In 1651 Giovanni Battista Riccioli published his massive New Almagest, a modernised version of the renowned second-century treatise by Claudius Ptolemy. Galileo never did iron out all the objections to his sun-centred universe and, even after his death in 1642, some of Europe’s most distinguished astronomers claimed that the jury was still out – that his case was not proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Yet the original conflict was no straightforward clash between reason and religion. After the war, he gave his script a further twist to condemn the American bombing of Japan and was hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In Nazi Germany, the playwright Bertolt Brecht fictionalised Galileo’s experiences to condemn political authoritarianism. This conveniently versatile story has been hyped up to represent struggles not only against the Catholic Inquisition, but against other oppressive ideologies. He condemned the heretical astronomer to the relatively mild punishment of house arrest, although melodramatic illustrations show a handcuffed elderly man being thrust down the steps of a dark dungeon as he vainly proclaims the truth. In the face of all the facts – or so runs the mythology – Pope Urban VIII had refused to accept that the earth is in perpetual motion around the sun. Galileo Galilei’s muttered protest symbolises the triumph of scientific rationality over blinkered, obstructive theology. It is one of the most famous quotations that was never said: Eppur si muove (And yet it moves). Map of the universe according to the theories of Tycho Brahe, from Andreas Cellarius' Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1660 © Granger/Bridgeman Images.
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