Galileo (Figaro!)

History seems to suggest that Galileo Galilei was punished by the Catholic Church for being a heretic. I’m not questioning his lack of impunity, but whether he should have been punished as a heretic in the first place. He may be in a rock song by ‘Queen’, but in his day he was a rock star in his own right. He used his telescope to demonstrate the heavenly rocks, like the moon and planets, weren’t perfect spheres and fixed like Aristotle had suggested millennia before. However, his heliocentric model supposedly shook the world and caused a rockslide of a response from the less than rock-solid Catholic Church. Secularism presents a battered Galileo lying under the foot of a cardinal confessing his scientific discovery that seemed to conform to reality as heresy. The truth is quite different, and may rock you - and I’m not off my rocker. Copernicus’ heliocentric model had been accepted by the church nearly a century earlier. Galileo misrepresented it as much simpler, disregarding the unnecessary epicycles it would need to match observations of the planets, unlike Kepler and his model with proper elliptical rather than spherical orbits. Not to mention, Galileo was bombastic and made enemies intentionally, possibly to gain notoriety. After all this, he was simply put on house arrest in a palatial enclave overlooking the Vatican Gardens - not in a dungeon chained to the gallows. Galileo was brilliant, no doubt, but was not the stalwart of truth against a bigoted fundamentalist-driven society, as he’s often portrayed. I’m not saying he shouldn’t be mentioned in ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, I’m actually saying he was likely very Bohemian himself.