00:00In 1633, the greatest scientist alive knelt on a stone floor in Rome and swore he had
00:05been wrong.
00:06He was not wrong.
00:07He was almost 70, sick, half-blind, and he had just been shown the instruments.
00:12He read the confession they had written for him.
00:14Then, legend says, he stood up and whispered five words, and yet, it moves.
00:20That sentence followed him into exile, and it followed Europe for the next 350 years.
00:24This is Galileo Galilei.
00:26And it is not the story you think.
00:29Because the man condemned for telling the truth was convicted by a book his own accusers
00:32had reviewed, approved, stamped, and published.
00:36Galileo was born in Pisa in 1564.
00:39That same year, William Shakespeare was born in England.
00:42Two bombs went off in the world that year.
00:44One destroyed literature as it had been understood.
00:47The other destroyed the universe as it had been imagined.
00:50His father, Vincenzo, was a stubborn musician.
00:53He had publicly challenged the musical authorities of the day, proving with experiments that they
00:57measured sound the wrong way.
00:59That habit, trust nothing but evidence, passed to the sun and multiplied a thousand times.
01:04Vincenzo wanted Galileo to become a doctor.
01:07Safe money.
01:08At 17 the boy was sent to Pisa.
01:10He had no interest in anatomy.
01:13He sat at the back of the lecture hall and drew pendulums in the margins.
01:16One day he was in the Cathedral of Pisa, bored, watching a lamp swinging on its chain in the draft.
01:22Everyone else was praying.
01:24Galileo timed the swings with his own pulse.
01:26And the arithmetic produced something impossible.
01:29The width of the swing did not matter.
01:31A wide arc and a narrow arc took exactly the same time.
01:34That became the law of isochronism.
01:37Decades later, other scientists would use it to build the first accurate clocks.
01:41A boy who could not pay attention in church had found a law that governs everything that moves.
01:46Then came the telescope.
01:48In 1608, a Dutch lens maker named Hans Lippershey discovered that putting two lenses together
01:52made distant things enormous.
01:54Word reached Galileo when he was 45.
01:57He saw what it meant for war overnight.
01:59He built his own the very same night.
02:01His first tube magnified about three times.
02:04Within months he had taught himself to grind lenses and reached eight times.
02:08But he did not point it at the sky.
02:10He showed it to the senators of Venice.
02:13They looked through it and understood immediately, they could see an enemy fleet hours before anyone
02:17else.
02:18His salary doubled on the spot.
02:20His final instrument was barely longer than a meter, with a lens 4 centimeters wide and
02:24magnification of 20 times.
02:26It looked like a wooden pipe.
02:27It was about to tear apart an idea that had ruled humanity for 1400 years.
02:32He pointed it at the moon.
02:34Aristotle had taught that the moon was a perfect sphere of smooth, pure light.
02:38The church taught the same.
02:40Galileo saw mountains.
02:41Galileo saw mountains.
02:42Craters.
02:43Valleys.
02:44Real shadows stretched across ragged terrain.
02:47Heaven, according to everything Europe believed, was not supposed to have mountains.
02:51That first look was already a blade at the throat of the church's entire cosmology.
02:55But it was nothing compared to what came next.
02:58On January 7, 1610, in the garden of his house in Padua, Galileo aimed at Jupiter.
03:03Jupiter.
03:04Three tiny points of light appeared beside it.
03:06He assumed they were stars.
03:08Then he looked again the following nights.
03:11The points had moved.
03:13One crossed from the left of Jupiter to the right.
03:16One vanished behind it.
03:17Six nights later he saw a fourth.
03:20Four small stars orbiting Jupiter.
03:22It meant something simple and devastating.
03:24Not everything in the sky revolves around the earth.
03:27Four dots of light had destroyed the most powerful story ever told about the cosmos.
03:31He published the Starry Messenger in March of 1610.
03:35550 copies.
03:37Sold out in days.
03:38Every scholar in Europe was arguing about it within a month.
03:42Then the pushback arrived.
03:44Some astronomers simply refused to look.
03:46They said the lenses were distorted and everything he reported was an illusion.
03:50Others quoted Aristotle and claimed God had made a perfect universe and Galileo was lying.
03:55He did not retreat.
03:56He pointed the telescope at Venus.
03:59Venus showed phases, like the moon.
04:01Sometimes a thin crescent.
04:03Sometimes nearly full.
04:05There is one explanation.
04:07Venus goes around the sun, not around the earth.
04:10The old cosmos was cracking apart in one man's garden.
04:13The church could no longer stay out of it.
04:16In 1616 the Inquisition declared that the earth moving around the sun contradicted scripture.
04:21Copernicus's book was placed on the forbidden list.
04:23Pope Paul V sent a cardinal, Robert Bellarmine, to warn Galileo in person, he could no longer hold or defend
04:29the idea publicly.
04:31Galileo accepted.
04:32Then he was handed a piece of paper that would decide the rest of his life.
04:36Bellarmine signed a certificate, the idea could not be taught as fact, but could be discussed as a hypothesis.
04:42Galileo kept it like a charm against harm.
04:46In 1623 his friend Mafio Barberini became Pope, taking the name Urban VIII.
04:51Galileo went to see him.
04:53They discussed Copernican theory directly.
04:55The Pope gave permission to write about it.
04:58On one condition.
04:59It had to be presented as a hypothesis.
05:02It could not conclude the earth moves.
05:04Galileo spent eight years writing a masterpiece.
05:07He called it dialogue concerning the two chief world systems.
05:10It is a conversation.
05:13Salviati argues for Copernicus, brilliantly.
05:16Simplicio argues for the old earth-centered view.
05:19Simplicio is a fool.
05:20He stumbles, contradicts himself, loses every exchange.
05:24His name comes from the word for simpleton.
05:27The Pope read it.
05:28He understood exactly who Simplicio was.
05:31He concluded the fool was him.
05:33And there was another detail the church could not swallow.
05:36The book had been reviewed by its own censors before publication.
05:39Twice.
05:40It carried two official approval stamps.
05:43It had been licensed and released by the very institution that was about to put its author
05:46on trial for writing it.
05:48Within months the Inquisition ordered the book seized and summoned Galileo to Rome.
05:52In 1633, at 69, in failing health, he made the journey.
05:57Ten cardinals were waiting.
05:59Now the record and the legend separate, and the real darkness begins.
06:03Galileo was threatened.
06:04Not with torture in the abstract.
06:07The records contain an explicit authorization, if the accused continues to deny the facts,
06:11he may be shown the instruments.
06:13It was not a bluff.
06:14It was designed to be believed by the man it was aimed at.
06:17It worked.
06:19He was also shown his own words, written years earlier in a document the church had kept secret
06:23from him, a harsher version of the warning that forbade even discussing the idea.
06:27He was old, ill, far from home, with a family to think about.
06:30He chose to live.
06:32So he knelt and read their words.
06:35He declared the theory false and swore never to speak of it again.
06:38The Galileo who mutters, and yet, it moves, belongs more to the world than to the record.
06:43There is no contemporary account of those words.
06:46They appear generations later.
06:48They are not evidence of what he said.
06:50They are evidence of what everyone who came after him wanted him to have said.
06:54When a man is forced to deny the truth with his own mouth, the rest of us write this sentence
06:57for him in retrospect.
06:59He was not executed.
07:01He was sentenced to life imprisonment, later commuted to house arrest outside Florence.
07:0515 years in a villa.
07:07But here is the part nobody expects, those were probably the most productive years of
07:11his life.
07:12Stripped of his career, watching his eyesight fail, he wrote two new sciences.
07:16The book that made motion a mathematical science.
07:19How objects fall.
07:21How their speed increases at a constant rate.
07:24How a projectile traces a parabola through the air.
07:27Newton stood on that work a generation later.
07:29Without the man in the villa, there is no mathematics of motion.
07:33Without the mathematics of motion, there is no physics.
07:36By 1638, he was completely blind.
07:39He dictated his thoughts to a boy who came to help.
07:42They gave him a small room, a candle, a clock that chimed every hour.
07:45He counted those chimes to keep track of the night.
07:49He died in 1642, at 77.
07:52And here is the detail most people only discover as adults.
07:55About a hundred years later, when his remains were moved to a proper memorial, someone broke
07:59into the grave.
08:01Three of his fingers were cut off.
08:03A tooth was taken.
08:04The bones of a man whose crime was a claim about light and motion were broken apart as
08:08relics, the way a saint's body might be.
08:11They passed through collectors for generations.
08:13They are now in a museum in Florence.
08:16His fingers are still there.
08:18Behind glass.
08:19Still bent, as though pointing at something.
08:22So why did the church care so much?
08:24Not about geometry.
08:26The church never held that the Bible was an astronomy textbook.
08:29The trouble was what a moving earth would mean for everything else.
08:33If the earth is just another planet orbiting an ordinary star, then the whole architecture
08:37of creation changes.
08:38The story of a central stage, with humanity at the center of the drama, has to be rewritten
08:42from the first page.
08:44Galileo was not an atheist.
08:46He was devout all his life.
08:48That was the real danger.
08:50He was a believer who followed the evidence, and to the men who profit from not knowing, that
08:54is the most dangerous heretic of all.
08:55Galileo.
08:56In 1992, a commission established by Pope John Paul II concluded that the judges who
09:01condemned Galileo had been wrong.
09:03Not that his science was bad.
09:05That the church itself had made a mistake.
09:07A formal admission, from the institution that had banned his books, that the man it silenced
09:11had been right all along.
09:13359 years.
09:15The delay was never about the difficulty of the science.
09:18The stars were never hard to see.
09:20The delay was the cost of admitting that the people who burned the books had been the ones
09:23who were wrong.
09:25Galileo died blind, silenced, and under a locked door he could only open by pulling a string.
09:30And every telescope pointed at the sky since 1610 has been pointed at a universe he broke
09:34open.
09:35That is why we remember his name.
09:37Not for what he was forced to say.
09:39For what he could not unsee.
09:53Or what he was forced to say.
09:56Or what he could not unsee.
10:03Is there a shift?
10:06Who, who, who had lo blaming?
