On 12 April, 2005.

It was on this day in 1633 that Galileo was put on trial for publishing evidence that the sun and not the earth is the center of the solar system. He was a devout Catholic but didn't believe his ideas should threaten the church. He wrote, the "Holy Sprit intended to teach us in the Bible how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go."


Galileo had gotten into trouble with the church about his ideas before, but he thought the new Pope Urban VIII might be more open-minded. Galileo visited him and brought along his microscope, hoping to dazzle him with its power to enlarge objects and bring them closer. After a few hours of demonstrations, Galileo asked if the ban on sun-centered teaching could be lifted. The Pope said that if Galileo wanted to write about his theories, he had to present them as theories only, and couldn't present them as the truth.


So Galileo wrote a book in which three friends discuss whether the earth or the sun is the center of the solar system. The book presented the sun-centered argument as convincing and the earth-centered argument as idiotic, but at the very end, the three characters agree that no one really knows the truth. When it was published, the book became a best-seller.


The pope decided Galileo's book had crossed a line, and mocked the church, and he ordered the printing stopped, all copies seized, and Galileo was put on trial for heresy. Galileo was sentenced to house arrest.


In 1636 he developed an infection in his right eye and because of his house arrest he could not seek treatment. Two years later he was blind. He wrote to a friend in a letter, "By my remarkable observations, the sky...was opened a hundred or a thousand times wider than anything seen by the learned of all the past centuries. Now, that sky is diminished for me to a space no greater than that which is occupied by my own body."


It took more than 350 years for Pope John Paul II to declare, in 1992, that Galileo had been unjustly condemned by the Catholic Church.