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How Galileo's Finger Ended Up in a Museum

21 min97 claims · 33 sources

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In a glass case in Florence, a finger points at the ceiling. It is Galileo's, cut from his hand 95 years after he died. How does a man the Church condemned end up kept like a relic?

This is the whole story: the musician's son from Pisa, the spyglass that showed him the moons of Jupiter in 1610, the friend who became Pope Urban VIII, the trial of 1633, the house arrest at Arcetri, the grave without a tomb, and the night of 12 March 1737, when his admirers carried him across Santa Croce to a new tomb and took pieces of him home. Along the way: which of the famous stories about him are true, and which were written by the man who kept his memory.

What we say, and where it comes from

Every factual claim in the video, in the order it is made, with the sources we checked it against. Click a time to jump to that moment.

0:00A finger in a glass case

  1. 0:06also at 0:11, 17:24, 20:47

    In a glass case in Florence, a finger points at the ceiling.

    The finger stands upright in a glass case on a marble base about 45 cm tall, carved with a Latin inscription by the astronomer Tommaso Perelli about the finger that pointed out new worlds in the sky.

  2. 0:06Disputedalso at 0:16, 17:19

    In a glass case in Florence, a finger points at the ceiling.

    The finger on show in the Museo Galileo is the middle finger of Galileo's right hand, taken by the antiquarian Anton Francesco Gori.

  3. 0:16also at 17:31

    It is Galileo's, and the museum that keeps it calls him the secular saint of science.

    The museum itself presents the relics as the cult of Galileo as 'hero and martyr of science', 'the secular saint of science'.

  4. 0:22also at 0:54, 10:08, 10:15

    How does a man the Church condemned end up kept like a relic?

    On 22 June 1633, at Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, Galileo was found 'vehemently suspect of heresy' and made to abjure on his knees; his sentence of imprisonment was commuted to house arrest, from December 1633 at his villa in Arcetri.

  5. 0:28also at 0:38, 14:30, 14:35

    When he died, there was no tomb.

    Grand Duke Ferdinando II gave way: the tomb and the public funeral were dropped. Galileo stayed where he had been put, a small room off the novices' chapel at Santa Croce, beneath the bell tower, at first without even an epitaph.

  6. 0:28also at 0:47, 13:10, 13:17

    When he died, there was no tomb.

    Galileo died at his villa at Arcetri on the night of 8 January 1642, with his son Vincenzo, Evangelista Torricelli and the young Vincenzo Viviani at his bedside.

  7. 0:30also at 0:47, 16:11, 16:16, 16:31

    Nearly a century later, his admirers carried him across Santa Croce by night, and took pieces of him home.

    On the night of 12 March 1737, before clergy, the professors of Florence and Pisa and learned men from across Italy, Galileo's remains were carried to the new monument inside the basilica, with Viviani's beside them.

  8. 0:30also at 17:16

    Nearly a century later, his admirers carried him across Santa Croce by night, and took pieces of him home.

    As the coffin lay open in 1737, some of those present cut parts from the body: three fingers of the right hand (thumb, index and middle finger), the fifth vertebra and a tooth.

  9. 0:30also at 16:46, 16:57, 17:09

    Nearly a century later, his admirers carried him across Santa Croce by night, and took pieces of him home.

    During the recognition of the body, Canon Giovanni Vincenzo Capponi asked the naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti for the knife he happened to have in his pocket, cut off the thumb and index finger of Galileo's right hand, and took them home as relics, 'because with them Galileo had written so many fine things'. Targioni Tozzetti, touching the dead man's forehead, answered that he would rather have had what was inside the skull.

  10. 0:38also at 0:44, 13:22, 13:41

    The day after his death, the friars put his body in a small room under a bell tower.

    The day after he died, Galileo's body was taken privately to Santa Croce in Florence and placed 'in deposit' in the bell tower of the friars' novitiate, pending a proper tomb.

  11. 0:44also at 13:29, 13:41

    It was meant to wait there for a proper tomb.

    Within days of the death, Florence talked of the Grand Duke building Galileo a sumptuous tomb in Santa Croce facing Michelangelo's, and the nuncio reported it to Rome.

  12. 0:54also at 4:00, 4:03, 4:10, 4:25, 4:30

    What he saw, what he argued, what he was convicted of, and the young man who kept his memory, and shaped it.

    Turning the telescope on the sky, Galileo saw that the Moon has mountains and valleys, that the Milky Way's patches are crowds of stars, and that Jupiter has four moons; he rushed these into print as the Starry Messenger in March 1610.

  13. 0:54also at 13:02, 14:45, 15:03

    What he saw, what he argued, what he was convicted of, and the young man who kept his memory, and shaped it.

    Vincenzo Viviani came to Galileo as a teenage assistant in 1639, stayed until his death, and in 1654 wrote the first biography, the Racconto istorico.

  14. 1:03also at 1:08, 1:24

    It starts in Pisa, in 1564, with a musician's son.

    Galileo was born in Pisa on 15 February 1564. His father Vincenzo was a court musician, composer and music theorist of modest means; the family moved to Florence in 1572.

1:15The musician's son

  1. 1:15

    Galileo's first biographer made a point of the birthday. It fell, he noted, three days before Michelangelo died in Rome.

    Viviani's biography made a point of Galileo's birth falling three days before Michelangelo's death (18 February 1564), the seed of the later legend that one was born on the day the other died.

  2. 1:24also at 1:31

    The family moved to Florence when he was eight. At 16 he was sent back to Pisa to study medicine.

    Galileo enrolled for a medical degree at Pisa in 1580, never completed it, and studied mathematics instead.

  3. 1:35also at 1:47, 14:53

    In the cathedral, the young student watches a hanging lamp swing, and times it against his own pulse. Big swings and small ones, the story goes, take the same time.

    The story that the young Galileo discovered the regular swing of the pendulum by watching a lamp in Pisa cathedral comes from Viviani; the famous bronze lamp shown there today cannot be the one, because it was made only in 1587.

  4. 1:57also at 2:32, 2:40

    In 1589 he was back at Pisa, now as a lecturer in mathematics.

    He became lecturer in mathematics at Pisa in 1589 and in 1592 took the chair of mathematics at Padua, in the Venetian Republic, at a much higher salary; he added to his income with instruments made in a household workshop, tutoring and consulting.

  5. 2:02also at 2:07, 2:16, 14:53

    Aristotle had taught that a heavier body falls faster than a lighter one.

    Viviani is the only source for the story that Galileo dropped weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa before the professors and students; most historians of science doubt it happened as told.

  6. 2:19

    What Galileo himself describes is a test with a cannonball and a musket ball. By Aristotle's rule, the heavy ball should have landed far ahead. It arrived only a hair before the light one.

    In his own books Galileo argues from thought experiments that unequal weights fall together, and reports a real test with a cannonball and a musket ball in which the two did not quite land together.

  7. 2:47also at 5:06

    With his companion in Padua he had three children. The eldest, Virginia, was born in 1600.

    In Padua Galileo had three children with Marina Gamba, whom he never married: Virginia (1600), Livia (1601) and Vincenzo (1606). When he moved to Florence the daughters went with him and were placed in the convent of San Matteo at Arcetri.

  8. 2:54also at 6:03, 6:10

    And privately, he had already told the German astronomer Johannes Kepler that he believed Copernicus. The Sun stands at the centre, and the Earth goes round it.

    In his Sunspot Letters (1613) Galileo showed that sunspots lie on the Sun's surface and that the Sun rotates; it was the first time he openly backed Copernicus in print, though he had told Kepler privately in 1597 that he believed it.

3:05The spyglass

  1. 3:05also at 3:14, 3:22

    In the summer of 1609, in Venice, he heard of a Dutch invention: a tube that made distant things look closer.

    During a stay in Venice in July 1609 Galileo heard of the Dutch spyglass; he worked out its principle without handling one, and while the Dutch instruments magnified two or three times, he soon made one that magnified about twenty times.

  2. 3:22

    Within months he had one that magnified about 20 times, and then about 30.

    Galileo built his telescope after hearing of a Dutch one: his first magnified about three times, a second about eight, and the third about thirty times, which he described as 'nearly a thousand times' larger (in area).

  3. 3:30also at 3:40, 3:57

    He gave the instrument to the Doge of Venice. Within days, the Senate made his chair at Padua a post for life, at 1,000 florins a year.

    Galileo gave the spyglass to the Doge, and within days the Venetian Senate renewed his Padua chair for life at 1,000 florins a year, nearly double his pay.

  4. 3:43Disputedalso at 3:53

    A letter in his name adds the scene everyone remembers. Old senators climb the city's bell towers again and again, to spot ships two hours early.

    In August 1609 Galileo showed his spyglass to the rulers of Venice. A letter in his name says old senators climbed the city's highest bell towers again and again to see ships at sea two hours before they could be seen without it; Favaro, who edited it, seriously doubted the letter is authentic.

  5. 4:15

    Then, in January 1610, he saw small stars lined up beside Jupiter. Night after night they moved, but they stayed with the planet.

    Galileo first saw the moons of Jupiter on 7 January 1610, and followed them night after night.

  6. 4:30

    He rushed it all into a short book, The Starry Messenger, in March. Later that year Saturn puzzled him. He was seeing its rings, without knowing what they were.

    Later in 1610 Galileo saw that Saturn's appearance changed; he was seeing the rings, though he did not understand them.

  7. 4:41also at 20:52

    The lens he saw the moons through still exists, cracked, in Florence. It is in the same room as his finger.

    The objective lens of the telescope with which Galileo first saw Jupiter's moons in January 1610 survives, cracked, in the Museo Galileo in Florence, with the only two of his telescopes that survive.

  8. 4:49also at 4:56, 16:40

    He named the moons the Medicean stars, after the family that ruled Florence, and he sent the Medici the book.

    Galileo named Jupiter's moons the 'Medicean stars' after the ruling family of Tuscany, and in 1610 won the post of Chief Mathematician and Philosopher to the Grand Duke, moving back to Florence.

  9. 5:20also at 5:30, 5:58

    Late that year, Venus began to change shape. It showed phases, like a small moon: a crescent, then a half, then a full disc.

    Late in 1610 Galileo observed that Venus shows phases like the Moon, which means it goes round the Sun: Ptolemy's system cannot produce that.

  10. 5:39also at 5:48, 5:58

    But there was a third system, Tycho Brahe's. The Earth stays still at the centre, the Sun goes round it, and the planets go round the Sun.

    Tycho Brahe's system kept the Earth at the centre with the planets going round the Sun; it gives the same relative positions of the bodies as Copernicus's, so it fits the phases of Venus too.

    Worked out from other claims: the phases show Venus goes round the Sun; in Tycho's system Venus goes round the Sun (Berry §105)

  11. 5:51

    And if the Earth really moved, the stars should seem to shift a little through the year. Nobody could see them shift.

    Copernicanism predicted a yearly shift in the positions of the stars (parallax); even Tycho, the best observer before the telescope, could find none.

6:03The friend in Rome

  1. 6:16also at 19:11

    Theologians answered with Scripture: in the Bible, Joshua commands the Sun to stand still, so it must be the Sun that moves. Galileo replied that Scripture cannot be wrong, but its interpreters can.

    Defending Copernicus against theological objections, Galileo wrote the Letter to Castelli (1613) and its expanded version, the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615): Scripture cannot err, but its interpreters can.

  2. 6:16

    Theologians answered with Scripture: in the Bible, Joshua commands the Sun to stand still, so it must be the Sun that moves. Galileo replied that Scripture cannot be wrong, but its interpreters can.

    Galileo's opponents set the Bible against the Earth's motion with the tenth chapter of Joshua, where Joshua commands the Sun to stand still; Galileo's Letter to Castelli (1613) answered that passage.

  3. 6:31

    In March 1616 the Index of Prohibited Books suspended Copernicus's book until it was corrected.

    In 1616 Copernicus's book was suspended 'until corrected'; the corrections appeared in 1620, yet the book stayed on the Index until 1835.

  4. 6:38Disputedalso at 6:45, 6:54, 9:36, 10:23

    Cardinal Robert Bellarmine called Galileo in and warned him not to hold or defend the doctrine.

    In 1616 Cardinal Bellarmine admonished Galileo not to hold or defend Copernicanism; whether a stricter formal injunction 'not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever' was also given is disputed.

  5. 7:03also at 7:10, 7:16

    In 1623, in The Assayer, he dismissed comets as tricks of light in the air.

    In The Assayer (1623) Galileo got the comets wrong: he ridiculed the idea that they are celestial bodies and argued they are optical effects in the atmosphere, rejecting what Tycho had shown, the best pre-telescope evidence against the old spheres. The same book says the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.

  6. 7:21also at 7:36, 10:05

    That same year, a friend became Pope.

    In 1623 Galileo's supporter and friend Cardinal Maffeo Barberini was elected Pope Urban VIII, and Galileo felt free to begin the Dialogue.

  7. 7:24

    Cardinal Maffeo Barberini had written Galileo admiring letters for years. In 1620 he even sent him verses praising his discoveries, as a proof of his affection.

    Long before he was Pope, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini wrote Galileo admiring letters, and in 1620 sent him verses he had written celebrating Galileo's discoveries, 'as a proof of my affection'.

  8. 7:48also at 8:04, 8:15

    The book needed a proof that the Earth moves. Galileo thought he had one: the sea.

    In the fourth day of the Dialogue, Galileo argues that if the Earth stood still the tides could not occur naturally, and that once the Earth is given the two Copernican motions the seas must ebb and flow.

  9. 7:55

    Think of a barge carrying fresh water across the lagoon to Venice. When it slows, the water runs forward and piles up at the bow.

    Galileo's own model was the barges that brought fresh water across the lagoon from Lizza Fusina to Venice: when such a barge is slowed, the water keeps its speed, runs forward and rises at the bow.

  10. 8:04

    The Earth both spins and circles the Sun. Galileo argued that the two motions speed each place up and slow it down, once a day, sloshing the seas.

    The mechanism: a point on the Earth's surface moves with the Earth's daily spin and its yearly orbit; on the night side the two motions add and on the day side they oppose, so each part of the surface is fastest at midnight and slowest at noon, speeding up and slowing down once a day, and the seas slosh in their basins.

  11. 8:18also at 8:34

    The trouble was that his theory gave one high tide a day, and there are two. He explained the second away as the water's own swing in its basin.

    The theory gives one tide a day where two are observed; Galileo knew this and explained the second tide as the water's own back-and-forth swing in its basin.

  12. 8:27

    And it left out the Moon. Kepler thought the Moon pulls the water; Galileo called that a childish notion.

    Galileo rejected the Moon as a cause of the tides, and singled out Kepler for believing in the Moon's dominion over the water, occult properties and 'similar childish notions'.

  13. 8:34

    The proof he trusted most was wrong.

    In Newton's theory of gravity, the term that comes closest to Galileo's mechanism is exactly cancelled by another term, so the effect Galileo relied on produces no tide.

  14. 8:38

    He wanted to call the book On the Ebb and Flow of the Sea. The Pope's censor wrote back that the Pope wished neither the title nor the subject to be the tides.

    The book Galileo brought to Rome had the title 'De fluxu et refluxu maris' (On the Ebb and Flow of the Sea); in May 1631 the Pope's censor wrote that it was the Pope's wish that neither the title nor the subject be the tides, but only a mathematical treatment of the Copernican position.

  15. 8:48also at 9:10, 9:17

    The Dialogue came out in Florence in February 1632.

    The Dialogue was printed in Florence by February 1632; soon afterwards the Inquisition stopped its sale and ordered Galileo to Rome for trial.

  16. 8:52

    Its preface calls the tide argument an ingenious fantasy. The book is a conversation, and its last word goes to Simplicio, the slow defender of the old view, whose name sounds like 'simpleton'. He makes an argument the Pope himself had made to Galileo.

    The Dialogue's preface, the text the censors had required, presents the tide theory as 'an ingenious fantasy' and Copernicanism only as a mathematical hypothesis; it was probably written in part by the censor and the Pope.

  17. 8:52also at 9:10

    Its preface calls the tide argument an ingenious fantasy. The book is a conversation, and its last word goes to Simplicio, the slow defender of the old view, whose name sounds like 'simpleton'. He makes an argument the Pope himself had made to Galileo.

    The Dialogue ends with Simplicio putting forward an argument Pope Urban VIII had made to Galileo: God could have made the seas move in ways we cannot imagine, so no one should claim the tides prove the Earth moves.

  18. 8:52

    Its preface calls the tide argument an ingenious fantasy. The book is a conversation, and its last word goes to Simplicio, the slow defender of the old view, whose name sounds like 'simpleton'. He makes an argument the Pope himself had made to Galileo.

    The Dialogue is a conversation between characters; the defender of Ptolemy's system is called Simplicio, a name that reads as 'simpleton', and the Pope was made to believe that Simplicio stood for him.

9:21The trial

  1. 9:21also at 9:27, 10:23

    In Rome, a commission named by the Pope read the book and drew up the charges.

    The papal special commission's report of 1632 on the Dialogue named two principal charges: that Galileo had asserted the Earth's motion absolutely, and that he had wrongly attributed the tides to the motion of the Earth and the stability of the Sun. A third was that he had kept quiet about the 1616 order.

  2. 9:42

    He tried to explain. Rereading the book, he told the Inquisition, two of its arguments came across stronger than he meant: the sunspots and the tides.

    At his hearing on 30 April 1633, Galileo said that on rereading the Dialogue two arguments, the one from sunspots and the one from the tides, came across with more force than they should have from someone who thought them inconclusive.

  3. 9:52also at 9:57, 10:05, 10:35

    It was not enough. The decision came from the Pope himself.

    On 16 June 1633 the Pope himself decided the outcome: Galileo was to be questioned on his intention, even under the threat of torture, made to abjure, imprisoned at the Holy Office's discretion, and forbidden ever again to treat the Earth's motion; the Dialogue was to be banned.

  4. 10:15

    He was not declared a heretic, but a man strongly suspected of being one, and he was made to abjure the opinion.

    The Church's first public statement that Copernicanism is a heresy was Galileo's own condemnation.

  5. 10:35also at 10:42

    His prison was first the Tuscan ambassador's palace in Rome, and from December his own villa outside Florence.

    From 1 December 1633 Galileo was allowed to live at his villa near Florence, on condition that he live in solitude and receive no one to talk with him.

  6. 10:42also at 10:51

    There he was to live alone and receive no one to talk with him. And every week he was to recite the seven penitential psalms.

    Besides imprisonment at the Inquisition's pleasure, the sentence ordered Galileo to recite the seven penitential psalms once a week; it was read out to inquisitors and professors across Italy and beyond.

  7. 10:58also at 11:08

    The famous words, 'and yet it moves', supposedly muttered as he rose from his knees, first appear in print in 1761.

    The story that Galileo said 'Eppur si muove' ('and yet it moves') is first told in print in 1761, more than a century after the trial; that he muttered it before the Inquisition is a legend.

  8. 11:15also at 11:22

    In her convent at Arcetri, his daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, managed to get a copy of the sentence.

    Galileo's daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, got a copy of his sentence and took on herself the weekly recitation of the penitential psalms, to spare him.

  9. 11:29

    A few months after he came home, in April 1634, she died. She was 33.

    Maria Celeste died on 2 April 1634, aged 33, a few months after her father came home to Arcetri.

11:37Arcetri

  1. 11:37also at 12:14

    Forbidden the heavens, he went back to what he had studied since his youth: how things move, and how they fall.

    Barred from astronomy after the trial, Galileo went back to his earlier work on motion and published Two New Sciences in 1638.

  2. 11:45also at 11:57

    He rolled a bronze ball down a long polished groove, 100 times over. He timed each run by letting water trickle into a glass, and weighing it.

    In Two New Sciences Galileo describes rolling a bronze ball down a polished, parchment-lined groove in a board about 12 cubits long, a full hundred times, and finding that the distances covered go as the squares of the times.

  3. 11:45

    He rolled a bronze ball down a long polished groove, 100 times over. He timed each run by letting water trickle into a glass, and weighing it.

    He timed the descents with water: a thin jet from a large raised vessel was caught in a glass during each run and weighed on an accurate balance.

  4. 12:04

    The book, Two New Sciences, says nothing about the heavens. It still had to be smuggled out of Italy, and it was printed in Holland in 1638.

    Galileo's last book, Two New Sciences, says nothing about cosmology, yet the manuscript had to be smuggled out of Italy; the Elzeviers printed it in Holland in 1638.

  5. 12:17also at 12:21, 12:42

    By the end of 1637 he was completely blind.

    By December 1637 Galileo was totally blind. 'This heaven, this earth, this universe', he wrote, which his observations had enlarged a thousandfold, had shrunk for him to the space his own body took up. The Florentine inquisitor reported him to Rome as totally blind and more with his head in the grave than his mind in mathematics.

  6. 12:34

    He even refused gifts from the Dutch, sent for his method of finding longitude at sea: the inquisitor had warned him off.

    In 1638 the Dutch States sent Galileo letters and gifts about his method for finding longitude at sea; under the inquisitor's warning he refused to accept either.

  7. 12:51

    One was a young Englishman, John Milton. Years later he wrote that he had found the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition.

    The young John Milton visited Galileo, 'grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition', and wrote so in Areopagitica (1644), his argument against censorship.

13:22No tomb

  1. 13:34

    In Rome, a scholar wrote that the loss belonged not to Florence alone but to the whole world.

    Ten days after his death a scholar in Rome wrote that the loss concerned 'not only Florence but the whole world', and that now, with envy gone, the height of his mind would begin to be known.

  2. 13:47also at 13:53, 14:02

    The answer came from Urban, the old friend who had judged him, through the Tuscan ambassador.

    On 25 January 1642 Pope Urban VIII, Galileo's old friend, told the Tuscan ambassador that a tomb would be no example to the world, since Galileo had been before the Holy Office for an opinion 'so false and so erroneous' and had given 'so universal a scandal' to Christendom.

  3. 14:16also at 14:25

    The same day, the Pope's nephew wrote to the inquisitor in Florence. No mausoleums, he wrote, for a man who died while still doing penance.

    The same day, Cardinal Francesco Barberini instructed the Florentine inquisitor, on the Pope's decision, to let the Grand Duke know that it was not right to build mausoleums for a man penanced by the Inquisition who died while still under penance; failing that, to make sure nothing in the epitaph or funeral oration offended the Holy Office.

14:45Ninety-five years

  1. 15:11

    About 30 years after the burial, a friar painted a Latin tribute on the wall above the grave.

    About thirty years after the burial, a friar of Santa Croce, Father Gabriele Pierozzi, painted a Latin eulogy on the wall over the place where Galileo's body lay.

  2. 15:17

    In 1693 Viviani put a bronze bust of Galileo on the front of his own house, between great marble scrolls of praise.

    In 1693 Viviani put up the first public monument to Galileo: a bronze bust on the front of his own house in Florence, between marble scrolls engraved with long praises of his master.

  3. 15:27also at 15:35

    When he died in 1703, he left his estate on one condition: a tomb for Galileo, as soon as it was allowed.

    Viviani died in 1703 and was laid beside Galileo in the little room, having left his estate to his nephew on condition that a monument to Galileo be built as soon as it was allowed.

  4. 15:40also at 15:45, 15:55

    In the 1730s, the inquisitor in Florence wrote to Rome.

    In June 1734 the Florentine inquisitor asked Rome whether any order forbade a 'sumptuous tomb of marble and bronze' to Galileo, 'already condemned for his notorious errors'. On 16 June the cardinals answered: do not prevent it, but send us the inscription first.

  5. 16:00also at 16:40

    The documents give no reason for the change. The museum that keeps his finger reads the tomb as the last Medici Grand Duke standing up to the Church.

    The tomb was built at the very end of the Medici dynasty; the Museo Galileo reads it as the last Grand Duke, Gian Gastone, asserting the state's independence from the Church.

  6. 16:23Disputedalso at 20:35

    Inside were three bodies: Galileo, Viviani, and a woman, believed to be his daughter, Maria Celeste.

    When the old grave was opened in 1737 a third body was found, a woman's, and carried to the new tomb with Galileo and Viviani; she is thought to be his daughter Maria Celeste.

  7. 16:31

    All three were carried to the new tomb. It stands facing Michelangelo's, where Florence had talked of putting him 95 years before.

    The 1737 tomb stands opposite Michelangelo's, where Florence had talked of putting it in 1642.

    Worked out from other claims: 1642: 'dirimpetto a quello di Michelangelo' (the nuncio); 1737: 'opposite that of Michelangelo' (IYA, relaying the museum)

  8. 17:16also at 20:14

    An anatomist took a vertebra. A tooth went too.

    The vertebra, taken by the anatomist Antonio Cocchi, passed through several hands and was given to the University of Padua in 1823.

17:41The long way back

  1. 17:44

    First, an English astronomer, James Bradley, noticed that starlight reaches us slightly tilted. It slants like rain as you run through it, because the Earth is moving.

    James Bradley, trying to measure the shift of the stars that the Earth's orbit should cause, found a different yearly shift instead, and explained it in 1728 as the motion of light combined with the Earth's motion in its orbit: the aberration of light, published early in 1729. Every earlier attempt to see the Earth's orbit in the stars had failed.

  2. 17:44

    First, an English astronomer, James Bradley, noticed that starlight reaches us slightly tilted. It slants like rain as you run through it, because the Earth is moving.

    The proofs came long after Galileo: aberration 87 years after his death, a star's parallax 196 years after, Foucault's pendulum 209 years after.

    Worked out from other claims: 1729 − 1642 = 87; 1838 − 1642 = 196; 1851 − 1642 = 209

  3. 17:56

    Then the shift Galileo had looked for and never seen, a star's tiny yearly shift, was finally measured. And Foucault's pendulum showed the Earth turning beneath it.

    Friedrich Bessel made the first definite measurement of a star's parallax, the shift Copernicus had predicted: for 61 Cygni, announced at the end of 1838, about a third of an arcsecond.

  4. 17:56

    Then the shift Galileo had looked for and never seen, a star's tiny yearly shift, was finally measured. And Foucault's pendulum showed the Earth turning beneath it.

    On 3 February 1851 Léon Foucault's note to the Paris Academy showed the Earth's rotation with a pendulum: its plane of swing turns slowly from east to west, 'a visible sign of the daily motion of the globe'.

  5. 18:09

    The Church came round more slowly. His Dialogue was printed again more than a century after the trial, but only with his sentence and abjuration in front of it.

    In 1744 the Dialogue was printed again, with Church permission, in a Padua edition of Galileo's works, but only with his sentence and abjuration in front of it and a preface saying the Earth's motion was a mathematical hypothesis.

  6. 18:19

    A few years later, the general ban on books teaching that the Earth moves was dropped.

    In 1757 Pope Benedict XIV agreed to drop the general ban of 1616 on all books teaching that the Sun stands still and the Earth moves; Galileo's Dialogue and Copernicus's book stayed on the Index.

  7. 18:25

    Even so, a canon in Rome still had to appeal before he was allowed to teach the Earth's motion as fact.

    In 1820 the censor in Rome refused to license an astronomy textbook by Canon Giuseppe Settele unless it treated the Earth's motion as a mere hypothesis; on appeal the Holy Office let him teach it as established, and in 1822 permitted such books generally.

  8. 18:32

    Only after almost two centuries did the Dialogue leave the list of prohibited books.

    Only in the Index of 1835 were Galileo's Dialogue and Copernicus's book finally left off the list of prohibited books.

  9. 18:41

    Pope John Paul the Second answered 350 years after Galileo's death, closing a commission he had set up years before.

    In 1979 John Paul II asked theologians, scientists and historians to re-examine the Galileo case; a commission was set up on 3 July 1981 and presented its conclusions on 31 October 1992, in the 350th year after Galileo's death.

  10. 18:50Being checked

    He did not pardon Galileo, and he did not reopen the trial.

    The 1992 address did not annul the 1633 sentence or declare a pardon; newspapers reported it as the Church 'admitting Galileo was right' or apologising.

  11. 18:55

    Most theologians of Galileo's day, he said, had confused Scripture with their reading of it, and carried a scientific question into matters of faith.

    In the 1992 address John Paul II said most theologians of Galileo's time failed to distinguish Scripture from its interpretation, and so wrongly carried a question of scientific fact into matters of faith.

  12. 19:05

    He also faulted Galileo, for refusing to treat Copernicus as a hypothesis without proof.

    The same address also faulted Galileo: like most of his opponents he did not separate science from natural philosophy, and he refused to present Copernicus as a hypothesis until it was confirmed by irrefutable proofs.

  13. 19:19

    The affair, he said, had grown into a myth. The tragic misunderstanding now belonged to the past.

    The address called the Galileo case a 'myth' since the Enlightenment, a symbol of the Church's supposed refusal of science, and said the 'tragic mutual misunderstanding' now belonged to the past.

19:27The moons he found

  1. 19:27also at 19:33

    Centuries later, a spacecraft named Galileo left Earth aboard the shuttle Atlantis.

    NASA's Galileo spacecraft, named for the man who discovered Jupiter's major moons in 1610, was launched from the space shuttle Atlantis on 18 October 1989, flew past Venus in February 1990 and went into orbit around Jupiter in December 1995.

  2. 19:33also at 19:42

    On its way it flew past Venus, the planet whose phases he had seen. Then it spent eight years among the moons he had found.

    The probe made 35 close encounters with Jupiter's major moons, eleven of them with Europa, and found evidence that Europa has a salty ocean under its ice.

  3. 19:47also at 19:58

    When its fuel was nearly gone, it was steered into Jupiter on purpose. That way it could never crash into Europa and spoil the ocean it might hide.

    On 21 September 2003, with its fuel nearly gone, the Galileo probe was deliberately steered into Jupiter so that it could never crash into Europa, the moon it had found might hold an ocean.

    • NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory (September 2003), Galileo End of Mission (press kit), text lines 53–56The spacecraft has been purposely put on a collision course with Jupiter to eliminate any chance of an unwanted impact between the spacecraft and Jupiter’s moon Europa, which Galileo discovered is likely to have a subsurface ocean
    • NASA Science, Galileo (mission page), mission overviewWhen the spacecraft plunged into Jupiter's crushing atmosphere on Sept. 21, 2003, it was being deliberately destroyed to protect one of its own discoveries—a possible ocean beneath the icy crust of the moon Europa
  4. 20:04

    The middle finger, the one in the case, passed to a librarian and to the Laurentian Library. Then it went to a shrine to Galileo, and at last to the museum.

    Gori's finger passed to the librarian Angelo Maria Bandini and was shown for years in the Laurentian Library; in 1841 it moved to the new Tribuna di Galileo, and in 1927 to the museum that is now the Museo Galileo.

  5. 20:14also at 20:21, 20:31

    The vertebra went to Padua. The canon's two fingers and the tooth vanished early in the twentieth century.

    Capponi's two fingers and the tooth stayed in his family's line until 1905, then vanished; in 2009 they turned up at an auction in an 18th-century glass vase inside a 19th-century wooden case topped by a bust of Galileo. A collector bought the lot, traced it, and Florence's museum experts confirmed the relics.

  6. 20:39

    Since then the fingers and the tooth have been together again, in one room of the Museo Galileo, beside his telescopes.

    Since 2010, when the museum reopened under the name Museo Galileo, all three fingers and the tooth have been on show together, in the same room as his telescopes.

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