— 1846: Planet Neptune was discovered. According to NASA’s website: “With the 1781 discovery of Uranus, the number of known planets in the solar system grew to seven. As astronomers continued to observe the newly discovered planet, they noticed irregularities in its orbit that Newton’s law of universal gravitation could not fully explain. However, effects from the gravity of a more distant planet could explain these perturbances. By 1845, Uranus had completed nearly one full revolution around the Sun and astronomers Urbain Jean-Joseph Le Verrier in Paris and John Couch Adams in Cambridge, England, independently calculated the location of this postulated planet. Based on Le Verrier’s calculations, on the night of Sept. 23-24, 1846, astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle used the Fraunhofer telescope at the Berlin Observatory and made the first observations of the new planet, only 1 degree from its calculated position. In retrospect, following its formal discovery, it turned out that several astronomers, starting with Galileo Galilei in 1612, had observed Neptune too, but because of its slow motion relative to the background stars, did not recognize it as a planet.”
— "Galileo Galilei vs. the Church". That is the title of one of the episodes of my podcast: History Analyzed. [Galileo is considered the ]()[father of modern science](). His discoveries included the laws of pendulums which led to the development of the first accurate clocks. But tragically, he was tried by the Inquisition of Rome for heresy. The science deniers of the Church threatened to burn him at the stake unless he recanted his claims that he could prove that Copernicus was right: the Earth is not the center of the universe — we live in a heliocentric system where the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun.
You can find History Analyzed on every podcast app.
— link to Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0qbAxdviquYGE7Kt5ed7lm
— link to Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/galileo-galilei-vs-the-church/id1632161929?i=1000655220555
1 Comment
The Galileo case isn’t as clear-cut as most people think. It happened because Galileo behaved appallingly and ignored rules.