I’m on a myth-debunking kick at the moment. (See my Friday post about how Manhattan really wasn’t sold to the Indians for twenty-four dollars.) Today’s story-behind-the story is about Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642).

This part is true: after observing one of Jupiter’s moons revolving around Jupiter with his new-and-improved telescope, he became convinced that his predecessor, Copernicus, had been right when he theorized that the Earth revolves around the Sun, rather than the other way around. In Galileo’s time, everyone believed that the Sun and all the planetary bodies revolved around the Earth, so this was a pretty Earth-shattering idea. Literally.

This part is also true: in 1632 Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, laying out his heliocentric (Sun-at-the-center) view. Galileo was arrested for heresy. In1633 the Church brought him to trial.

Now here’s where it gets murky. According to one version of the story, when faced with being burned at the stake, Galileo recanted his views and declared that the Earth stood still and everything revolved around it. As he left the courtroom, he is supposed to have muttered, “and yet it moves” (Eppur, si muove) under his breath.

It’s a fun story, the triumph of science over closed-minded church dogma, but there are other versions. Some historians have suggested that the Church was actually behaving rather reasonably toward Galileo, considering the era. Galileo was already a Renaissance rock star—close personal friends with the Duke of Medici, and earning a pension from the pope, Urban VIII. The pope had even given him permission to pursue his heliocentric studies, but cautioned him to state his findings as a theory rather than a universal truth, and to present arguments for and against his findings. The result was his Dialogue, where three characters debate the nature of the solar system. They’re a simpleton (Simplicius), a student, and a wise person. Simplicius offers the arguments put forward by the Church. That’s where Galileo got himself in trouble; the Pope—who saw Simplicius as a stand-in for himself—was deeply offended at being openly mocked. Kind of hard to blame the guy. (I did a blog here about fallen idols, great thinkers who might personally have been big fat jerks, and Galileo is on my list of candidates. Certainly he doesn’t seem to have been very diplomatic.)

According to still another version, Galileo’s arrest may have stemmed purely from politics. Recently, a new—old—biography of Galileo, written twenty years after Galileo’s death by the biographer, Thomas Salusbury, has resurfaced. All copies of the book were thought to have been destroyed in the great fire of 1666. But in this recent find—an incomplete, annotated proofreader’s copy—Salusbury claimed that there were political tensions between Rome and Tuscany. The pope had Galileo arrested not for religious reason, but for political ones–simply to spite the Duke of Medici.

Here’s where the story gets back on track: Galileo was already an old man, and he spent the rest of his seven years in relative comfort under house arrest just outside Florence, where he continued to experiment and to write until he died, seven years later.

On October 31, 1992, the Vatican formally admitted it was wrong to have condemned Galileo for his views.