The heliocentrist and Copernicist Galileo Galilei was born on 15 February 1564.
In one of history’s layered ironies, the two names given to the most famous person to suffer the Roman Inquisition came from the pejorative given to the Roman Church by many Romans including the decidedly non-Christian Emperor Julian.
Julian wrote the polemic “Against the Galilaeans” but is said to have given up his argument as he gave up the ghost, his last words being vicisti, Galilaee (“You have won, Galilean”).
All of which led to one of Galileo’s opponents to make a pun. In 1614, the opponent quoted Acts 1.11, which opens ‘“Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky?”’
Three hundred and forty years later, Albert Einstein gave an answer in his Ideas and Opinions:
Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics—indeed, of modern science altogether.
