“Who and who?” Frank asked.
“Oh, Copernicus was the Catholic priest who first discovered that the Earth orbits the sun, and Kepler was the one who figured out the laws of orbital mechanics. He died only a few years ago, as it happens. But I’m wandering off the point again.”
“You say Galileo got caught by politics?”
“Yes. I said before that everyone thinks of it as a plucky scientist battling against the medieval darkness, but it’s not that simple. To start with, as I said, Galileo used to be friends with the pope.”
Frank heard where Mazzare put the stress on the words, and took his cue. “Used to be?”
Mazzare grinned. “Right up to when Galileo called the pope a simpleton in print.”
Frank couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Oh, not in so many words,” Mazzare added, “but he took every opinion the pope ever expressed on the subjects of science and astronomy and put them into the mouth of a character called Simplicio. Now, at his trial—as I recall—he claimed that was supposed to be Simplicius, a philosopher from classical times. Thing is, he wrote it in Italian, and in Italian, Simplicio means . . .” He pointed to Frank.
“Simpleton. So the pope’s really ticked off, huh?”
Mazzare wiggled his hand back and forth. “Hard to know, really. Urban VIII is a very sophisticated man, by all accounts. Not the type to fly into a rage over a minor personal insult—especially since he could, after all, choose to accept Galileo’s excuse. Anyway, just to make his own life more interesting, Galileo published his book in Italian, like I say. So he couldn’t claim that he was trying to start a learned debate, he’d written for the popular market. Even so, if he could have proven it, he’d have been fine. After all, if nature says one thing and the Church’s teaching says another, the Church’s teaching has to be wrong and the teaching has to be changed, right?”
“They can do that?” Frank asked.
“We can and we do, Frank. The thing is, a couple of places in the Bible, it talks about the sun going around the Earth. Now, you can read that as a description of what really is going on, or you can read it as the guy who wrote the words down saying what it looked like.”
“And the Church is saying that’s what it really is, right?” Frank was following the logic, now.
“That’s about the size of it. And Galileo couldn’t prove otherwise, you see. Part of that was that the astronomer who had the best evidence for the theory he was trying to prove was one of the many people Galileo had annoyed over the years. In fact, he’d denounced the evidence as fraudulent.”
“What was it?” Frank was actually getting really interested, now.
“It was a comet, as I recall. Scheiner, who’s in Rome right now, or it might have been Grassi, another of the Church’s astronomers, I can’t remember—”
“The Church has astronomers?”
“Sure. Most of the leading astronomers in this day and age are actually Catholic priests. Did you run into Father Kircher at the high school?”
“He’s an astronomer?”
“Among other things, yes. He does just about everything; a very bright man. But as I say, there are these two Church astronomers who’ve got the evidence that goes a long way to prove what Galileo was saying.”
“Then why don’t they, I mean why didn’t they come forward with it? Didn’t they want to get accused of heresy too?”
Mazzare laughed. “This is why I said it was more complicated than everyone thinks. They published it, years ago. And Galileo called them both frauds. Galileo thinks comets are optical illusions in the upper atmosphere.”
“He thinks what?” That didn’t sound like the Galileo he’d heard about.
“Oh, yes. A lot of Galileo’s ‘science’ was off-base. He came up with a wrong explanation for the tides, too. To make things worse, he’s a notorious intellectual bully who rarely sees the need for common politeness. Take Scheiner and Grassi: he called one of them a drunk and the other one a plagiarist. Which is why they, between them, reported Galileo to the Inquisition when he published his last book. In which, as I say, he called the pope a simpleton.”