Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - This Book Sent Galileo To JAIL! (#291)

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo) is a 1632 Italian-language book by Galileo Galilei comparing the Copernican system with the traditional Ptolemaic system. It was translated into Latin as Systema cosmicum (English: Cosmic System) in 1635 by Matthias Bernegger. The book was dedicated to Galileo's patron, Ferdinando II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who received the first printed copy on February 22, 1632. Download your copy of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in auidiobook form here https://BrianKeating.com/dialogue Background In the Copernican system, the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun, while in the Ptolemaic system, everything in the Universe circles around the Earth. The Dialogue was published in Florence under a formal license from the Inquisition. In 1633, Galileo was found to be "vehemently suspect of heresy" based on the book, which was then placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, from which it was not removed until 1835 (after the theories it discussed had been permitted in print in 1822). In an action that was not announced at the time, the publication of anything else he had written or ever might write was also banned in Catholic countries. Overview While writing the book, Galileo referred to it as his Dialogue on the Tides, and when the manuscript went to the Inquisition for approval, the title was Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea. He was ordered to remove all mention of tides from the title and to change the preface because granting approval to such a title would look like approval of his theory of the tides using the motion of the Earth as proof. As a result, the formal title on the title page is Dialogue, which is followed by Galileo's name, academic posts, and followed by a long subtitle. The name by which the work is now known was extracted by the printer from the description on the title page when permission was given to reprint it with an approved preface by a Catholic theologian in 1744. This must be kept in mind when discussing Galileo's motives for writing the book. Although the book is presented formally as a consideration of both systems (as it needed to be in order to be published at all), there is no question that the Copernican side gets the better of the argument. Structure The book is presented as a series of discussions, over a span of four days, among two philosophers and a layman: Salviati argues for the Copernican position and presents some of Galileo's views directly, calling him the "Academician" in honor of Galileo's membership in the Accademia dei Lincei. He is named after Galileo's friend Filippo Salviati (1582–1614). Sagredo is an intelligent layman who is initially neutral. He is named after Galileo's friend Giovanni Francesco Sagredo (1571–1620). Simplicio, a dedicated follower of Ptolemy and Aristotle, presents the traditional views and the arguments against the Copernican position. He is supposedly named after Simplicius of Cilicia, a sixth-century commentator on Aristotle, but it was suspected the name was a double entendre, as the Italian for "simple" (as in "simple minded") is "semplice".Simplicio is modeled on two contemporary conservative philosophers, Lodovico delle Colombe (1565–1616?), Galileo's opponent, and Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631), a Paduan colleague who had refused to look through the telescope. Colombe was the leader of a group of Florentine opponents of Galileo's, which some of the latter's friends referred to as "the pigeon league". Join PragerU: www.prageru.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's an extremely important book in the history of science for many different reasons, one of which is that it's really laying out the scientific method for the first time to a popular audience. This book was written, not in Latin, which was the conversant language for scientists of the day, the only language that Galilei was permitted to write in. He wasn't allowed to teach in Italian because that would be communicating to the mass public and the Catholic Church wasn't ready for that in the early 1600s. In this book, he writes for a popular audience. And it's really perhaps the first and might be the best.

example of popular science writing. You may have read about Galileo and his telescope, but do you really know his story? Why did Galileo have such an outsized influence on science? What were his most important contributions? Why did he risk his life and sacrifice his freedom to publish his heretical theories? In this episode of Into the Impossible, we cross-published with Prager University Book Club's host Michael Knowles' interview with Brian Keeney on one of Brian's favorite subjects, Galileo.

You're going to get a unique fast-paced in-depth account of what made Galileo such a towering historical figure, including a unique primer on his most famous work, the dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, or simply the Diologo. Most importantly, what lessons about freedom of thought and expression can apply today? under the impossible is making you ever smarter and keeping free thinking alive. Please dialogue with us in the form of a review and a five-star rating. We appreciate it. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Open the pod bay doors, please, hell. Welcome back to the book club. I'm Michael Knowles. And for this episode, we are going to do something we've never done on the book club before. we are going to pry open a science textbook, but it's much less dry than it sounds. This is a very old school science textbook. It's not even really a textbook. It's a dialogue concerning the two chief world systems by Galilea. My guest, Brian Keating, the Chancellor Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, and the author of losing the Nobel Prize.

Brian, thank you for being here. It's a great pleasure to be here, Michael. Brett, I also have to thank you. You brought me presents. I did. You're the first guest to bring me presents, including Peace of the Moon. Yes. You brought me somehow a piece. I don't even know, did you hitch a ride with Richard Branson or something? I don't know.

This was delivered the old-fashioned way by the United States Postal Service. That's so great. You can get your very own samples of the Moon if you were an astronaut. That would be one way to get it, expensive way to get it. Or you can actually get them online. There are actually sources of getting slices of the Moon, and this is actually apropos of this book, because the moon figures greatly in the dialogue concerning the two chief world systems. And it sort of provides a foil to some of the arguments against that of the protagonist,

really portraying Galileo himself as character, Salviati. But I thought it would be good to just maybe summarize what this book is and how it had an effect on me as a young scientist and even greater effect as a more mature scientist. Yes, I think that's a good idea because I think there might be one or two people out there who didn't get to finish the whole book. Maybe it tops three. That's right. So, yeah, could you just very briefly describe how the book is designed and who the characters are and why Galileo got thrown into prison? Well, we'll get into that too. That's a little bit of some sort too.

So it's an extremely important book in the history of science for many different reasons. One of which is that it's really laying out the scientific method for the first time to a popular audience. This book was written not in Latin, which was the conversant language for scientists of the day, the only language that Galileo was permitted to write. in. He wasn't allowed to teach in Italian because that would be communicating to the mass public and the Catholic Church wasn't ready for that in the early 1600s. He was prohibited via a Vatican injunction to do so. But in this book, he writes for a popular audience. And it's really perhaps the first and might be the best example of popular science write it. It has no equations of note. So it's not a textbook like you would encounter when you come back and get your PhD someday, perhaps in San Diego. It has no equations, no formula, nothing complicated. It presents. some data, but the beautiful thing about this book is that it's literature. It's a work of literature

masquerading as a book about the way the world or really the universe could be arranged. And that is really the distinction that's set into motion, the scientific revolution, which we now kind of take for granted in our technological age. But if you ever stop and think about it, how do you really know that the earth goes around the sun? It doesn't appear that way. Things would be different according to our natural notions of how motion and mass and other things work. So Galileo was responding to that, the perception that we feel like the Earth is stationary and it appears as if the sun and the stars are orbiting around us. Some more than others here in Hollywood, right? That's right. Orbiting around each and every one of us. Well, you make this point on the textbook. Most science

textbooks I've read do not have characters. They do not have a storyline. They do not take So the book is divided into four days of these conversations, and there are three principal characters. That's right. So the first character is sort of an interlocutor, whose job is really to kind of translate between the two other protagonists in the story. One by the name of Salviati, and he really has the words of Galileo. These were all three real existing human beings that existed that Galileo knew, two of whom Salviati and Sagreiro had passed away decades earlier when Galileo wrote this in 1630. when it was published. But there were true people. The third person, by the name of Simplicio,

aka the simpleton, he's, you know, considered by Galileo. Galilee describes him sort of like an amalgam of maybe a sixth century, you know, a scientist. A commentator on Aristotle. It's so far down. You say, you've got Salviati. He's the one, and there are two other characters

we should mention. Copernicus, who's saying that the earth revolves around the sun. Correct. And Ptolemy, the older view, who says that the sun revolves around the earth. And so those are the two views that are being debated. And you've got Salviati, who Galileo agrees with. The Savior. The Savior, right? And he's representing the Copernican view, the view that we now hold, right, that the earth goes around the sun. That's right. You've got the interlocutor, as you say, Sagredo, who's kind of mediating between these guys. They both

use their real names. So how come the guy who's representing Ptolemy, and really Aristotle, too? They don't call him Ptolemy. They don't call him Aristotle. They don't use them. use his real name. They use this name of this obscure commentator, Simplicio. Why do they call him simple? Well, I think Gaunt Leo was known as a brilliant scientist, but he had immense flaws. He had immense challenges to his character that ultimately what led to his undoing, one of which is that he would do things that were precisely the impolitic thing to do, such as take the index's prohibition of Copernican work and the logic that goes behind the Aristotelian earth-centered view of the cosmos, and he would put those in the very injunction against him, he put those in the words of

the simpleton, namely the Pope, who would later become Pope, Pope Urban, who would preside over the Holy Office or the Holy See. I always say it's like a euphemism, like the IRS is the money donation service. You know, you just donate your money. The Holy Office, yes, that's exactly what it was. It was the Inquisition. And in truth, Galileo had a lot to, it was very much at fault when it came to the ultimate, you know, culmination. of that story. But maybe before we get there, we talk about why this is such a unique work of literature. As you say, there are no equations, not textbook, or it's not like any textbook we would see nowadays. It's what we would call, you know, popular science or a trade book,

meaning that it's meant for the general audience. So that's why I think readers today, in addition to the scientifically brilliant ideas and logic and philosophy, theology, the most weighty subjects, the ultimate issues that mankind, we just don't have as much time to think about anymore. And maybe they had more time back then. There was fewer options on YouTube, etc. Netflix. Prager University didn't exist. But nevertheless, this is so brilliantly captivating that immediately sold out all across the continent. Gallia was world famous. Even in a very early age, this is almost 400-year-old book. We have, coincidentally. We have a first edition here from 1632. They all sold out. So I was obviously a friend of ours was able to get there in 1632,

grab this copy of the book. And it's funny because when the book eventually is put on the list of forbidden books, it was too late because the thing sold out within three days or something. Yeah, so I got that from a friend who got it on Amazon, you know, 400-year delivery. That's it. There's a little known aspect of Amazon that you could get. So this is from a friend who's a collector of these rare books and has first edition copies of it and has generously loaned it to us for today. And this book is so brilliantly displayed. It has wonderful illustrations, including the cover, the frontist piece as it's known, which depicts these wonderful characters, which were later used in another book after Galileo was supposedly tortured and imprisoned, which didn't really happen. He wrote another book also called the dialogue in dialogue format about two different types of science, he called it, and that really revolved around what we call mechanics and material science today, but the same three characters come back in this work that was published only a few years before he passed away in 1642 or so. What makes this book so spectacularly important and revelatory for me is that you can be a great scientist and also a great writer.

And Galileo was this brilliant amalgam of all these different traits, including the human foibles, flaws and peccadillos that we all have. And there's a stereotype that scientists are just these geniuses, walking Wikipedia's expert knowledge. The scientist. I trust the scientist. I don't trust other scientists. You shouldn't trust me. So scientists are the least trusting of other scientists. I never made to say, oh, what did you just go? Oh, yeah.

Great, go to publish it. Here's your Stockholm Nobel friends. Sounds good to me. Scientists have the most doubt, and that's because, as you know, the word science means knowledge. Well, the only way that you get knowledge is by subjecting it to experimental empirical evidence. Well, what about something like, as I've talked about previously, the multiverse, for which there is no evidence existing currently. It doesn't mean there never will be.

But to what level should you trust a scientist that's purely speculating on theoretical findings? It could be purely theoretical. It doesn't mean it's wrong. The theory of evolution, we have evidence for the theory. theory of evolution, right? What Galileo does so brilliantly here is he presents these two theses. Obviously, he's partial to the Copernican, the heliocentric model of the universe. But again, I ask, as the only homework assignment that you'll get on Prager University, this quarter, maybe you'll get more in future quarters, is to think about it. What if you

were teleported back to 1631 before this book came out? And you're trying to communicate all these wonderful discoveries of the past nearly 400 years. How would you prove the most simple postulates of all, that the earth is a sphere, that the earth rotates on its axis once per 24 hours, and that once per 365 and a quarter days, it orbits around the sun in motion. It sure as heck doesn't feel like that, and that's the subject of day one, in the first day of this book. In the second day, they get into a little bit more obscure observations rather than just purely philosophical arguments on the nature of how things fall down, and things are attracted to the centers, occupied them for the most part in day one. In day three, they start talking about

about the composition of the Earth is sort of like a magnet, and maybe it's made of little tiny magnets all kind of congealed together. Maybe it's not. What is the nature of the surface of the moon? If it's perfect, it was thought to be perfectly smooth. It doesn't look smooth, right? It doesn't look smooth, I can see. Imperfections in it, doesn't it?

And so Galileo had discovered, he didn't invent the telescope, but he was the first observational astronomer to look through a telescope, conceive a scientific hypothesis, subjected to tests, and refine his model. And that's why you shouldn't trust a scientist. Because at any one of those stages, he had great blunders. I mean, he was really brilliant. I always say, you know, he could have had a great career if he didn't make these blunders. Einstein had great blunders.

There's not a serious scientist who hasn't made a serious mistake. And with Galileo, fortunately or unfortunately, those mistakes usually are wrong around the politics of the day. Yes. Not the science. This reminds me, this trusting scientist. Because it occurs to me when I think of all these science, I think, well, Ptolemy is a scientist, right? and some Tycho Brai is a scientist and all these other guys. And they get things wrong.

There's a great line in the second day. And this is Segredo, the interlocutor, is the one. And he's recounting a story, which is, by the way, now become a cliche. And he's talking to this guy who's a follower of Aristotle and Ptolemy, right? And he asked this man whether he was at last satisfied and convinced that the nerves originated in the brain and not in the heart. previously they had thought that the nerves come from the heart, but now because of scientific inquiry, we know it's in the brain. So he asks this devotee of Aristotle, are you now satisfied?

And the philosopher, after considering a while, answered, you have made me see this matter so plainly and palpably that if Aristotle's text were not contrary to it, stating clearly that the nerves originated in the heart, I should be forced to admit it to be true. But Aristotle said it, so I don't care what I've seen. I believe him over my lion eyes. Right. So I look at at that and I say almost everything that Aristotle said was brilliantly wrong. In other words he would say things like a heavier object

falls faster than a lighter object. And Galilei would say, what if you have this heavy object like a book? But in midair somehow, they didn't say it was a laser beam, but let's say it breaks apart in midair. Now does it fall slower? Or let's say just a tiny bit of it breaks off. So now the tiny bit is lighter than the head. Of course not. It's absurd.

They could have figured that out in 300 BC when Aristotle was promulgating. Now he had some interesting ideas, but it turns out that almost all of them were wrong. And so what Galilei... On the physical side. On the metaphysical side, I give a lot more... In terms of politics, very interesting.

But when you look at what Galilei, I always say, if you have the choice between a weather woman who's half right and half wrong, or one that's always wrong, always choose the one that's always wrong because it'll just do the opposite. That Galileo used to great effect. The ultimate conclusion of this book in Day 4 turns out to be wrong. And it actually is only thanks to the Pope who enjoined him to not publish the book with his original title, which was the spectacular, which would do so well in A-B-Testing. The original title that Galileo wanted was on the flux and reflux of the Earth's Tides. Wow.

Where do I get it? Run away. It's a blank book. No, no, but it wouldn't be a blank book. But actually, it's a subject of the fourth chapter about the fourth day, which Galileo felt was a dispositive conclusion that was. is inescapable that because the earth has oceans on it and because it spins on its axis, as he had proved in the preceding days, as it rotates around the sun, just as this vodka, no, just as this water sloshes about in this bottle as I rotate and revolve it, so too are tides

on the earth's surface caused by such a phenomenon. Right. In fact, we now know that it is indeed the moon that causes the earth's tide. The moon has a gravitational force field that acts on the earth and tugs on the oceans a little bit more and a little bit less on different sides of it four times a day. Galileo had the data, conclusion was absolutely wrong, because he fell victim to what we call confirmation bias. Scientists are very subject to it. I have personally been subject to it.

When you want to prove something so badly, maybe it's to get tenure, maybe it's to get a prize or to get attention, or maybe because your theory is so beautiful, it can't be wrong, as Einstein used to say, that you sort of fall in love with it and you discard contrary evidence. Galileo fell victim to it, and ultimately the Pope did him a real favor by forcing him to change it to this much more interesting provocative type. This is very funny that because people totally, it's not that they even misunderstand the Galileo incident, it's not that they're ignorant of it. It's that they know so much that isn't so. They know things that just didn't happen. So, you know, in the traditional way the story is told Galileo, this brilliant guy, he's totally oppressed by the Inquisition and by the Catholic

Church, and these awful ladies tortured, he's thrown in a prison cell. It's, you know, it's the worst anti-intellectual, anti-scholarship thing that's ever happened. And that isn't quite true. First of all, the Pope actually helps him because he gets that theory wrong. But the Pope had been sort of pals with Galileo, right? Pope Urban the 8th. And then how does Galileo repay him? He names his character Simpleton in the book. And there's another great line from the era, from another pal of Galileo's, Cardinal Beronius, who they were very, I won't say they were tolerant of these sort of scientific inquiries, but they weren't, you know, burning Galileo at the stake or anything like that. And Barronius famously said, that the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. It does not form these rock-solid, canonical scientific conclusions about the world, and so you can be open to inquiry. You say that Galileo runs afoul of the Inquisition because he was impolitic. I think he had an agenda, and I think his scientific agenda sort of superseded some of the reason and his interpersonal skills.

So there's a joke. How do you know a scientist is outgoing? He looks at your shoes when he talks to you instead of his own. So Galileo had great flaws. He was sort of boorish in his personal life. He wasn't the greatest father. He had two daughters and a son out of wedlock.

But he was a religious man. He did believe, and he considered himself a good Catholic, which is why the ultimate verdict, as you might say, was that he was guilty of suspicion of heresy, not heresy itself, for which he would have been tortured. It was sort of done under threat of torture, and you can argue if that's the same.

He certainly was never tortured in the classic sense. He did have to bow down and kiss the Pope's rings, et cetera. But given how... We all did in those days, right? My students... God forbid. But the point of Galileo being... There are actually books called, you know,

Galileo goes to jail and other myths. You know, so there's this narrative that was established after this book because of that incident, the Galileo affair, as it's known, that really chose to pit this as the first battle between science and God. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199.

And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot, Loss supplies last. Priced invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. And that Galileo, you know, they imprisoned reason.

There's another book called On Trial for Reason, suggesting that, you know, merely because of his ideas. Now, I ask you, there are comparisons made, you know, et cetera, but what if I came up with some idea that we're about to collide with an enormous black hole and you're the president Knowles and you're the most powerful ruler on earth? It's a question. If something could undermine,

caused pure panic and debate and just because maybe perhaps there's nothing good that can come of it. And you know that. Do you have an obligation to reveal that? If indeed you thought it's compatible with somewhat of the Catholic Church's worldview to go against what Galileo was saying. Right. So I think there are a lot of myths about scientists, and there's certainly a lot of myths about Galileo and how he was treated ultimately. Okay. But at the very least, you've convinced me.

you've affirmed for me what I had always known in my... Confirmation bias. It's confirmation bias because I always like digging in at Galileo. They didn't throw him in jail for being a scientist. They threw him in jail for being a jerk. But you say, okay, he doesn't get tortured. That's a total myth. But he does go to jail, surely.

So he was sentenced to house imprisonment. And I was lucky enough to host a conference in his very prison, namely his final villa, Villa de Galloillo, outside of Florence in a small town called our Chetri, which is less than a couple of kilometers from the convent where his daughters were serving as nuns. So they served as nuns within walking distance of their father and they would communicate with him.

He continued to write books and see visitors, and he was by no means, I always say, Bernie Madoff would trade jail cells in a second. It's sumptuous. Not to say that he might not have wanted to travel elsewhere. He was also very old. He was infirm. He had kidney problems probably, and ultimately he lived about another nine years or so after the sentence was handed down.

But it was by no means a torturous existence. He actually, as I say, wrote books, conducted final observations. And some of them went into what they consider his most important book, a second dialogue between these three wonderful characters called the Discorsi, the discussion on two chief sciences. You've assigned me now more homework. That's right. I have to. It's so interesting to me that when we talk about science, it has become such a politicized term, as now capital S, the trademark sign over the E, and you hear these terms like science denier, we're the party of science, we own science. And so often those stories

are just complete legends, fabrications, going back, probably most notably to Galileo, where I would suspect that the people who are always invading against the science deniers, they don't know the real story of what happened to Galileo. Yeah, it provides a very convenient, and this book, Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science, goes through this, you know, very complicated interplay between the church and science, and puts to lie some of the myths about these great characters, Giardana Bruno, who is another character held very closely to people for being burned at the stake, for postulating that stars were actually other solar systems where planets where people could live,

for example. But I think, you know, one thing to give a little bit of upgrading to the Catholic Church, so Galilei was never pardoned. And actually for me, that caused me, I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church at age 12, and I did want to eventually go all the way, which would be becoming a priest. And at that time, I got my first small telescope, not unlike one, that's back there. And the one homework assignment I would love to give people here, even in the middle of LA, you can see the exact same craters on the surface of the moon that Galileo saw. You can see the glorious rings of Saturn. You can see the moons of Jupiter and other heavenly objects that inspired Galileo towards a love, towards an affirmation that there was a higher power, which is actually

the ultimate conclusion of the book. If I may read one or two passages that really speak so loudly and speak to his poetic use of language. He was not just the dry science professor like Isaac Newton was or unreadable as Copernicus might be. This is the book that really set into motion the future hawkings and et cetera of the world, the future keyings of them. So he says, I do not presume to be able to adduce all the proper and sufficient causes of those effects, which are new to me, and which consequently I have had no chance to think about. What I'm about to say, I propose merely as a key to open portals to a road never be trodden by anyone in a firm hope that mine's more acute than mine will broaden this road and

penetrate further along it than I have done in my first revealing of it. He's giving an assignment. He's enjoying people to take up the path that he has started on, but continue it, meaning he's not the last word. And in fact, the last word goes to the Pope. The last word in the book goes to none other than Simplicio, the simpleton. Not too often you give the Simpleton the last word, but you'll indulge me in doing just the same. So before they break for drinks, there's a long discourse by Sagredo, and Simplicio said,

you need not make any excuses. They are superfluous, and especially to me, being accustomed to public debates, have heard disputants countless times, not merely go angry and excited at each other, but even break out into insulting speech, and sometimes come very close to blows.

But he basically said, I know if I had asked that God in his infinite power and wisdom, could have conferred upon the watery, element, the tides, its observer superkending motion by other means of its containing vessels, both of which would reply that he, capital H, could have, and that he, capital H, would have known how to do this in many ways, which are undeniable to our minds. He's giving the last word to the church. Right. And I think it was consonant with his viewpoint. I don't think he really, he was an atheist, by no means. There's no evidence for that. You know, there's another, there's another great line.

God comes up a lot more here than in most science. And it's not, it's not merely, I think, a sort of gloss for his true atheistic views. Insurance policy. You've got to give him more credit than that. He's a much deeper thinker than that. And he writes, this is on day three. He says, I say that it is brash for our feebleness to attempt to judge the reason for God's actions and to call everything in the universe vain and superfluous, which does not serve

us. Because that's really a central issue here, right? Man is not sitting at the very center of the universe if Galileo is right. And why on earth would these heavenly bodies not be perfectly smooth? Why would they have these imperfections? It has no purpose. It has no service to mankind. And so he says, well, I think it's a look.

It's a little brash. This is in the mouth of Salviati, the guy who's representing Galileo. He says, I think it would be brash to just say, oh, yeah, sorry, everything that doesn't serve us is vain and pointless, and God had no reason to do that. And then Segreda, the interlocutor, complicates this a little. He says, say rather, and I think you will be speaking. speaking more accurately, which we do not know to serve us. I believe that one of the greatest pieces of arrogance or rather madness that can be thought of is to say, since I do not know

how Jupiter or Saturn is of service to me, they are superfluous and even do not exist. Yes, that's brilliant. Now that is a beautiful complication here. And in a way exposes the arrogance of even the people that Galileo probably would side with and who now think they side with Galileo. And you see echoes of this in the modern militant atheist movements, the Lawrence Krausses, etc. That suggests, well, look at the Hubble Deep Field, which is an image made by the Hubble Space Telescope, staring for weeks at a time at a tiny blank spot in the cosmic wallpaper, and discovering that every place you look, there's a galaxy.

And they'll say, well, that proves there's no God because there's all this wasted space. There's all these wasted galaxies of which, you know, we know nothing about, we can never contact, etc. But just the same way. who would look at Jupiter and say, oh, well, those moons of Jupiter, or the telescope itself, oh, it's only good for looking up the moons of Jupiter. That would be so limiting the power of the telescope, all the more so to limit the power of God. And I'm not here to advocate on behalf or not. I don't think it's as simple as saying, well, Galileo believed in God or Einstein might have believed in God,

so I'm going to believe in God. We know Newton certainly believed in God. But it was interesting that people use this as a cudgel to really go after the biblical authorities and to give them some ammunition. It's true that he never formally issued a pardon to Galileo, which affected me greatly as a kid, but now I'm an adult, and now you have to look with a little bit more wisdom,

which is not what the word science means. Science means knowledge. Well, even this issue, the question of the Vatican apologizing to Galileo only really even became a big one in the mid to late 20th century, right? In the 90s. Maybe we were a little harsh on the guy. And did you know that the Vatican operates

a series of telescopes around the world? Why would they do that? I mean, a lot of it is, you know, as the psalmist says, the heavens declare the handiwork of God. Right. And wisdom begins with the fear of God. Now, again, I'm not advocating on behalf of any religion or even in existence of God. I'm just saying it's a question that Galileo wrestled with. Yeah. And it behooves us to wrestle alongside of him. Right. And not to make a caricature out of him, not to read the, read him as just a silly cartoon that is, that actually has nothing to do with his life in the way he's normally presented. You actually have to dig into the book. But it occurs to me, you have put me at a disadvantage here because Simplicio has to end this discussion even. Break for drinks on the canal. That's right. As they do.

Much like these characters, we will break for drinks on the canal. Brian, thank you so much for being here. Another book you ought to read is losing the Nobel Prize. You can do that right after you finish the dialogue concerning the two chief world systems. In the meantime, we'll see you next time. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Book Club at Prager You. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible and gained a new appreciation for Galileo and the scientific method.

For a chance to win your very own bit of extraterrestrial material in the form of a meteorite fragment, subscribe to Brian's mailing list at briankeeding.com. Too busy to read Galileo's diologo? listen to the audiobook, produced by Professor Keating, and narrated by his friends. Carlo Rovelli, Luchio Piccolillo, Fabiolo Gianotti, James Gates, and Frank Wilczek. Available on Audible. And remember, always be curious. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars.

Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th. the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. U.N.? must be 21 to enter.