The following is an excerpt from the book An Ocean of Air
by Gabrielle Walker
Published by Harcourt, Inc.; August 2007;$25.00US; 978-0-15-101124-7
Copyright © 2007 Gabrielle Walker

Chapter 1
The Ocean Above Us

Nearly four hundred years ago, in a patchwork of individual fiefdoms that we now call Italy, a revolution of ideas was struggling to take place. The traditional way to understand the workings of the world — through a combination of divine revelation and abstract reasoning — had begun to come under attack from a new breed. These people called themselves “natural philosophers,” because the word “scientist” had not yet been invented. To find out the way the world worked, they didn’t sit around and talk about it. They went out and looked. This was not an approach that was likely to find favor with the Church, home of received wisdom, or with its instruments — the whispering Inquisitors, with their hotline back to Rome. Now, a certain natural philosopher had fallen very foul of those Inquisitors and been forced to stop his investigations into the structure of the heavens. His name was Galileo Galilei, and our story begins with him.

Convent of Minerva, Rome
June 22, 1633

I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, arraigned personally before this tribunal, and kneeling before you, most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors general against heretical depravity throughout the whole Christian Republic . . . have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves:

Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this strong suspicion, reasonably conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies . . . and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me.

As the great Galileo rose from his knees at the end of this infamous, and forced, recantation, he is said to have muttered “Eppur si muove!” (“And yet it moves!”). He knew in his heart that Earth moves around the sun, in spite of what the Inquisitors had made him say. Still, devoutly religious as he was, he had no taste for defying his own church. Nor had he any desire to share the fate of the unfortunate monk Giordano Bruno, who a few decades earlier had been publicly burned for holding similar views. Galileo may have been the most famous philosopher in all Italy, but he knew that in itself wouldn’t save him from the fire.
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