ON the occasion of 400 years since Galileo invented the first man-made telescope that drastically changed the scientific perception of mankind to the universe, the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), together with the International Astronomical Union (IAU) have launched 2009 as the ‘International Year of Astronomy”.
Accordingly, events have been organized and scheduled throughout the year at local, national, regional and international levels to celebrate the magnificent impact of Galileo’s work on the history of science as well as on the history of humanity.
In Galileo’s time, optical lenses were invented and their use extended to spying tasks; the king or the prince in his palace would use a tube with two lenses (that became binoculars later on) to watch what people were doing in the gardens.
Galileo, impassioned by science and the theories of the Polish astronomer Copernicus, decided to use the lenses in a different way; he built a tube out of leather sheets of about one meter long, and fixed two appropriate lenses at both ends tp form the first ever telescope. With this primitive optical instrument Galileo made four important observations.
Firstly, he found that Jupiter is surrounded by four moons that are revolving around it and not around the earth. Secondly, he discovered that Venus had different phases (like those of the moon) related to its position in relation to the sun, which meant that Venus was revolving around the sun and not around the earth. Thirdly, he saw the details of the surface of the moon with its flat areas (Mare) and the mountains (Craters) and drew these details in a series of sketches.
Until the time of Galileo, human beings thought the universe to be Geocentric (Planet Earth is the centre and all celestial bodies are rotating around it including the sun, the moon, and the five planets known at that time as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the sphere of starts). From Galileo’s observations, especially the first two, he concluded that the universe is not geocentric, but indeed it is heliocentric (centered around the sun and not the earth). He also concluded that the earth not only revolves around the sun but it also rotates around its own axis once every day.
Since these discoveries were against the existing knowledge and the inherited religious beliefs, Galileo was condemned by the Church and had to deny his discoveries to escape execution. He was consequently isolated by being imprisoned in his own home until the day he died in his seventies.
People often use the story of Galileo when they talk about discrimination and ignorance, because it is such an evident example of how anyone coming up with a new idea, thought or theory or even an interpretation that is different to the existing common knowledge, might be subject to isolation, discrimination or censorship until today.
This has always happened and is still happening in science as well as in religion and politics. The legendary Egyptian writer Taha Hussein was accused of atheism, when he wrote book about the poems of the Jahilia (pre-Islam age of ignorance) and, of course, all the stories of different prophets faced the same trouble.
