Copernicus & Galileo Myths Debunked

by Asa Boxer

Niclaus Copernicus Monument, Warsaw, Poland. Artist: Bertel Thorvaldsen 1830.

The advance of reason, the story goes, brought about the Renaissance in cosmology. Copernicus challenged the reigning common sense that the Earth lay at the centre of the universe by positing heliocentrism, the idea that in fact the sun was immobile and lay at the centre. It is furthermore assumed that Copernicus came to his conclusions through his own observations of the heavens. According to the myth, Copernicus was deemed a heretic by the backward Church and his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Book of Revolutions) was banned. However none of this story is true.

During his own lifetime, his ideas were considered fascinating and admirable by those in the Church hierarchy: he received direct encouragement from both the bishop Tiedemann Giese as well as from the cardinal Nicholas Schönberg, along with several others, including indirect interest on the parts of Pope Clement VII and Paul III. In fact, his Book of Revolutions is dedicated to Paul III.¹ Despite all the interest and encouragement, Copernicus had grave misgivings about his hypothesis and resisted publishing anything on the subject until cajoled into it by close associates, especially one Rheticus—a humanist Lutheran, who went out of his way to bring Copernicus’s book to print despite the ridicule of Martin Luther himself.² It was only decades after his death that his work was lightly censured, and his book was only banned following Galileo’s raising of Copernicanism to a scandalous pitch, hurling insults against Church leaders who were in fact well-disposed toward him (see below). The truth is Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was largely unread, unpopular, mathematically flawed and inscrutable.³ Also Copernicus did not base his ideas on very much direct observation, but instead on the observations of past authorities, including the “Chaldeans, Greeks and Arabs.”⁴ Consequently one of the main values of his book was that it dealt with ancient authorities and their ideas (the humanist project), including those of Aristarchus. In other words surrounding the phenomenon of Copernicus (since no one was reading his book and his ideas were more of a popular item of discussion) was the humanist spirit interested in alternative ideas however untrue or improbable or full of “absurdities”—as “the leading theologian and preacher of Nuremberg, Andreas Osiander, one of the founders of the Lutheran creed” put it in the Preface to Copernicus’s Revolutions (170).⁵

So what was Copernicus’s actual contribution? The proposition that the Earth moved. And though difficult for the modern mind to recover, this was a frameshifting proposition in its time, defying common sense, observation and Ptolemaic science. It was also affirmed by both Plato and Aristotle that the Earth was immobile. Most importantly the immobility of the Earth was perceived as fundamental to scripture where the sun is represented as moving from east to west along its daily journey. The Earth moved and the sun remained stationary. That was the essence of the Copernican contribution. Significantly Copernicus did not claim that the planets orbited the sun, and so his system was not heliocentric properly speaking: the Earth turned round “a point in space removed from the sun by a distance of about three times the sun’s diameter.” To disabuse readers of yet another item of misinformation: according to the Copernican system the planets did not revolve about the sun or even around that point in space around which the Earth revolved. Instead as Copernicus had it, the planets orbited the Earth.⁶

To those who did read Copernicus, there was one main advantage to his model that recommended it as better than the Ptolemaic. Here’s how Koestler explains it:

The principle advantage of the Copernican system over the Ptolemaic is greater geometrical simplicity in one essential respect. By transferring the hub of the universe from the earth to somewhere in the vicinity of the sun, the retrograde motions of the planets, which had so much worried the ancients, disappeared.⁷

In any event, historically speaking, it wasn’t what Copernicus actually thought or wrote that became known as the Copernican System; instead it was rumours about his conceptualisation of the universe that became known as such. And according to those rumours, Copernicus posited a heliocentric model with an immobile sun at the centre and an Earth that revolved around it, while the other planets orbited the Earth; or according to some explanations, some of them orbited the Earth and some revolved around the sun. Thus “Copernicus” came to represent an alternative model that unsettled the Ptolemaic one.

When considering the problematics with the Copernican System it is essential to keep in mind that Copernicus, adhering to cosmological dogma, attempted to explain the motions of the planets using circular orbits and was thus forced to save the appearances (of the model) by using a well established system of circular motions compounded with other circular motions (known as “epicycles”) such that he wound up with close to fifty such motions to account for observations⁸—more than were required by the Ptolemaic system.⁹ The Earth itself required nine wheels.¹⁰ To confound matters still more, keep in mind that none of this cosmology, neither that of Copernicus, nor the Ptolemaic, was expected to represent the truth of how the universe functioned. The mathematics and geometry involved were considered—at least overtly and formally speaking—heuristics of convenience to help create better calendars, and predict celestial events, nothing more. The modern dogma of mathematics and geometry as bearing essential, epistemological and empirical Truths was not yet in play.

That said, there was clearly an epistemological drift already underway because despite this notion of the math having little to do with observed reality (the platonic shadow world), these cosmologies were still perceived as telling something about observed realities: whether the sun or the Earth was at the centre was considered a question of reality; whether the universe of fixed stars moved about the Earth or whether the Earth moved and the stars remained immobile were equally questions regarding the reality of the cosmos. Nevertheless, the theoretical framework (Ptolemy) preceded the observations, a bias that persisted until Kepler (1571-1630) and held sway for some time after his discoveries.

Portrait of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) by artist Domenico Tintoretto (1560-1635). Painting circa 1605-1607.

Galileo, the myth continues, was persecuted by the Church. According to legend the canons came after him with torches and pitchforks for heresy. Since I’ve already introduced Iain McGilchrist, I’ll quote him on this subject. He informs us that “the received version of Galileo’s dispute with the Church [is] a piece of hagiography that suits the dogma of our own age.” The story we are told assumes “that Galileo must have been the champion of reason in the face of irrational bigotry on the part of the Church.”

In fact his ideas were certainly not dismissed by either pope or his cardinals, who indeed let him know that they admired his work; and if it had not been for Galileo’s personality, he would not have found himself placed under house arrest, which led to his canonisation in the chronicles of science.¹¹

If one conducts an internet search on the Galileo story, one will find defenders of the notion that the Church persecuted him. Such claims are patently false, as the primary sources indicate. Admittedly when Galileo did initiate a campaign claiming the idea that Copernicus’s ideas of a sun that did not move and an Earth that did, he found himself embroiled in a sort of inquisition. But it was hardly of the sort one imagines before a grand inquisitor and implements of torture. First of all Galileo was only brought before the Holy Office after making false claims that Copernicus’s hypothesis had been irrefutably proven and conformed to all the appearances (of the phenomena), and that therefore the Church had to go about altering its theological interpretations of those scriptural passages suggesting the sun moved from east to west and that the Earth stood still. And frankly he would have been forgiven even that taboo foray into theology had he not gone about insulting those who argued against the glaringly flawed Copernican system for which he failed to provide an iota of evidence, calling them “‘mental pygmies’, ‘dumb idiots’, and ‘hardly deserving to be called human beings’.”¹² Deploying such language, he managed to alienate his supporters among the Jesuits and the Pope himself. Moreover once he was brought before the tribunal, he was treated with utmost respect and clemency. He was placed under house arrest to be sure, but “assigned a five-roomed flat in the Holy Office itself, overlooking St Peter’s and the Vatican gardens, with his own personal valet and Niccolini’s major domo to look after his food and wine.”¹³ There were no dungeons, no pitchforks and no flames.

Koestler explains “that the fame of this outstanding genius rests mostly on discoveries he never made, and on feats he never performed”:

Contrary to statements in even recent outlines of science, Galileo did not invent the telescope; nor the microscope; nor the thermometer; nor the pendulum clock. He did not discover the law of inertia; nor the parallelogram of forces or motions; nor the sun spots. He made no contribution to theoretical astronomy; he did not throw down weights from leaning tower of Pisa, and he did not prove the truth of the Copernican system. He was not tortured by the Inquisition, did not languish in its dungeons, did not say “eppur si muove”; and he was not a martyr of science.¹⁴

Moreover he was hardly the hero who stood courageously against the dominant views of his age. In fact as a professor at the University of Padua he taught the Ptolemaic system and worked to discredit the Copernican view. When Kepler gently suggested that he speak his mind and indeed the Truth, Galileo was insulted and cut off their lively epistolary exchange.

What’s more, Galileo was a petty and vicious sort. Afraid of speaking his mind on a great topic, he was more than bold to persecute one who had written an instructional brochure on the use of “the so-called proportional compass” a German invention fifty-years old “which Galileo had improved, as he improved a number of other gadgets that had been known for a long time.” The cause of dispute was that Galileo himself had written an Italian instructional booklet, and a year later a fellow by the name Capra wrote one in Latin. As Koestler explains, “both referred to the same subject, which interested only military engineers and technicians.” In response Galileo “published a pamphlet Against the Calumnies and Impostures of Balthasar Capra, etc (Venice 1607), in which that unfortunate man and his teacher were described” in the most extreme terms:

“that malevolent enemy of honour and of the whole of mankind”, “a venom-spitting basilisque”, “an educator who bred the young fruit on his poisoned soul with stinking ordure”, “a greedy vulture, swooping at the unborn young to tear its tender limbs to pieces”, and so on.¹⁵

Most notable is that Galileo did not express fear of the Church in his explanation to Kepler for why he withheld his true views of heliocentrism. “What he feared was clearly stated in his letter: to share the fate of Copernicus, to be mocked and derided; ridendus et explodendum—‘laughed at and hissed off the stage’ are his exact words.” But by whom? Koestler explains as follows:

he was afraid of the ridicule both of the unlearned and the learned asses, but particularly of the latter: his fellow professors at Pisa and Padua, the stuffed shirts of the peripatetic school, who still considered Aristotle and Ptolemy as absolute authority.¹⁶ (358)

The more one learns of Galileo, the more one discovers he was a petty man, most charitably viewed as a victim of left-brain predominance and therefore a tragic example of one subject to fury and emotional imbalance. That said, his insights into dynamics proved essential to the development of physics. And most interestingly, this was not an area of contention nor especially recognised in popular myth, where he has been immortalised as a Tower of Pisa Saint who was burned at the stake for a heretic—as many do in fact believe.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

1. Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. London: Arkana Penguin Books, 1989. (First published 1959.) pp. 155-56, 176-77.

2. Ibid. pp. 156-57.

3. Ibid. p. 194.

4. Ibid. p. 125.

5. Ibid. p. 170.

6. Ibid. p. 196-7.

7. Ibid. p. 197.

8. Ibid. p. 124.

9. Ibid. p. 194-5.

10. Ibid. p. 198.

11. McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. p. 324.

12. Koestler op. cit. p. 493.

13. Ibid. p. 498.

14. Ibid. p. 358.

15. Ibid. p. 362.

16. Ibid. p. 358.