A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

complicated. It was a simple ellipse - a shape like an egg. He published his theory in a book called
The New Astronomy in 1609. Astronomers read it with interest; no one else paid much attention.
One of these astronomers was a brilliant but self-assertive Italian named Galileo Galilei, the
professor of mathematics at Padua University. In the year Kepler’s book came out, Galileo heard
about a new invention that had become fashionable in Holland. Lenses had been around for about
three centuries - in fact, primitive rock-crystal lenses have been found in ancient Nineveh and
Carthage. Now a Dutchman had discovered that if two lenses are put into opposite ends of a
cardboard tube they will magnify distant objects. Galileo quickly made himself a telescope. Then
he stepped outdoors one fine night in the autumn of 1609 and looked at the moon. What he saw
amazed him. Instead of a smooth surface, he saw a landscape covered with pockmarks; closer
examination showed he was looking at mountains and valleys. Then he looked at the Milky Way -
which to the eye looks like white gas - and saw that it was made up of millions of stars.
It was when he turned his telescope on Jupiter that he received the most exciting revelation. He saw
three tiny white ‘stars’ close to the edge of the planet, and the next day, they had moved around to
the other side - proving that they were not stars. Jupiter had moons, like the earth. But our moon
had always been used by opponents of (Copernicus as the chief objection to his theory. If the earth
went round the sun, then why should the moon go round the earth? Surely it could not be an
exception to the law of nature? Now Galileo could see that our moon is not an exception - other
planets have them too. In a state of great excitement, Galileo wrote a book called The Starry
Messenger. It made him instantly famous, and became the seventeenth-century equivalent of a
bestseller. It was like Marco Polo’s travels, a book about strange, distant regions, and everybody
wanted to read it. At forty-five, Galileo suddenly found himself famous.
Galileo was, in fact, a great scientist; but his discoveries had so far not been of the kind that cause
widespread interest. At the age of eighteen, he had been sitting in the cathedral at Pisa when he
noticed the lamp swinging back and forth from the ceiling. He timed the swings, and observed that
they always took the same time. A few years later, he went to the top of the leaning tower and
dropped a heavy and a light cannon ball at the same moment; he observed that they struck the
ground at the same time - disproving Aristotle’s assertion that heavy objects fall faster than light
ones.
But as a human being, Galileo had serious shortcomings; from early on in his academic career, he
displayed a crude self-assertion that gave much offence. And his sudden fame at forty-five acted as
an intoxicant. The Academy of Science made him a member; at a banquet in his honour the new
invention was christened ‘the telescope’. The pope, Paul V, gave him an audience. The Jesuits
honoured him with ceremonies. For a man with Galileo’s thirst for fame, it must have been a heady
experience. It made him more arrogant than ever. When scientific opponents raised objections to
his theories, he treated it as a personal affront, and tried to crush them with sheer rudeness. It must
be admitted, of course, that in most cases, he was right and they were wrong; but this does not
excuse his bad manners. And the Church began to worry about the sheer dogmatism with which he
asserted his opinions.
This was, in fact, a matter in which the Church had right on its side. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine,
one of the soundest thinkers of his time, said that if Galileo thought that Copernicus was right, then
it was up to him to prove it. And this was precisely what Galileo could not do. For he still lacked
one essential insight: a theory of gravitation. Only gravity could explain why the planets circled
around the sun as if attached to strings, and why they had reacted on one another until their orbits