Written By John Assaraf
In 1633, an aging Italian astronomer named Galileo Galilei was taken before the Roman Inquisition, tried, convicted of heresy, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.Galileo's crime? He endorsed the idea, proposed a century earlier by the great Catholic astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus
This idea was judged as being diametrically opposed to the position taken by Holy Scripture. Galileo was forced to publicly recant his views, and his book containing the offending idea, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was banned. The old man's sentence was later commuted to house arrest, and he lived out the rest of his days confined to his villa outside Florence, where he eventually went blind.
Still, Galileo's views persisted, and the meticulous experiments and mathematical models he used in his search to understand nature set the stage for all the developments of modern science that followed. Three centuries later, a German physicist named Albert Einstein called him "the father of modern science."
From Galileo's time onward, scientists' precise observations contributed to a picture of the world that looked very much like a massive piece of mechanical clockwork; they had little practical use for such ideas as soul, spirit, or consciousness.