Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Istituto e Museo Nazionale di Storia della Scienza in Florence (soon to be renamed Museo Galileo Galilei, to the relief of leaflet printers across the city), is introducing an exhibition of Galileo’s telescope and astronomical work at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. As he speaks a slowly rotating roster of the names and faces of Nobel prize-winners pass over his head on a track, announcing the importance of it all.

There’s Charles Richet, honored for his work on anaphylaxis in 1913. Alfred Werner for his work on the linkages between atoms. Gunter Grass, ‘whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history’. Barack Obama will join them in a few days.
The telescope sits in a glass case in front of him, bathed in dim light and drawing the gazes of even the most jaded technology journalists present. This is one of the most important scientific instruments in history, sitting in a building dedicated to the highest achievements. Galluzzi and his colleague Giorgio Strano, curator of the exhibition, are glowing with pride.
Giorgio Strano, curator of the exhibition, and Paolo Galluzzi I asked Dr. Galluzzi why this telescope, which was a present to Cosimo Medici and not one that Galileo himself used in his work, deserves such reverence. ‘The telescope he used was lost at the beginning of the 17th century, only the objective lens remains of that one,’ he said. ‘It was a precious object to the Medicis.
They were the first dynasty ever to have objects in the sky named after them – the satellites of Jupiter were named Medici stars – so they were very proud of displaying it in the Uffizi gallery where their most precious objects were preserved and not touched.
‘It meant a lot to them because these discoveries that made them unique in the world. No emperor, no king had that privilege – a seat in the sky – so patronage came in to Galileo and he became a major source of propaganda for the Medicis. This instrument was preserved as a relic, which is why it’s still in such good condition.
‘My opinion is that Galileo was the first one to make an astronomical use of the telescope. A British man, Thomas Harriot, used it a few weeks before, but was probably not prepared to understand what the potential was to change the image of the world and the fact is that he sketched the moon in a very poor way, probably because he had lenses of poor quality, and he abandoned it immediately.
A few weeks later Galileo turned his telescope to the sky and was better prepared to make good use of what he saw because he was looking for evidence of acopernican system, having been fully convinced by copernican ideas twenty years before. We have documentary evidence, particularly a letter he wrote to Kepler in 1597, 13 years before, in which he declares his full faith in the copernican system.
‘He was looking for evidence and found many pieces. The moon’s structure, full of valleys and mountains, was a twin of the earth, he said. In the classical tradition was a crystal globe, perfectly spherical, totally different to the earth. Then he moved to Jupiter and found that there was an earth, a planet, and other planets, the moons, rotating around it, so it could not be true that all planets rotated around the earth.
‘I can’t think of any other changes that happened so suddenly, in a few months, that alter the development of science so deeply as those months between the end of 1609 and the beginning of 1610. Everything changes. It changes physics, it changes cosmology, it changes the imagination of the universe. In fact, many poets have been stimulated and have a sense of anguish, anxiety, that we have discovered we are such a small planet.
‘If we are on a very small piece of earth located nowhere, not in the centre, what happens on the other planets? If they’re so similar to the Earth are there other inhabitants? If there are inhabitants on the moon or Jupiter, did Christ also come for them? What about Revelation? Are they different to us, what language do they speak? This change in science introduces a big change in religion, in anthropology.
(Source: Telegraph)