Word: galileo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Three and a half centuries ago, the Vatican's Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office forbade the Italian Astronomer Galileo Galilei to "hold or defend" the Copernican theory, which Galileo's telescopes had verified, that the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. Galileo stayed silent 16 years, then reasserted his view more strongly than ever in his Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems. In one of the world's most famous trials, the Roman Inquisition charged Galileo with heresy, threatened him with torture, and forced him to recant. His Dialogue was placed...
...condemnation of Galileo has ever since been cited to demonstrate Roman Catholicism's opposition to science and free inquiry. Later, of course, it turned out to the satisfaction of ev eryone, including the Roman Catholic Church, that the earth does revolve around the sun. Galileo's works were removed from the Index in 1822, and a year ago French Jesuit François Russo suggested that the church might also formally repudiate the unjust censures directed...
Last week, at the National Catholic Eucharistic Congress in Pisa-where Galileo, according to legend, dropped a cannonball and a bullet from the leaning tower to prove that objects of different weights fall with the same velocity-Pope Paul VI formally praised Galileo, along with Dante and Michelangelo, as "great spirits" of "immortal memory...
...academy, founded in 1583 with support by the Medici family and with Galileo himself as a member, published its first dictionary in 1612, a century and a half before the learned Dr. Johnson did as much for English. Subsequent editions appeared regularly until 1811 and one-the 1623 edition-became the model for definitive dictionaries in other European countries. The academicians tackled the job again in 1842, and plugged away for 81 years in their classical Dantean style, leading one critic to call the work "a vile, barbarous collection of excommunicated language." They were...
Donald Fleming's new edition of Loeb's Mechanistic Conception of Life explains both the former stellar position and the present eclipse of the biologist Jacques Loeb (1859-1924). When the first edition of this book appeared in 1912, Loeb ranged in poplar opinion with Galileo, Newton, and Darwin: he was a great-scientific innovator, who applied the principles of his science to the problems of ordinary men. This second edition of Loeb's most famous book-recalls an alternative to today's canon that the principles of scientific inquiry may be legitimately applied only to the defined problems...