Word: galileo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ever since Galileo taught them to scan the skies with a telescope, astronomers have studied the sun with particular interest. It is the earth's own star, and to earth-bound viewers it glitters with 10 billion times the brightness of any other celestial body. Everything significant that happens on the sun-the emergence of solar flares, for example-signals some effect on the earth's atmosphere...
...part of my life. If I hadn't shelled the peas, my father would have had to, and he would not have been able to deliver on time the suit he was making for his customer, and the earth would have stopped turning, much to the shame of Galileo...
Unhappily, lesser theologians forgot this sound advice. When Galileo peered through his telescope four centuries later and saw a heliocentric rather than a geocentric universe, the result was conflict between baffled theologians and fascinated scientists. The Roman Inquisition forced Galileo to "abjure, curse and detest the aforesaid errors," but science was not to be stopped that easily...
...faith-was never more sharply apparent than in the century (1558-1648) from Elizabeth to Richelieu and from Shakespeare to Descartes. It was a time when superstition was rampant; a king's touch would cure scrofula, corpses bled in the presence of the murderer, comets signified disaster-although Galileo was calmly regarding the heavens through a telescope that magnified 1,000 times. Witchcraft (in which Kepler believed) was widespread: the Archbishop of Trier found it necessary to burn 120 of his fellow Germans on the ground that they had prolonged the cold weather long past the change of seasons...
...probably the world's oldest scientific society. But in those days, relations between the Papacy and science were far from cordial. The four young men who met in a Roman palace in 1603 to organize the accademia were taking a considerable chance. And trouble came quickly. In 1633, Galileo Galilei, most famous of the Lynxes, was picked up by the Inquisition and compelled to recant his heretical notion that the earth revolved around the sun. Galileo's condemnation broke the academy's spirit, and for more than a century it was hardly more than a library...