Stephen Hawking was born exactly 300 years after Galileo Galilei died. Their death and birth, exactly 300 years apart on ...

To Galileo, the moons proved that not everything in space circled the Earth, and therefore our planet was not the absolute center of the universe, as the Church maintained the Bible had it.

Not a good moment for the Church. Two days later, Galileo was summoned to the Vatican and ordered “to abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing ...

Galileo lived at a time when the centuries-old Almagest of the Egyptian scholar Claudius Ptolemy, written in 139AD, was still being used by the Church as “evidence” and “confirmation” for ...