Galileo's Battle for the Heavens

When you upset someone's universe, you ought to expect trouble…especially if it's the early 17th century, the “someone” is the Catholic Church, and the universe in question is God's. Based on Dava Sobel's best-selling biographical account Galileo's Daughter, this two-hour NOVA program interweaves interviews with scholars together with dramatic reconstructions based on the letters of Galileo's devoted illegitimate daughter--a Poor Clare nun named Maria Celeste. In the reenactments, actor Simon Callow plays the opportunist, arrogant, self-centered-to-a-fault hypochondriac scientist who ignores his daughter's real suffering. Proposing that his discovery of the four moons of Jupiter, sunspots, and the phases of Venus as it circles the sun might support Copernicus's revolutionary cosmological theory (namely, that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice versa), Galileo was in considerable danger when he locked theological horns with Cardinal Bellarmine in 1616 (sixteen years earlier, this inquisitor had approved the torture and burning of a “heretic” believer in Copernican theory). Summoned to Rome in 1633 for his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican, Galileo was ultimately found guilty of heresy, but even though he famously recanted, he spent the rest of his life under house arrest, which gave him time to finish an earlier work on the physics of motion that would become one of his greatest contributions to science. An interesting story, backed by characteristic top-notch production values from the NOVA team, this wide-ranging biographical portrait of Galileo and his times is highly recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Reagan)