The sharp-eyed lynx, outfoxed by nature: Galileo and friends taught us that there is more to observing than meets the eye

Natural History, May, 1998 by Stephen Jay Gould

We all know the tragic outcome of this decision only too well. The pope, Galileo's erstwhile friend, became furious and ordered the scientist to appear at a trial before the Roman Inquisition. Galileo was convicted and forced to abjure, on his knees, his "false" and heretical Copernican beliefs. He was then placed under a form of house arrest on his small estate at Arcetri for the remainder of his life. His situation scarcely resembled solitary at Alcatraz, and Galileo remained fully active in scientific affairs by receiving visitors and engaging in voluminous correspondence up to the moment of his death (even though blindness afflicted his last four years). In 1638, he even managed to smuggle a copy of his second great book in dialogue form to a printer in the liberal Netherlands: Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences. But Galileo was not allowed to leave Arcetri either, as the vindictive pope, still feeling betrayed, refused Galileo's requests to attend Easter mass and to consult doctors in Florence when his sight began to fail.

The literature on the whys and wherefores of Galileo's ordeal is varied and voluminous, and I shall not attempt even the barest summary here (the most interesting and original of recent books include Mario Biagioli's Galileo, Courtier, University of Chicago Press, 1993; and Pietro Redondi's Galileo Heretic, Princeton University Press, 1987). All agree that Galileo might have avoided his fate if any one of a hundred circumstances had unfolded in a slightly different manner. He was, in other words, a victim of bad luck and bad judgment, not an inevitable sacrificial lamb in an eternal war between science and religion.

However, until doing the research for this essay, I had never appreciated the strength of one particularly relevant factor along the string of contingencies. From the vantage point of the Lynxes, Galileo would almost surely have been able to navigate a subtle path around potential trouble, if the most final of all events had not intervened. In 1630, at age forty-five and at the height of his influence, Federico Cesi, founder and perpetual leader of the Lynxes, died. Galileo learned the sad news in a letter from Stelluti: "My dear signor Galileo, with a trembling hand, and with eyes full of tears [con man tremante, e con occhi pieni di lacrime--it sounds so much better in Italian!], I must tell you the unhappy news of the loss of our leader, the duke of Aquasparta, as the result of an acute fever."

I feel confident that Cesi could have interceded to spare Galileo for two reasons. First, his caution and diplomacy, combined with his uncanny sense of the practical, would have suppressed Galileo's famous and fatal impetuosity. Galileo, ever testing the limits, ever pushing beyond into a realm of danger, did cast his work in the form of a dialogue between a Copernican and a supporter of Ptolemy's earth-centered universe, but he had scarcely devised a fair fight. Ptolemy's champion bore the name Simplicio, and the quality of his arguments matched his moniker. Moreover, Urban VIII developed a sneaking suspicion that Simplicio might be a caricature of his own imperial self--hence his angry feeling that Galileo had betrayed an agreement to discuss Copernicanism, as one coherent theory among equally valid alternatives. If Cesi had lived, he would, no doubt, have insisted that Galileo write his dialogue in a less partisan, or at least a more subtly veiled, form. And Cesi would have prevailed, both because Galileo respected his judgment so highly and because the Lynxes intended to publish his book at Cesi's expense.