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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown

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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown	label	The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown	comment	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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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_1c445e86	type	Poor Communication Kills
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_1c445e86	comment	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 claims on sunspots. Galileo writes a blistering open letter to Scheiner as a result.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_28a5213a	type	Small Name, Big Ego
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_28a5213a	comment	Small Name, Big Ego: Galileo has 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 by someone else earlier or more accurately—he still acted as if he was the most important scientist alive. He even accuses a fellow astronomer of being jealous that "it was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else."
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_33c2b1e2	type	Best Served Cold
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_33c2b1e2	comment	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.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_35d7be67	type	Hermetic Magic
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_35d7be67	comment	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.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_4782e60f	type	Jerk with a Heart of Jerk
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_4782e60f	comment	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 ended as soon as it ceased to be convenient for him.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_4b86a724	type	Getting Crap Past the Radar
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_4b86a724	comment	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 hypotehtical 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.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_4eaa9b84	type	Author Tract
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_4eaa9b84	comment	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 hypotehtical 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.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_5539b84f	type	Corrupt Church
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_5539b84f	comment	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).
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_5be7bcfa	type	Older Than They Think
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_5be7bcfa	comment	Older Than They Think: Flynn points out that at several points, ancient and medieval thinkers espoused scientific concepts that seemed relatively far ahead of their time. Ptolemy's model of the planets, though geocentric, roughly approximates elliptical orbits. 14th century astronomer Nicole Oresme argued Galilean relativity centuries before Galileo. Pope Urban VIII espoused a concept of falsifiability that would be paralleled by Karl Popper 300 years later. Kepler's theory that the orbit of the moon affected the tides
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_6fb07cc4	type	Science Is Wrong
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_6fb07cc4	comment	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 ends up being largely vindicated by later scientific discoveries is Kepler's. Even as the Copernican model was becoming superseded, Galileo stubbornly spent much of his later life (and his reputation) defending it in his writings. A lot of the Renaissance humanists mentioned throughout the story are said to have flirted with Platonic mysticism, 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 put it in his book anyway.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_79b5677	type	Belief Makes You Stupid
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_79b5677	comment	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.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_82a631b8	type	Present-Day Past
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_82a631b8	comment	Present-Day Past: Part of the zaniness of the series. Galileo and Urban VIII are "BFFs", Mersenne a "SysOp", and so on.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_8ed5c6e4	type	Asshole Victim
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_8ed5c6e4	comment	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 not worth the trouble of speaking up.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_8f900ccd	type	Overly Long Name
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_8f900ccd	comment	Overly Long Name: Several historical figures (mostly Germans) are remarked as suffering from this.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_95979921	type	Evil Jesuit
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_95979921	comment	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 sour his reputation with the Jesuits, led to them doing nothing to stop his prosecution.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_9bb8ac92	type	Stealing the Credit
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_9bb8ac92	comment	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.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_a0db7803	type	It's Personal
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_a0db7803	comment	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.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_a220d528	type	What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_a220d528	comment	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?"
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_ae3d6438	type	Deadpan Snarker
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_ae3d6438	comment	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 a pun on the Italian word for pigeon, colombo and his rebuttal to a book called Astronomical Balance is titled The Assayer.note an assayer is a type of scale that's more accurate than a balance
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_b77eb3b2	type	Revenge by Proxy
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_b77eb3b2	comment	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.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_d397657d	type	Hoist by His Own Petard
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_d397657d	comment	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 ends up pissing off authorities who were otherwise content to leave him alone and alienating potential allies.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_d8573ef9	type	Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_d8573ef9	comment	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 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.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_e753ea41	type	Damned By a Fool's Praise
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_e753ea41	comment	Damned By a Fool's Praise: The reason Pope Urban VIII becomes 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 have little trouble convincing His Holiness that it was a direct dig at him
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_eb8ec7c8	type	Jerkass
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_eb8ec7c8	comment	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.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_f360fc33	type	Dumbass Has a Point
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_f360fc33	comment	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.
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_f58d1622	type	Medieval Morons
The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown / int_f58d1622	comment	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.
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