Word: copernican
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...relationship between science and religion, no other event has proved so troublesome as the Roman Catholic Church's denunciation of Galileo Galilei. In 1633, at the age of 69, the noted Italian scientist was judged by the Inquisition to have violated a church edict against espousing the controversial Copernican view that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe. For the last nine years of his life, Galileo lived under house arrest...
Bellarmine cautioned Galileo that the new Copernican view of the heavens should be treated as no more than a hypothesis. For a while the scientist heeded that advice. But when an old friend, Maffeo Cardinal Barberini, became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, Galileo felt confident enough to write his most controversial and, ultimately, self-ruinous work: Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems...
...book, written in the form of a conversation between three fictional characters, argued the relative merits of the Copernican universe and the older Ptolemaic system, which held that the sun and planets revolved around the earth...
...great embarrassments in Roman Catholic Church history is the condemnation of Italian Astronomer Galileo Galilei by the Holy Office as "vehemently suspected of heresy." His crime: writing in defense of Copernicus' hypothesis that the earth revolves around the sun. In 1616 the Holy Office had proclaimed the Copernican view "formally heretical, inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the doctrines of Holy Scripture in many places, both according to their literal meaning" and the common interpretation of the early Church Fathers. The head of the Holy Office, which was responsible for seeking out heresy, ordered Galileo not to disseminate his views...
...easy to understand pre-Copernican beliefs in a flat earth and similarly easy to account for the accumulation of popular myths about the cold before the disease's viral nature became clear. But why do so many dubious beliefs persist in the face of new knowledge? The inertia of human prejudices is only part of the answer. An additional reason lies in the truth that a cold, typically, is far more than a mere medical event...