Letter recently discovered catches Galileo in a 400-year lie | Smart News

After having lured the Catholic Church's for declaring that the Earth was in orbit, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was tried at the headquarters of the Inquisition in Rome. To avoid being burned at the stake, the 69-year-old was forced to give up his belief in a heliocentric model of the universe. Nevertheless, the famous polymath has always been condemned to live his last years under house arrest. As Alison Abbott reports in a Nature News In exclusivity, a long-lost letter reveals that before Galileo was convicted of "vehement suspicion of heresy", he was already living in fear of persecution and was ready to create a false paper trail in order to deceive the Inquisition.

Galileo wrote the missive of 1613 to his friend, the mathematician Benedetto Castelli. The original letter, recently discovered in an erroneous library catalog of the Royal Society of London, is considered the first documented account of his inflammatory arguments for the secular pursuit of science and his support for the 1543 theory of theology. 39, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. from a universe centered on the sun.

In an approximate way, two versions of the letter are around today: one contains a much more passive language about Galileo's results; the other, a more incendiary copy, is what ultimately resulted in the hands of the Inquisition. Researchers have long wondered: what letter was the original? Has the most cautious been written by Galileo himself to try to soften his revolutionary beliefs? Or was the most radical trafficked by members of the Inquisition, accusing the Galileo language of building a lawsuit against him?

The truth of the matter was solved only at the beginning of August, when Salvatore Ricciardo, historian of science at the University of Bergamo in Italy, discovered this original letter in the archives of the Royal Society, filed at an incorrect date. The original wording of the letter corresponded to the copy seized by the Inquisition …do not the one attached to Galileo's plea. Four centuries later, Galileo was caught in a lie.

"I thought," I can not believe that I discovered the letter that virtually all Galileo specialists thought was desperately lost, "Ricciardo tells Abbott. The results of Ricciardo will be published in an article of the journal Royal Society. Notes and records.

The revelation demonstrates Galileo's cunning. Two years after sending the fateful letter by Galileo, the correspondence reached the Inquisition. Conscious of the destinies of his predecessors (at the beginning of the century, after the Dominican monk and mathematician Giordano Bruno had made public his enthusiastic support for the Copernican theory, for example, he was quickly burned at the stake), Galileo sent a strategic letter to a friend suggesting that the copy of the Inquisition had been tampered with to portray him as a heretic. To clear things up, he then attached a copy of what he claimed to be "the original".

The changes to the document were not serious; Most of them euphemized the ox of Galilee with the Church and diluted the vehemence of his affirmations. For example, Galileo had originally quoted some biblical passages as "false if we rely on the literal meaning of the words" – but in his later amendments he struck out the word "false" and scribbled him. . "

Even in its original form, the letter was by no means Galileo's only offense to the Catholic Church. In 1632, after the Church withdrew the writings of Copernicus and outlawed publications supporting the heliocentric theory, Galileo published a book outlining the scientific support of the Copernican model.

This was the last nail in Galileo's coffin.

Once again, Galileo tried to manage the story. As the Inquisition came upon him, he claimed that he was writing "hypothetically," reports Sarah Pruitt for History.com. But the Church did not buy it this time either, and in 1633 he was tried.

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