Galileo: And the Science Deniers

Mario Livio reminds us that one of the major goals of physics today is to formulate a theory that would unify all the fundamental forces of nature – gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear reactions. He tells us that it was Galileo ‘who took the first, insightful step toward such a unification’.

This is not just another biography, but an illuminating one that explains how and why Galileo found himself before the Inquisition. It was not so much his defence of the Copernican view that the earth revolves around the sun, contrary to the ancient but mistaken view of Aristotle, but the fact that his explanation trespassed into the realm of the Church.

Only the Church has the right to interpret what the Bible says. The passages in Joshua 10 and Psalm 19 in which it was stated that the sun stood still, are matters of theology, not science. Livio shows the insidious antagonism the clerics have against Galileo and how they manoeuvre him, ultimately, to face the Inquisition.

This is an outstanding biography because Livio, himself an astrophysicist, could not help but explain the science to us, but how clearly and vividly he does so. It is what presents the context of Galileo’s achievements. The collateral story of Galileo’s eventual humiliation in Rome is told by Livio in arresting fashion. We see how a brilliant but naïve scientist got trapped by his scriptural enemies who rejects Galileo’s theories even though he explains with clarity how the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic world system has been dismantled by the Copernican one.

From what we see even today, in 2021, science still has its deniers. They will not read this book. But anyone who has an open mind will surely find light, if not through Galileo’s arguments, then certainly through his life; one dedicated to the cause of science. The words ‘Science Deniers’ in Livio’s book are significant today because this biography shows how the Catholic Church denied not only the discoveries of Copernicus, but also of Galileo’s, in favour of the unscientific, unproven, theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy – the obstinate denial that the sun moves from east to west and that the earth stood still. The contradiction by Galileo caused him to be subjected to the humiliation of the Inquisition and ultimate house imprisonment and the banning of his book, the Dialogo. It was the Church that insisted that science was wrong. It was only in 1992 that Galileo was exonerated. And even then, rather than accepting that the Bible is wrong and science is right, the Church created a moat around itself; a bubble in which scientific truth belongs to science and ‘truth of faith’ belongs to religion.