all by not having any affiliation with radical scholars of the time. Which is a sad thought because there is no telling what these people what have brought to attention if fear was not a limiting factor. In order for people to not have their faith in the church brought to question, many would just mock the scholars against their better judgment so as to not seem heretical themselves. People still do this today, refusal to associate with people whom they find socially awkward or unappealing. So its not to hard to justify their actions, personally I would have done the same thing if I had to choose between living another day or fleeing to exile in a foreign land.

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