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Entry: The Galileo Myth Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_galileo_myth#15769 Post contents: I presume this scientific just so story reflects the affray at Rome's La Sapienza where His Holiness was made unwelcome because in 1990, as Cardinal Ratzinger he upheld the punishment of Galileo, quoting Paul Feyerabend as saying : "At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just." 24 years after Bruno's proofless adherence to the doctrine of many worlds--and infidelity to that of the Virgin Birth--got him burnt to ashes, the Holy Inquisiton reminded Galileo that " Error has no rights" , and he prudently foreswore "following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture." For his trouble ,his anti-Aristotelian books were burnt and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Even in the depths of World War II, Manhattan Project scientists declined to assassinate their German opposite numbers on neutral academic ground in Switzerland, clinging to the naive superstition that physicists should not shoot other physicists. Today, though we are sorely tempted, few would demand even the most wayward of string theorists be barbecued , and it therefore seems to some unseemly for a German cardinal to have invoked an Austrian metaphysician in saying it's OK to lock 'em up and throw away the key. Some things make absolute sense inside a system of dogmatic allegiance. Yet though the author is as absolutely free to voice his as General Groves was to ask who would rid him of that turbulent Heisenberg?, scientific bystanders tend to dismiss selective takes on intellectual history as scundering cant, whether based on excepts from the Institutions of The Kirk of Scotland, or NeoHierophantic tracts demanding the Big Olive administer hemlock to any whose hecatombs are in arrears. Because interesting a figure as Feyerabend may be, the simple truth is that however good an idea metaphysics may be, physicists don't do it, any more than modern philosophers, e.g. Quine or Rawls, do. We've barely begun measuring the foundations upon which it might contingently rise. -- Sent at: 2008 12 02