Bellarmine is blasted again by the pernicious propaganda about Galileo's persecution. Everyone wants to be Galileo, and nobody wants to be Bellarmine. But something the history books don't mention, is that from everything science knew at the time, Bellarmine was right and Galileo wrong.

[Nor do history books mention that Scopes lost his trial to teach biology for the very good reason that the textbook he was using was downright Nazi. Or that Helen Keller became a flaming communist after being saved by a Christian. There's a lot that history books clean up for the public, lest we pollute our minds with the truth.]

So if you go back and look at what Bellarmine said to Galileo, and what Galileo responded, my sympathies are all with Bellarmine.

Galileo was plugging this view that the Earth and all the planets were moving about a stationary Sun, which was, after all, the idea of a good Catholic churchman named Copernicus. Bellarmine had no beef with Copernicus, it might be true and it certainly simplified the calculation of the positions of the planets. The only problem was that Copernicus' predictions were worse than the traditional method. So why say something is "true" when it gives "false" results? Not until Kepler replaced the circles of Copernicus with ellipses did it start to improve, but Galileo didn't know that when he began to push geocentricism.

But if all Galileo had done was plug Copernicus, perhaps he would have been left alone because Bellarmine himself had no qualms about Copernicus. The problem was that he also said that the Earth was rotating. Well that's an entirely different problem, and leads to all sorts of questions. Such as "if the Earth has a radius of 4800 miles and rotates in 24 hours, then the surface of the Earth is travelling 1100 miles an hour" shouldn't we notice that? It's like, somewhere around Mach 1.5, wouldn't we get blown off? Or if I drop a rock, won't the Earth move a couple of feet before the rock hits the ground?

Galileo had answers to all these questions, but one answer was completely bogus. He said that the tides were a result of the Earth's rotation. All the Vatican Jesuits said the same thing: "No, the tides are caused by the Moon".  By the time Galileo had added that comets came between the Moon and the Earth, the Vatican astronomers had had enough. [Yes, I know I'm conflating 1616 with 1633, but this is a blog after all.]

"The guy is a meglomaniac crypto-atheist" they told Bellarmine. "try to get him to shut his trap before he feeds those Protestant heretics with his nonsense!"

[Why did so many Jesuits hate Galileo? One historian calls it the consequences of patronage, the political connections needed to get funding. Since there was such intense competition for funding, a sucessful scientist was assured of enemies. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.]

But Galileo was not happy being told to stuff it by Bellarmine. So he writes a book that consists of a 3-way dialogue, and puts the Pope's comments in the mouth of the character named "Simplicio", which roughly translates "simpleton". The manuscript is smuggled out of Italy to Holland where the printers there will publish any heretical or Protestant book, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But look, just because you predicted the housing bubble crash 5 years before it happened (and 4 years, and 3 years, and 2 years) doesn't make you an instant genius and candidate for Lou Dobbs position at CNN. Sometimes you can get lucky and be right. Sometimes you can be lucky and smart and think you are always right. Galileo seemed to be one of those guys. And if it weren't for a scurrilous work of historical fiction in the 1874 that attempted to blame the Catholic Church for every evil mankind has known, it is possible we wouldn't have heard about poor Galileo again.

Nevertheless, the myth goes on that Bellarmine was keeping the status quo for dogmatic reasons (rather than very good scientific ones), and that any time a rebel promotes wild-eyed views against the status-quo he must be right.

The twist on this story, is that the American Geophysical Union, which improbably includes the meteorology and the space physics communities as well, just canned a "global-warming denier" session. (Note the emotional bias, "I'm a skeptic, you're a denier.") The organizers are outraged, claiming that they are Galileo and the AGU is Bellarmine.

The irony is that I left the AGU ten years ago when they decided that they needed a statement to support Darwin and deny intelligent design, but unlike meteorology, no one in the AGU is a biologist. So why the sudden need to support Darwin? Clearly, the management was finding it politically useful to kowtow to some agency in DC. With that kind of political agenda, is it any wonder that they canned an anti-global-warming session on the eve of President Obama's visit to Copenhagen, or Senator Boxer's global cap-and-trade bill?

The even more ironic thing, is that today came the news that someone had hacked into the UK's Hadley research centre, which has become the global hub for global warming scenarios. They stole some 70MB of e-mails, and discovered that the science advisors there have been scheming to discredit critics and manipulating data for a decade in order to obtain funding.

So it would seem to me that the AGU/Hadley hacks are Galileo, and the critics are Bellarmine.