And there's a chain of creation reaching up to heaven. As a young man, Galileo toyed briefly with the idea of becoming a priest. Instead he entered the University of Pisa as a medical student in 1581.

Galileo argued vociferously against the biblical ... Though it got by church censors, it deeply offended Pope Urban VIII and the Jesuit priests advising him. New charges were raised against ...

We got “Galileo hate mail” here at the Vatican’s astronomical observatory. It was funny — and not funny. It originated, and originates, in respectable places. And it speaks to the broader ...

The book made him famous, but offended a Muslim priest who ordered the doctor to ... of his book were accompanied for good measure. Galileo (1564-1642) The Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo ...

The drama of Galileo's trial by the Inquisition in 1633 has cast him as a renegade astronomer who scoffed at the Bible and drew fire from a Church blind to reason. Indeed, the myth of the martyred ...

In 1600, the year Galileo’s first daughter was born, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy, having suggested, among much else, that the universe was infinite ...

Galileo proposed an idea that we now take for granted: that the earth rotates around the sun. This idea (sometimes called "heliocentricity") had already been suggested as a hypothesis by ...