Though of little social effect upon publishing in 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus' essay, "On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres" would nearly two hundred years later influence the works of Galileo Galieli. Already a famous polymath, in the early 1600s Galileo joined a small group of pioneering astronomers in making the first telescopic observations of the cosmos in our understood human history. (The notion of conventional wisdom around understood human history will play an important role in this essay before we finish!) A quest for truth despite implication rests at the foundation of a sincere scientific method. This honest scientist searches for the best means of ascertaining facts, rigorously and vigorously scrutinizing their own assumptions to remove or address those which prevent a more accurate correspondence with what we can call reality. They do not intend upending the moral fabric of society, or for their discoveries to call in to question the bedrock of monopolistic authority in a civilization. To the contrary they just want to understand the world a little better than they did before and share that with the world. I assume this as the case for Galileo, who merely continued a long human tradition of disciplined intellectual pursuit, using technologies unavailable to previous generations. The mainstream intelligentsia of the renaissance subscribed to a lesser magnitude of discipline in their own pursuit of knowledge. Much like today, perhaps like always in human societies, they relied upon the popular opinion among their peers to develop their own beliefs. And also like today they had a vast compliance apparatus to investigate and root out any semblance of heresy in society. These same nobles relied on that greater discipline of Galileo and his ilk to engineer tools to help them better wage wars, but unwilling or unable to engage in the critical thinking necessary to understand and contradict mathematically based scientific argument, they relied instead on the fallacy of argument from authority. It goes a bit like this: my authority says X is true. The end. The social thought leaders of the time relied on a pseudoscientific geocentric model which Aristotle promulgated and supported by a few lines in the bible suggesting the earth as a stoic center of God's creation. The end. It's a terrible circumstance in which to pursue truth and perhaps had Galileo's works remained confined to an esoteric cabal of natural philosophers he could have avoided the controversy, but had a dedication to educating others, which regularly put him under official scrutiny. The powerful of human societies have the same mortality and limited mental capacities is any in the species. They, perhaps more so than most, make active use of accurate truths in influencing the world around them. To amass wealth and maintain an empire they require good facts. To put it in a very practical analogy, to build Rome, you need good measuring sticks. The rich and powerful do not want their floors and ceilings to collapse randomly, or their water supplies to foul. They do not want their medicines to kill them, or their foods to poison them. They do not lightly put ideology in the way of their own pursuit of profit because false understandings of the world bare unwanted results to action. At his inquisition in 1616, the various Roman Catholic officials present signed a letter responding to the idea that "the sun is the center of the world and completely devoid of local motion" with the following "Assessment: All said that this proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and doctors of theology." In other words: we say so. The end. In saying so they tell us a lot about their mindset, at least apparently so. I repeat for emphasis, "according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers..." You should not find it controversial of me to say that the literal meaning of words changes over time, and that as experts retire and new ones take their place, so too do the common interpretation and understandings of that profession. An incoherence, which pervades societies, underlies this reality. Our social beliefs necessarily get in the way of an accurate understanding of reality. Galileo noted that some of his critics refused to at least *look through the telescope and see for themselves. Even today some people believe the earth is the center of the universe, but they refuse to look through a telescope and see the vastness of the universe.