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But the Inquisition ruled against him in 1616. This was not as unreasonable as it appears. His position flew in the face of common sense and 1,500 years of academics. It violated the accepted laws of physics. The star parallaxes demanded by this system could not be observed (and would not be until 1838). The Inquisition condemned the Copernican system and forbade Galileo from teaching it as fact.

But Galileo the scientific combatant never gave up. When a friend was elected pope in 1623, Galileo went to see him, but Urban VIII would not lift the injunction for fear of undermining church authority. Galileo did obtain permission to write about "the systems of the world," both Ptolemaic and Copernican, as long as he discussed them noncommittally and came to the conclusion dictated to him in advance by the pontiff—that is, that man cannot presume to know how the world is really made because God could have brought about the same effects in ways unimagined by him, and he must not restrict God's omnipotence.

So Galileo embarked on his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632). As soon as it came out, with the full and complete imprimatur of the censors, it was greeted with applause and cries of praise from every part of Europe as a literary and philosophical masterpiece. But even though formally noncommittal, it clearly championed the Copernican system and featured a dull defender of Ptolemy in whom the pope saw too much of himself.

Galileo was called back before the Inquisition in 1633. A document was produced (later proved a forgery by historians) that said Galileo had promised not to write about the Copernican system whatsoever. The old fighter, now 70, was ordered to renounce publicly his teachings and submit to house arrest.

In his last years, he published a compendium of his earlier work in physics—Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, his greatest achievement—and shortly thereafter went blind.

It wasn't until 1981 that the Catholic church ordered a commission to look into Galileo's case, and another 11 years before the commission acknowledged the "errors" of Galileo's judges.

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