In response to today’s column:

Your column on Galileo and the Lomborg case was excellent and very enjoyable. As a practicing planetary scientist, I can certainly attest to your proposition that science is a very human (and often, a very ugly) business. Your point that L’Affaire Galileo is more complicated than a simple “bigoted-church-stifles-dissent” story is quite true. It will probably not surprise you to learn that your replacement concept of “bigoted-scientists-stiffle-innovation” is also not the full story.
The scientists of Galileo’s day had good reason to embrace the Ptolemaic system of the universe – it worked. Ptolemy’s Earth-centered universe, in which the sun, Moon, planets, and celestial sphere rotated around the Earth, with ‘wheels within wheels,” of cycles and epicycles, was used to navigate around the world for centuries. To a first order, it explained otherwise apparently inexplicable phenomena, such as the reversing (“retrograde motion”) of Mars in the night sky. And, if it seems silly and ad hoc to modern minds, a solid crystalline celestial sphere is conceptually no sillier than our current ideas about superstrings and the nature of matter. Both are theoretical concepts, untestable by current technology.
Moreover, the Copernican system did NOT work. Planetary paths predicted by Copernicus were found to be in serious error. The system did not work for a very good reason: it’s not the way the Solar System is put together. Copernicus said that Earth and the other planets orbited the sun in circular orbits. But they do not: they revolve in ELLIPTICAL orbits, with the sun at one focus. It took years of painstaking planetary observation by Tycho and years of menial number-crunching by Kepler to establish the laws of planetary motion, all well after Galileo published his astonishing findings. Finally, it took an Isaac Newton to take what were basically empirical “laws” and explain to everybody what they actually meant, with his Principia, published almost 100 years after Galileo lived.
The cartoon history that depicts centuries of the most brilliant of human minds stupidly embracing the “obvious idiocies” of Ptolemy’s “wrong” model of the universe is itself oversimplified and slathered with retrospective. We all do the best we can. No doubt personal pique and jealousy motivated some of the animus against Galileo. And you yourself pointed out that he was not an easy guy to get along with (for starters, he was arrogantly convinced of his own intellectual superiority. Even if true, that’s not an attitude that encourages friendship). But some of the “opposition” to the Copernican model of the universe had roots in a very different motivation – they were right about its being wrong. That they embraced an alternative that was equally wrong does not change the basic facts of the case.