Galileo's Mistake

Book excerpt: In a revisionist look at the seventeenth-century battle between ecclesiastical authorities and Galileo Galilei, Rowland provocatively challenges the prevailing view of the episode. The central issue for the inquisitors investigating Galileo's orthodoxy, insists Rowland, was never the sun-centered astronomy of Copernicus. No, much broader philosophical issues were at stake. And on these issues, Rowland argues, the church stood closer to the truth than did Galileo. The astronomer erred--in Rowland's judgment--not in his advocacy of Copernican theory but rather in his endorsement of a thoroughgoing mathematical empiricism. And while everyone now agrees with Galileo in accepting Copernicus, the doctrinaire empiricism Galileo deployed to advance Copernicanism looks as shallow and misleading to today's quantum physicists as it once did to the Renaissance theologians who forced Galileo to recant.