The fight is on!
In three centuries, the long complex story of how the mobile Earth replaced the stationary Earth dipped below the horizon from History into Legend. Like all good legends, the story of heliocentrism and the culture-hero Galileo is simple and general and geared toward supporting the Rightness of the Modern worldview. But history is always detailed and particular.
—Chapter 9, "Conclusion: Our ancestors were not fools"
Written by Science Fiction author Michael Flynn under the handle TheOFloinn (TOF for short), The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown is an irreverent but detailed account of the long transition from the geocentric to the heliocentric worldview, with particular emphasis on the career, controversy, and trial of Galileo Galilei.
Besides illustrating how the march of science can be slow, plodding, and inconsistent, it also works to dispel numerous myths about the era. This includes, but is not limited to, support for geocentrism being rooted in unscientific superstition, the accuracy of many early heliocentric models, the extent of Galileo's contributions to science, and the role of the Catholic Church in his downfall. Instead, Galileo comes off as an egocentric blowhard who had a knack for overhyping his skills, alienating colleagues, and making new rivals. Flynn also provides context regarding the The Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, portraying Galileo's conviction for heresy as being part of a larger political struggle instead of the oversimplified "brave scientist vs. superstitious clergy" narrative known today.
The first version was an article published in January 2013 in Analog with the full title "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle." An extended version was published from August to October 2013 on Flynn's BlogSpot page TheTOFSpot, and it can be read here
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Tropes Concerning the Two Chief World Systems:
- Asshole Victim: While the end result of Galileo's trial was clearly biased against him, he had angered so many people over the years that many were glad to see him go down, or at least couldn't be bothered to speak up on his behalf.
- Belief Makes You Stupid: Discussed and very much averted. Flynn points out that contrary to the popular myth around Galileo, he wasn't persecuted because heliocentrism angered literalist religious authorities, but because he was in the middle of a web of personal, religious, and political rivalries. The story is also filled with numerous cases of priest-astronomers, as well as scientists and mathematicians with religious benefactors.
- Best Served Cold: In the 1610s, members of the so-called "Pigeon League" conspired to frame Galileo for heresy by forging letters and witness statements. They eventually do bring Galileo down... eighteen years later, after other rivals of Galileo came across the unsuccessful accusations and cited them as evidence against him in his trial.
- Corrupt Church: Since the series deals mainly with Renaissance Italy, it's a given. It is noted that Urban VIII was infamously nepotistic even by contemporary standards (not that Galileo had an issue with this, since he had a piece of it).
- Damned By a Fool's Praise: The reason Pope Urban VIII became so irate at Galileo's Dialogue is because in the conclusion, a strawman idiot named Simplicio ("Simpleton" in Italian) shares Urban's philosophical views. Galileo's opponents in the Papal court had little trouble convincing His Holiness that it was a direct dig at him.
- Deadpan Snarker: One of Galileo's most notable traits—which made him plenty of both friends and enemies—was his caustic wit and snarky comebacks hidden in his writings. For instance, he refers to his rival Ludovico delle Colombe and his supporters as the "Pigeon League,"note and his rebuttal to a book called Astronomical Balance is titled The Assayer.note
- Dumbass Has a Point: In his Dialogue, Galileo has the idiot Straw Character Simplicio point out that in order to truly settle the debate, one theory can't just have evidence in its favor, but also have evidence that proves the other false. Flynn compares this to a proto-concept of Karl Popper's theory of falsification. This was largely only done so Galileo could maintain a fig leaf of balance and impartiality.
- Evil Jesuit: Averted. Many Jesuits were supporters of Copernicanism, and several of them—most notably Cardinal Robert Bellarmine—were colleagues and political allies of Galileo. However, Galileo's repeated spats with astronomer-priests like Frs. Christoph Scheiner and Orazio Grassi soured his reputation with the Jesuits, meaning they didn't do anything to stop his prosecution.
- Flowery Insults: It's noted that in a series of letters between Johannes Kepler and Christen Longomontanus (an associate of Tycho Brahe's), Longomontanus described Kepler's work with the colorful analogy of being "submerged in the shit of the Augean stables."note Kepler retorted that nitpicking his work would be like complaining about the last barrel of shit in the Augean stables after he'd cleaned up the rest.
- Getting Crap Past the Radar: Everything about Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems:
- In 1616, Galileo was put under an injunction on teaching Copernicanism as a fact instead of simply a mathematical theory. So, he wrote the Dialogue as merely a hypothetical debate between several characters about heliocentrism and geocentrism. Of course, he made it an Author Tract where the heliocentrist runs rhetorical circles around a geocentrist Straw Character.
- The Dialogue's full title was originally Dialogue Concerning the Ebb and Flow of the Sea. Pope Urban VIII said that his claims about tides being proof of the Earth's rotation may be too biased, so Galileo changed the title of the book and left all his arguments within intact.
- In order to publish the Dialogue without interference from the Papal censors, Galileo took advantage of his political ties and extenuating circumstances (a local outbreak of plague impeding travel) to get multiple officials in different cities to each review part of the book. As a result, his book was approved, even though none of the officials saw it in its entirety.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Arguably, the person most responsible for Galileo's downfall was Galileo himself. Due to his egocentrism, hotheadedness, and lack of political acumen, he pissed off authorities who were otherwise content to leave him alone and alienated all his potential allies.
- It's Personal: One of the great factors in Galileo's downfall is that Pope Urban VIII believed that Galileo's Dialogue was a deliberate insult against him. As a result, he became personally invested in seeing Galileo getting punished and censored.
- Jerkass: Galileo, big time. The famous Italian was a talented polemicist and did not shy away at all from his gift: not even people who supported him for decades were safe from his often uncalled-for ridicule. It ends up being his undoing.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: While needlessly arrogant and standoffish, Galileo was a proto-scientist who advocated for successful theories, supported colleagues like Kepler and Marius and was deeply involved with the Church... all of which is depicted as stemming mostly from self-interest, as his support for them ended as soon as it ceased to be convenient for him.
- Medieval Morons: Defied. Flynn writes at great length about how from a medieval perspective, geocentrism seems obviously true and the people who believed it held to it for intellectually solid reasons. He also points out that many of the modern arguments in favor of heliocentrism, which we now take for granted, were unproven at the time and would not fully be so until centuries after Copernicus and Galileo."Before you laugh at your ancestors, TOF invites you to prove that the earth is, contrary to your senses, in wild and careening double motion: spinning like a top and whipping around the sun without (somehow) leaving the Moon and Air behind, and without everyone stumbling around like drunkards. You are not allowed to appeal to authority or to the success of NASA, or suchlike things. You've got eyeballs and armillaries, and that's pretty much it. Go. TOF will wait here."
- Nothing Personal: With the notable exception of Pope Urban, very few people behind Galileo's downfall had any personal disdain for Galileo himself. It was due to political rivalries between Rome and Galileo's home of Florence more than anything else; after the war ended, the ban on him publishing any more books was barely enforced.
- Overly Long Name: Several historical figures (mostly Germans) are remarked as suffering from this.
- Poor Communication Kills: Due to the slow dissemination of literature in the day, Galileo thinks that a months-old treatise by Bavarian astronomer Christoph Scheiner is recent and deliberately refusing to acknowledge his findings on sunspots. Galileo writes a blistering open letter to Scheiner as a result.
- Present-Day Past: Part of the zaniness of the series. Galileo and Urban VIII are "BFFs", Mersenne a "SysOp", and so on.
- Revenge by Proxy: Flynn implies that at least part of the Roman Inquisition's motivation to prosecute Galileo was because he was closely tied to the Grand Dukes of Florence, who opposed the Papal States in the Thirty Years' War.
- Science Is Wrong: Many of the scientists mentioned in the story are dead wrong, one way or another. Flynn summarizes it at the end by saying that the heliocentrists were Right for the Wrong Reasons and the geocentrists were wrong for the right reasons.
- Ancient heliocentrists, like Aristarchus and the followers of Pythagoras, justified their position with the logic that the Sun was made of fire, and fire is nobler than earth, therefore the Sun should be in the center of the world.
- Of all the "modern" 17th century models of the universe mentioned in the story—Copernican, Gilbertian, Tychonic, Ursine, and Keplerian—the only one that ended up being largely vindicated by later scientific discoveries is Kepler's. Even as the Copernican model was being superseded, Galileo stubbornly spent much of his later life (and spent all his reputation) defending it in his writings.
- A lot of the Renaissance humanists mentioned throughout the story are said to have flirted with Platonism, occultism, and other "mystical woo-woo."
- Copernicus created his heliocentric model because he wanted to push the Platonic idea of perfectly circular planetary orbits, and he cited Hermes Trismegistus as evidence.
- Since comets would throw off the whole Copernican theory due to their elliptical orbits, Galileo concluded that comets are actually non-material emanations in the upper atmosphere.
- Galileo cited the movement of the tides as proof of the rotation of the Earth. When he learned of new data that contradicted it, Galileo flat-out ignored it and left the original claim in his book anyway.
- In order for Kepler's theory of planetary movements to work, there needed to be some kind of field projected by the Sun that kept everything in orbit. The theory of gravitation hadn't been developed yet, so what was Kepler's answer as to what this field was? The Holy Spirit.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: At various points throughout his career, Galileo relied on powerful friends and patrons—the Grand Duke of Florence and the Pope, to name two—to get ahead in life or avoid trouble. It came back to bite him when Florence and the Papal States found themselves on opposite sides of the Thirty Years' War, and his dual loyalties became a liability.
- Small Name, Big Ego: Galileo had this in spades. Although he didn't contribute to any significant advances in astronomy beyond his innovations with telescopes—many of his other "discoveries" were done earlier and/or more accurately by someone else—he still acted as if he was the most important scientist alive. He even accuses a fellow astronomer in a letter of being jealous that "it was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else."
- Stealing the Credit: Flynn mentions that Galileo did not do the famous test where he dropped two metal balls from the Tower of Pisa to prove that gravitational acceleration was constant independent of size. It was actually performed by another scientist, Vincenzo Reineri; it was posthumously attributed to Galileo by his friend and biographer Vincenzo Viviani.
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: Exact Words. "Galileo rushed to Rome to meet with his old friend and benefactor — six audiences in six weeks! His BFF is now the Pope! What could possibly go wrong?"
