The very success of him began to arouse suspicion and jealousy. Many sermons were preached against “Galileists” in Florence; there were complaints that he “defiles the dwelling place of the angels by seeing spots on the Sun and Moon, and lessens our hopes of Heaven”. Galileo tried to defend himself by maintaining that it always had been permitted to interpret Scripture as allegory. But then he was accused of wishing to explain the Bible in different ways other than those of the Roman Catholic Church, a very dangerous idea when the Protestant Reformation was a major threat. He went to Rome and persuaded to the authorities that he was no heretic, but he was told that Copernicanism was contrary to sound doctrine, and must not be taught or defended in writing. Back in Florence, he gave up astronomy for a while, instead he wrote to criticize other astronomers. In 1641, he began to think of the possible application of the pendulum to keep time. After many years passed, Galileo became something of a tourist attraction, with whom foreign visitors could commiserate, when they could get permission to see him. Galileo, a mathematician, physicist and astronomer, sadly died early in January of 1642. Isaac Newton was also a great scientist, he was the successor to Galileo. The Scientific Revolution reached its height with Newton’s “Principia,” which summed up the partial and fragmented work of his predecessors and contemporaries. The influence of the “Principia” was backed up some years later by the publication of Newton’s “Opticks.” The “Principia; has been called the greatest scientific book ever written. These two books led to the development of “Newtonian Science” in the eighteenth century. Newton was born in England on Christmas Day, December 25, 1642. Later he attended Trinity College, where he followed a traditional pattern of learning. Students there att...
