DOCUMENT A- Galileo Galilei: Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, 1615
CUMENT A-
To the Most Serene Grand Duchess Mother:
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CUMENT B-
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OCUMENT C-
Some years ago, as Your Serr-ne Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens [the cosmos, the stars]
many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some
consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among
academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors-as if I had placed these things in
the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the
increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts; not their
diminution [reduction) destruction
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DOCUMENT E-
Showing a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth they sought to deny and disprove the new
things which, if they had cared to look for themselves, their own senses would have demonstrated to them. To
this end they hurled various charges and published numerous writings filled with vain arguments, and they
made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed
to understand properly, and which were ill-suited to their purposes.
Well, the passage of time has revealed to everyone the truths that I previously set forth; and, together with the
truth of the facts, there has come to light the great difference in attitude between those who simply and
dispassionately refused to admit the discoveries to be true, and those who combined with their incredulity
some reckless passion of their ownThey know that as to the arrangement the parts of the universe, I
hold the sun to be situated motionless in the center of the revolution of the celestial orbs (planets, while the
carth revolves about the sun.. Possibly because they are disturbed by the known truth of other propositions
of mine which differ from those commonly held.. these men have resolved to fabricate a shield for their
fallacies out of the mantle of pretended religion and the authority of the Bible,
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