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Welcome to Pods with Nick and James. I'm James. With me is Nick.
I'm supposedly leading the discussion this evening.
My chosen subject was the famous astronomer.
Polymath, as all individuals of great intellect at that time were chosen to be called.
Yeah, and well, sorry, the individual is Galileo or Galileo Galilei, as to use his full name.
Weirdly enough, Galileo was his family name. Yeah, so I guess Galileo Galileo.
Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. With me is Nick, obviously.
Hi. How are you doing?
So we've looked at a number of different sources. I read a what I say a read.
I spent a good nine hours listening to an audio book on Galileo's life.
The book in question is and of course, audibles change.
But really enough, the title of the book was literally just Galileo Galilei.
It was an audit. It was a biography and it was designed.
Oh, sorry. Here we go. Here's the book. Right. Galileo, a life by James Reston, Jr.
It's it's a very, very good book. I will give it five stars.
The narrator was Jeff Riggenbach, and despite his own problems and needing to stop at several times in order to catch his breath, which humanized him in my view, it was a very.
Yeah, it was a very well read book and it covered a huge amount of good details.
Sadly, though, I will admit often I'm feeling that documentaries do a better job. So, Nick, tell us a little bit about the documentary you watched.
I watched a documentary from the Eugenides Foundation.
I literally titled Galileo Fighting in the Dawn of Modern Science. It was released in 2013.
Unfortunately, it was in Greek, I believe, and I had to watch it with subtitles on, which doesn't bother me at all.
But I know for a lot of people that really does. That's like a no for them. But I really enjoyed it. It was very informative.
I learned a hell of a lot. I found it no different to like reading a book whilst having like TV on in the background.
So, but it was a very, very, very informative documentary. They are.
I think they're I think Eugenides Foundation is like a free thinking platform and therefore there was a bit of perspective,
shall we say a bit of. What's the word I'm looking for here?
Do you feel that there was a Eugenadabow agenda? Well, I think there was a mild agenda there.
As far as like the church, how they like how they treated Galileo.
And it was definitely like a taint to how they were talking.
But being the the well rounded individual that I am, you can.
Will that be out and get the general consensus?
And the very first. What surprised me is that the book also starts very much with the same role.
However, as you read more of the book, it actually seems the book that I read, it seemed to actually become more and more
conservative, like not looking at Galileo as just bravely fighting for his beliefs and his
his theories versus an ignorant time and a mono
theistic and mono kind of restricted belief system.
But it actually kind of documents how he would
get people on side with one theory and then unfortunately with his next act,
as it were, completely alienate people that he had spent ages trying to get on side.
It also looked at the mistakes of the Inquisition and of
Pope Paul V. Yeah.
Weirdly enough, Pope Paul V was not the pope at the time of Galileo's house arrest, but he was.
He was the pope. He was the pope that
he was the pope that came before, wasn't he? Because if memory serves,
he was in good standing with one pope, used that to
speak in Rome a couple of times in front of a lot of theologians about his perspectives.
And got a lot of people on side by sharing his views,
should we say, in Rome whilst he was in power.
Well, I guess we'll start with it.
I guess my first question will be what was your understanding of or your knowledge of Galileo prior to the
research done for this podcast?
Pretty much just the name and he was another one of those Renaissance era
free thinkers that changed the world. I put him in the same kind of box as you have like Plato, Archimedes,
Socrates, even Newton.
For how, I don't necessarily know everything that they've done, but I know they had
the same kind of impact on the way the world thought and the way the world thinks as each other.
Yeah, I'm very much the same. Like I was aware of Galileo and I know that he
Yeah, I know that he had fought the church. I wasn't aware that I thought he died for his beliefs.
Whereas, yeah, I knew that he was an astronomer. I wasn't aware of the improvements that he'd made to the telescope,
his invention of the military compass, or a number of his inventions.
I also wasn't aware that he was one of the first people to get a patent on one of his inventions.
Yeah, it was to do with a water pump that he'd invented.
Oh cool.
And annoyingly, he spent a huge amount of money getting a patent on it and then sold like two.
Which, yeah, it's really interesting. He was very much a showman, but not necessarily a fantastic businessman.
What I liked reading about or hearing about was that he, a lot of the things that he thought,
and I say thought because he didn't necessarily test very much.
He would come up with these amazing concepts.
What did he want?
No, there's hypothetical scenarios that people have, like historians have put out there,
like he dropped weights off the Tower of Pisa. However, it's not actually generally thought of that he did that.
It's that, if the consensus goes, that he thought about the process of chopping different weighted objects off of the Tower of Pisa.
And that's how he came up with the theory that everything moves towards the Earth at the same speed,
unless it's affected by other factors such as air resistance.
Yeah, no, I honestly thought he had. But I guess I will admit the biography that I'm reading is dramatised.
And it does talk about how the reports are varied and a little bit suspect in their styles.
What do you, okay, now having watched the documentary, what do you think was his biggest achievement?
I think from a mathematician's standpoint, it is brilliant.
Yeah, break it down into the other bit. Yeah, I'm going to say one thing, but by all means, the man did a lot.
So hit me with your different favourite bits from a mathematical perspective.
He came up with the idea of inertia, didn't he?
Although he didn't use that word, he conceptualised inertia.
And that in turn paved the way for Newton to do what Newton did later on.
So I think that was quite possibly the biggest achievement that he did from a mathematical perspective.
But from a philosophical perspective or a theological perspective,
I think what he did was he started the way for the church to be separate from scientific investigations.
He started the road of that separation because previous to that, the church was at the forefront of all things,
philosophy, mathematics, theology, and everything had to be crossed and ticked via the church.
Whereas post Galileo, not so much. It started to move away from the church's power.
You started to get more and more of these so-called free thinkers.
Yeah, no, absolutely. For me, although I disagree on the why he did it, he basically...
So I disagree with why he improved the telescope. But what I do like is the fact that he got some drawings,
had a conversation with a man about how a telescope works, hired a glass blower, and made his own.
And then made several prototypes. And then within the course of a couple of months had improved it several times.
So he heard about something, got some drawings, and by hearing about something and getting some drawings,
he backwards engineered, made one from scratch, and then improved it beyond the original several times.
And the reason why I disagree with why he did this is because he wanted to be patronized by, I think it was one of the Tuscan Grand Dukes.
And Dutchman was approaching to give one of the Grand Dukes a telescope as a gift and to kind of ingratiate himself.
So when Galileo heard of this, he had one of his best mates block the Dutchman from approaching the Grand Duke.
And then in this month period where the Dutchman was waylaid, he built a telescope from scratch, improved it several times,
and then presented it to the Grand Duke of Tuscany before the Dutchman was allowed entry to get there.
Which, not the best move, but what I will say is, to take a new idea, like if somebody even showed me a rudimentary car engine,
I wouldn't know how to make it into a good car by modern day standards, let alone if somebody showed me a jet and asked me to make improvements on it,
I wouldn't be able to do that. To be able to take something entirely new, make it, and then improve it within the course of a month is absolutely ridiculous.
And the fact that he did that is incredible. Yeah. Because the telescope was originally a Dutch invention, wasn't it?
And it was used to see things far away on Earth. It was used as a means to... Was it a naval thing? Yeah, it was more for the Navy.
However, Galileo affected it and sharpened the visibility on it so much that he could then use it to observe the surface of the Moon and the Sun.
That led to his agreement that Copernicus' theory, the heliocentric theory about the Sun being the centre of the solar system and everything rotates around it,
it led to that being one of his fundamentals. Interestingly, he observed some of the moons around Jupiter and obviously observed the moon around our planet and said,
basically there are objects that rotate around larger objects but we all rotate around that big glowing orb over there. That was generally where he got to with it.
I love the fact that he was able to figure that out by looking... He looked at the Moon, saw that it had phases, then looked at Venus and saw it had the same phases.
It was the sun casting the shadow on Venus, wasn't it, that caused him to go, hold on, we see that on the Moon, which kind of led to him getting the idea that something's getting in the way of the Sun and Venus,
which means that Venus isn't going around us, it's going around the Sun. Yeah, it's really clever, very clever. He observed sunspots on the Moon, actually wrote his first book, or his first letters, were letters about sunspots rotating around the Sun.
That's it. And I love it as well because some people said, oh well those are just bits of matter, or whatever, and he was like, no, no, no, they appear on the surface of the Sun.
Additionally, it took me a while to figure out how he'd done that by the fact that you can't look directly at the Sun with the naked eye, let alone looking at it through a telescope.
And it wasn't just a lens, he literally projected an image of the Sun using a telescope and then some additional lenses in order to be able to view the sunspots in the first place.
I love as well the fact that my understanding of the Galileo, so he's held up as one of the big, and he did, he did make huge step forwards for the separation between science and theology.
But what really interests me is that it wasn't just the heliocentric thing that he put forward, and it wasn't just the Church and the Inquisition that he annoyed.
The weird thing is at the time of his house arrest, Galileo had been putting his thoughts forward, arguing with people left, right and center, and if I'm honest with you, both gaining great friends and great enemies, both in and out of the Vatican for a good 25 years.
You know, like he just... The people that he had on side, people that he quite often he had good friends in the Church, but because of the power that the Church had and because of the, shall we say the blasphemous teachings that he was trying to express,
his friends within the Church quite often double crossed him and turned their back on him and almost gave him up to the Inquisition on a couple of occasions.
Yeah, it did, it did disappoint, some of his friends did really disappoint me. What also really kind of, what really surprised me as well was that it seems, a lot of it seems to have started in, so before he went to Rome to talk to Robert Bellemann, the Cardinal Inquisitor.
Cardinal Roberto Bellemann, yeah.
Oh, okay. Okay, you know what your thing is going to be more... Yeah, that's it.
Oh, has the sound gone?
No, yesterday.
Okay, great. All right.
Yeah, what really surprises me is that the Grand Inquisitor was in himself an astronomer.
It also surprises me that when Galileo was originally attacked in the early 1600s, it was by a gentleman who was looking for a way to promote his own ascension within the Church.
Like he wanted to become a powerful, a more powerful person.
So he attacked Galileo, and it had the opposite effect. The leaders of his order would like literally just said, no, mate, you're wrong.
Shut up, and then sent a letter of apology to Galileo, but the moment that this one... Which bloke was it? I need to find this. This is really going to annoy me.
But this one bloke attacked him in the early 1600s, and then it just seemed to start this continual kind of procession of people who just more and more and more attacked him until there was a great consensus.
Like Copernicus was treated terribly by the Church as well, and there was also a guy called Bruno and a number of other Florentine natural philosophers were treated horribly by the Catholic Church.
But up until, I think it was in the teens of the 1600s, Galileo was pretty much like the Catholic Church's golden boy.
Yeah, he was pretty well liked in the Church. However, around about 1613, maybe 1616, he ended up under the scrutiny of the Holy Inquisition.
And I think it was more because the more of a voice that he got, mathematicians ended up with more ego, shall we say, for lack of a better term.
They believed that given the fact that their teachings, you could prove them, their theories could be proven. They weren't just thought up.
You could think up a mathematician's theory and then go and prove it by conducting an experiment. You can't do that with philosophy, or with a lot of philosophy.
You also can't do it with rhetoric. Yeah. A lot of theologians at the time, the main bulk of power was in philosophy. And because the power started to shift towards the mathematicians, that's when he started to get a bad rep and ended up under the scrutiny of the Holy Inquisition.
They actually made him in, I think it was 1616, renounce the Copernicus system as false and sign a document stating that it was false.
Then Copernicus's book was added to the Forbidden Works, or as it's written in Italian, index labororum prohibitorum, which is just a book of you must not read these books kept by the church.
It's also interesting that you had in the, so from 15 to 1600, it was a horrible time. Well, just things didn't go well for the Catholic Church generally.
Like it just was, you had King Henry VIII renouncing you had a lot of Protestant nations just coming up out of nowhere.
What year was the Black Death? Is that there? I know the plague came about during, a number of plagues came about during Galileo's time, but you had a lot of bad things happening.
Also, France also became Protestant for a time in the late 1500s and then came back to Catholicism in the early 1600s.
Black Death from 1346 to 1353.
Okay, I was massively wrong there.
You have this institution which had for a number of hundred years had enjoyed like a solid stranglehold in power and that's the thing that really annoys me that at this time.
I think it, yes, it was about theology, but it was more about power and you could buy power and you could buy certain levels of freedom and you could buy forgiveness and it kind of really frustrates me that like you've got
something like Galileo simply wasn't rich or influential enough to get away with things, whereas richer people who claim to believe in Copernicus were entirely just left alone.
Additionally, the Vatican's power, they had complete power in Italy, but when it came to some of like the outer city states and like Tuscany and Venice and Florence, like some of the places like some of the Venetians were almost in open rebellion already.
One of his close friends was the Prince, was it Prince Cosimo of Florence?
Yes, Prince Cosimo of Florence. Prince Cosimo was also one of his former pupils. He did private tuition for Prince Cosimo.
Was that at Produa?
Yeah, yeah, like we're dealing, it's really weird like Galileo enjoyed private education, it all depended, well I suppose this is true of everyone, it just
Well he started off his education as a medical student at Pisa.
Yes, absolutely.
And then he left there without a qualification, he ran out of money and moved to Produa where he joined the university there and became a mathematician.
Well became head of the mathematician but what's weird is that the mathematician school at the time paid so much less than the other faculties and other, yeah, I don't know, what I see is I don't just see Galileo as
like the prophet or component of science versus religion, I see him as the movement from rhetoric to observation.
And what really interests me is that everyone seemed to be convinced that Aristotle was right about everything and that they were using our all of Aristotle stuff as almost like a separate canon for the Bible and yet
Aristotle himself, what they had of his writings, Aristotle didn't write full books, full works like Plato wrote full books and we only have about like I think it's a tiny number of Plato stuff whereas Aristotle
started the Lyceum and all of his stuff was lecture notes all of the writings they had of our Stossel were scraps of lecture notes where that he did orably the Lyceum literally translates to walk and talk.
Yeah.
So it's so it's not even like a interpretation of biblical biblical script, it's literally an interpretation of script at all, like that they just seem to be getting dead wrong.
And it's like this horrible social epoch where you've got people making up rules in secret about what a particular verse in the Bible means or what a particular verse of Aristotle means, and then holding people account to account to it when they
hadn't been told.
You know what I mean. Yeah, like, it just feels like towards, towards the end of
Galileo's life. It just feels like everybody was waiting to trap him.
You know, yeah, like, slowly but surely. I think you can call it, he had a couple of swan songs didn't he so obviously was put under house arrest after in the.
No wait that wasn't then he was stopped from teaching Copernicus or investigating Copernicus his teaching in 1616, which he did begrudgingly.
However, eight years later, he returned when the when the new pope came in.
He asked him to return Rome and asked him to overturn the decision from 1616, which the pope refused.
He didn't say you couldn't, what he didn't overturn the tea overturn entirely. And however, he did allow him to write a paper on both the Ptolemaic or
the other. You have the Ptolemaic and the cosmology like for Ptolemaic and for Aristotle, they didn't believe that the earth moved.
So, he said you can have because this is what that's what the Catholic Church heavily believed was that the earth was the center and everything revolved around it.
And that's the aristotelic teachings. The Copernicus idea is this heliocentric idea of there being a sun and that everything rotated around that.
And so what he what the pope said was you can write a book, but I want you want it to include both theories. And in this book, you must not draw any conclusion.
You must only discuss it. I want you to include my conclusion at the bottom of the book.
And I've got the quote. Yes, I've got the quote here. It says, man may not possibly understand how the world is actually made because God can act in way in ways that no man can imagine, nor has the ability to limit God's omnipotence.
And so that's what the pope told him he must include at the end of his book that he then went away and wrote in 1624. I suppose he must have finished it around 1627.
And interestingly, the book was to it was almost put on the standpoint of two people having a conversation, one from the actually there's three people having a conversation. One of them is like the Copernicus.
The Copernicus perspective. The other one is the apostate.
The Aristotle I can't say it. Aristotle.
That one. Yeah, the other one was. It's only because I've listened to a really smart bloke pronounce it that way. I might be pronouncing it horribly wrong. That's absolutely fine.
We'll blame the smart bloke. Aristotelian. His perspective. The other one was supposed, I suppose, was trying to be Galileo.
However, come seven years later, he was then called to Rome to stand trial because the philosophers didn't like the fact that there was a and it was almost like there was an open agenda against the aristotelic principles in the book.
And they said that, oh, as much as like you, the Pope wrote the and people were against the Pope by this point, they were looking to overthrow him.
So the Pope was backed into a corner and kind of went, no, I've got to call him to trial and to save his face.
And then they called him to trial and that was when he was he was fully renounced from the church and then he was put on house arrest.
Following the trial in 1624. No, not 1616, 1633. Sorry.
He during the trial, though, he was threatened with torture if he didn't agree that he had made an agreement with the church not to not to write about Copernicus anymore.
He was threatened with torture. He was threatened with lots of life imprisonment. Yeah, yeah. Unless he completely renounced his failing or he admitted his failings and he renounced his beliefs.
And he was forced to sign an agreement and confession or face death. Ironically, not ironically, interestingly, and this is one thing that a lot of historians once again skirt over with a bit of will say they pencil this one in.
They say that when he signed his confession, he whispered under his breath, his breath, and yet it still moves.
Almost like almost like I'm still going to believe what I what I believe. All right, whatever you tell me to write, but I still know what I think.
And you'd think 1633 he's been locked in house arrest. He's at a pope's house, not a pope's house, a priest's house.
He's locked in a in a room. He's actually not very well at all by this point. He is health is heavily declining. What does he go and do?
He wrote he writes he writes his most important book.
1634 and 1637 he takes the time following his trial to put his most important work in text called dialogue concerning two new science, two new sciences.
And that's where he recounted all of his experiments on freefall and inertia.
And paved the way that book itself paved the way for a very important man who is said to have stood on the shoulders of Galileo.
You know who I'm talking about? Is it Isaac Newton? It was Isaac Newton.
And without that without that book that he wrote in sheer defiance to the church in 1637 or at least in 1637, he, Isaac Newton would not have had the foundation to
start the enlightenment. His his enlightenment yeah. By 1639 I think it was he was completely blind. No 1638 he was completely blind.
I felt really sorry for him because this is a man who literally spent all of his life valuing observation. Yeah, you know, this is a man who had looked at the sun and was okay for a time.
Yeah, I mean to be fair, let's be completely fair. It's probably the looking at the sun that caused his eyesight to go.
Yeah.
But somebody's got to do it without him doing it. Right. Yeah, we wouldn't know about sunspots.
Well, I'm sure we would have worked it out. Someone else would have done it but he did it, you know, he did it early.
It's a shame as well because like as you, I don't not sure how much they covered about his life in his character but he starts off as a very, well he was always brash to a point and argumentative.
But he starts off as, you know, reasonably happy and yet through his life he just becomes, well I suppose the things that he faces, he becomes bit more and more bitter and also this seems to affect his health like he was most other than he had an eye infection when he was a teenager.
Which is weirdly enough why his father Vincenzo Galileo pulled him out of the monastery when, well he used the eye infection as an excuse to pull him out and out of the clutches of the monks there because Galileo had actually found that some of the monks were actually reasonably intelligent.
And had thought, yeah, all right, this life's okay, I could do this. Whereas Vincenzo wanted Galileo to make money.
So he pulled him out of, he pulled him away from a life of being a monk, really tried to push him into becoming a doctor as you said, he ran out of money, couldn't, didn't do that but still studied a lot of mathematics.
Yeah, he ran out of money when his father died, didn't he?
He became the sole proprietor, like he was the eldest son of six children. I genuinely feel sorry for the fact that the dowry payments to do with his sisters, somehow he was responsible for looking after the men who married his sisters and this became a problem for him later when they started demanding money from him.
And additionally, like his younger brother, Michelangelo, I'm not sure if this is just my book, I'm not sure what they said in your documentary, but they just make him sound like a douche.
They didn't say a lot about his family, other than his father in the documentary, no.
Oh, okay. Okay, well, it's fine. His father was not a failed musician, but like he was musical, sort of a musical genius. But the rest of Michelangelo's family, not Michelangelo, sorry, the rest of Galileo's family, like his mother was an impoverished noblewoman and became incredibly just bitter throughout the course of her life.
So he was then hired, paid one of Galileo's servants to start stealing lenses from him when he was building telescopes and to listen in on his conversations.
Well, there was a couple of servants who actually sold him out throughout his time, his early days of teaching Copernicus. A few other servants sold him out to some high ranked philosophers in the area.
Yeah, again, it really doesn't surprise me. It's annoying because I get the sense that Galileo was difficult to be around and to live with, but that shouldn't mean you sell him out straight away.
It's also just kind of really frustrating as well that Michelangelo promised to help Galileo with his sister's dowry payments.
Never did it. Never did it at all. In fact, two of Galileo's brother-in-laws took him to court over this, but I'm going to be honest with you, the dowry payments they demanded were ridiculous. It wasn't, oh, can I have some bread?
It was literally, I want to be able to live in luxury. I don't want to have to worry about money at all and you're going to pay for all of it. It was just, I don't know, just the scale of the number of demands on Galileo during his mid-30s.
He wasn't ever rich. It wasn't really, there wasn't any point. No, influential, but not rich. Exactly. I think that's where a lot of the misconception at the time of Galileo comes in. Everybody thinks, oh, he's really influential, he's incredibly intelligent, he must be loaded.
Yeah, and this is the thing, everyone assumed that. What I also really, one point I really did struggle with Galileo is that when he didn't marry his mistress, he clearly did love her as he had several children by her, even both of his daughters.
Yeah, wasn't it two daughters and a son?
Yeah, two daughters and a son. Both of his daughters, he put, both of his daughters became nuns, again, Catholic nuns.
Yeah.
And he still, you know, he still visited them and stuff, but they didn't even grow up. The one problem I have is at the time, lots of people had mistresses, but you didn't necessarily flaunt it.
No.
Whereas Galileo was constantly being attacked by other people over everything. So he literally had his, yeah, had his spouse and his children grow up in a smaller house down the road, which, like, I get why he did it, but it just, it's really weird that Galileo was never rich and his children,
they, they, you know, they grew up on, they grew up in borderline poverty. And it just seems really weird that you've got a man who in 1616, after kind of like agreeing not to necessarily talk too much about Copernicus, or after losing his arguments within the Vatican itself,
as to whether Copernicus was heretical or not, annoyingly, all the people who made that decision weren't in themselves astronomers, they were just Aristotelian theologians.
But you've got, yeah, you've got a guy who literally was able to get, was told by Pope Paul V, you have the goodwill of everyone. And, and this was something that the Pope said to him, whilst also giving him an hour of his time, an hour one on one time with the Pope, and his kids are growing up down a back alley.
It's just, I don't know, it's just the weird, it's a really weird thing that Galileo rubbed shoulders with some of the most important men of his age, and was friends and pen pals with princes and grand duchesses.
Grand Duke of, was it Grand Duke of Tuscany that he was really good friends with? Yeah, well, he was good friends with them, he was good friends with the Prince of, what was it?
Florence? Padua? Yeah, the Prince of Florence. Prince Cosima Florence, yeah.
Yeah, and like he was also really good friends with his mum, weirdly enough, because he'd originally, because she had originally hired him to tutor.
Talking about Cosimo's mum. Yeah Cosimo's mum, who I think actually went by the name Grand Duchess.
It's just, it's weird that you've got this guy who is in contact with and in conversation with, like, I guess this is why I, sometimes I feel like from some of his letters backwards and forwards when he's complaining about money, I actually kind of understand why he's complaining about money because he's surrounded
and he's talking with people who are richer than him constantly.
Yeah. You know, like he's not, he's not kind of. Nobody's throwing a dime.
Yeah, this is it, like they, and because nobody throws him a dime, he's constantly asking for the money and then grumbling when he gets it.
And that's because it's already gone. It's already gone to his brother-in-law's, it's already gone to, yeah, but, all right, but I don't know, to be fair, what really frustrates me about the whole thing is that I've listened, I've listened to hours of this book on his life, but it still doesn't mean that I consider myself to have an understanding
of rhetoric versus observation, or in my mind, how, how rhetoric was able to overpower observation for such a long time in human history.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
Because that, I don't know, what are your thoughts on that?
Well, it's almost a complete reversal on how we do things now. Now we are of the mentality that yes, you can think about it, but then we go away and test that thought just to give it some foundation.
Whereas previous, it was, let's think up a hypothetical situation that seems at least reasonably relevant, and that'll do. We'll write a book on it. And it feels, like I said, it feels backwards to how things are now.
And I think the way that everybody thinks now, if you tried to just have a theory, you think about Terence Howard, for example, just to throw a name out there, he wants to revolutionize the world of maths.
He's come up with a theory that one, one times one equals two, and wants to re-audit the entire world of maths based on that theory. It's fantastic that somebody can have that rhetoric in their head.
However, in our foundation, in our reality now, you must then go away and prove that your theory then works. And when you look into it, it doesn't. So society now doesn't work on that basis.
I don't know about you, but I feel like social media is kind of leading it back towards that, where just having an idea and if it sounds good enough, then that's good enough for everybody else, because of the amount of traction that somebody like, for example, Terence Howard has got.
He's a very famous celebrity, an actor, and the amount of people that listen to his theories and go, wow, this guy's a revolutionary, he's going to change the world.
No, it just doesn't work from a scientific perspective or from a mathematical perspective, it doesn't work. And you must go away and test your theories to corroborate them, should we say.
But the church never did that. And the idea that you would want to go and prove your theory wasn't necessary. It baffles me. It really does not sit in my head very well at all. I mean, I'm quite a logical person.
What weirds me out is that people would argue and they would argue over logic, and they would reason over things, but the direct observation of fact would be somewhere hiding in the corner.
And it was always, well, how wealthy are you? Or how well known are the people who believe in your argument? And therefore, that's...
That's your corroboration.
That's your power. That's the truth. The truth in your argument is in the public opinion. Like it's really weird hearing about scientific findings being discussed in the same way as a moral argument or a philosophical argument, or if I'm honest with you, just politics.
It just seems like there was no truth. It was just politics.
The more you're saying, the more I feel like it has transitioned back into that phase through the use of social media.
I'm terrified at the moment, I'll admit, because yeah, I actually think you're right. And I think things are going back that way. And it's also in advertisement, it's in social media for sure, but it's also just in society at large.
It's like, this is true and right, because this big company says it's true and right.
There's no... I don't know, just like the things that corporations ask their workers to do or expect their workers to do with no compensation. And it's weird that you're seen as... you even have to come across as belligerent in order to put across a different moral view on the idea of selling time
and effort and action for money. I don't know. Sorry, I think you're right. I think things have gone... things do seem to be going back this way. And it seems to be that the power is held by the most powerful spin doctor, not the power is held by what is obviously morally good.
Yeah, I mean, the amount of times my kids tell me something that is... they believe is absolutely incredible and then you go, oh no, that's wrong. And that's wrong because of this, this and this. And they're like, no, you're wrong because this video is on TikTok and it's got over a million likes.
And you're like, you have no idea. One of my favorite things, and this is a bit of a digress, but we'll go with it. One of my favorite videos to watch, not to watch, but one of my favorite videos I've observed my kids watching is one of those videos where they go, oh, think of a number, double it and do this and do that to it.
And then you end up with like, you end up purely with the number three or something like that, no matter which way you go about what number you start with. And my kids were like, wow, it's like magic. And I'm like, no, it's just maths. And it works because you are manipulated by the person on the other side of the screen.
That's it. But also like, have you, have you talked to them about, oh, is it n-grams? Like you can use a mathematical formula to solve any Rubik's Cube.
Yeah, my daughter solves Rubik's Cubes. I can solve them. I've got the formula in my head to solve a Rubik's Cube from any formation, but it's not fast. It will take me time to go through it, whereas my kid will do it in like half a minute if that...
Well, your kid's got powers, so fair play to her. But like, yeah, it's a mathematical, it's a skill thing rather than a magic thing. Although I'm not gonna, I don't know, I'm not too worried.
And I don't want to tell any kids that they're wrong or take away their wonder when they look at things, but I will, I will admit it does.
Truth and public opinion and popular opinion are two separate things. And like, just because several million people believe something doesn't mean that it's right or that it's wrong. It just, that there's no...
There might be influence in a popular opinion, but that doesn't change whether it's true or not. So like, for example, if anybody tried to defend religion by saying, oh well, most of humanity all throughout the course of the history of humanity have believed in some form of God and it's only nowadays that people don't believe, that's not a strong argument.
But then again, neither is the church has done incredible evil, therefore God can't exist. It just changes whether God is either all powerful or all good.
Because if he's both, then how come the world looks like the horrible messed up place that it is? Even though as I sit here in, you know what, sorry, I won't say, but even though I sit here in a comfortable English town, I know that it's bad in other places in the world. And I know that it's bad like even just down the street.
But that doesn't change whether something is true or not. No, it's just, I don't know, I like I need to I think maybe I need to do another episode on thought experiments or on logic as a whole or logic versus rhetoric, which seems to be what the entire life of Galileo is all about.
And I apologize to our listeners, listeners that we've covered so little ground on this, but Galileo research him. He was an amazing bloke with some amazing ideas. Did he do everything right? No. Was he persecuted? Yes.
On that, there's a lot to be learned from him though.
How long was it before he got an apology from the church? You know?
I do know it's embarrassing but what I find really interesting is it doesn't say in the Bible that the Pope's infallible.
Like St. Peter was arguably the first Roman Catholic and the first Pope.
But he was massively fallible. Like his entire, the whole reason why Jesus put him on the top and put him in charge of the church was a way of saying, look, you're flawed. You've denied me three times. You are human.
Do your best to feed my sheep. Do your best to look after people.
And yet somehow there was just this complete reversal of the Pope has been elected. He needs to have absolute authority.
Because he needs to have absolute authority, we need to claim that he's divine, which seems to be what you get with countries like North Korea, which then claim that their leader is in fact divine or magical.
I mean I thought we moved away from that after the Egyptians and the Grecians. Who was the...
No, it just keeps coming back.
It's ridiculous. I'm sorry to use that kind of language but it is ridiculous.
It's fine.
But yeah, John Paul II formally apologised for the condemnation of Galileo and restored his name, how much of a hollow victory this is because obviously the bloke had been dead for 350 years when he got exonerated.
Was it 392 or something after his original trial or after his house arrest?
It was 31st October 1992 that he... I think it was 322 years.
No, 352. I can't remember. It was a very long time.
If they wanted it to have any kind of social effect or effect on the way that people view the Catholic Church, they needed to do it by the late 1800s.
At least 100 years before.
And it's just...
Yeah.
I don't know. If anything, just the very fact that they've admitted it that long in advance. In fact that's one of the points that's used in the shorter videos to do with Galileo.
Is that, oh, and the Church didn't apologise for this many years.
Which is nearly... it's such a large number, it might as well have been, and the Church never apologised.
Well, he certainly wasn't around to hear it, was he?
Who were they apologising? They're apologising for themselves, for the organisation, for the sect that is the Church.
Their faith?
Well, they're doing it. It's a people pleasing thing.
But it's a people...
Sometimes I apologise when I shouldn't and when I'm just aware that something is wrong.
But... yeah, it was just... it was too little, too late. The very fact that there is a banned list of books.
You could say, well, we disagree... you can have a set of books where we disagree with these books, but the moment you ban, the moment you take faith and you try and wield it with absolute authority,
unless you are directly representing God and directly acting out of a profound and deep experience you have had on this one particular issue,
then your authority, unless you're doing a direct reaction to that, your authority is just vacuous, it's bankrupt, it's not there.
It's the complete opposite, doesn't it? If you ban books like that, you give them more weight.
You give them...
You give them glamour.
Yeah, you give them status because they are one of the banned books. You create curiosity in the public.
Not... not... the only way you get people not to read those books is with fear.
And the church led with fear for so long, as did many rulers. But... I mean, the minute somebody tells me that there's like X amount of banned books,
I'm like, okay, I need to find out what these books are, I need to read them and find out why they're banned.
Like, it just builds curiosity in me more than anything. It doesn't make me not want to read them.
That's it. That's exactly it. Oh, dear. Right. Well, I'm sorry, leaders, this was one of the more just backwards and forwards.
But take a look at the life of Galileo. He's definitely a person who was... is worth researching.
And I'd also say take a look at the... at the relationship and the authority of rhetoric and think about how much secondhand opinions affect your own views and how much facts affect your own views.
Having said that, I am fully guilty of having so many secondhand opinions and things affect my views. But this has been me and Nick dipping our toes,
barely dipping our toes into what is a huge subject and affects a huge swathe of human society.
I'm going to call it an end there as long as you're right with that, Nick, and come back to this at another point. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. Thanks very much to everybody for listening and take care.
Thanks for your patience. Bye.