Up Yours

Posted on Tuesday 2 November 2004 to unknown


My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?
--- Galileo in a letter to Kepler in 1610
Though humiliated and forced to recant his most important works by the ecclesiastical authorities, the great man's finger remains to this day upright, defiant and unwavering.

Galileo at the time of his death did not receive a proper burial because of the condemnation that he received in 1633. Instead, his remains were kept in storage at the Capella dei Santi Cosma e Damiano in Rome. In 1737 they were transferred to a more fitting mausoleum built in his honour by Vincenzo Viviani at the Church of Saint Croce in Florence.

It was at this time that his middle finger was removed and placed - like a relic of one of the saints - on public display. It now resides at Florence's Institute and Museum of the History of Science.


 The incription on the base of the display stand reads:

This is the finger, belonging to the illustrious hand

that ran through the skies,

pointing at the immense spaces, and singling out new stars,

offering to the senses a marvelous apparatus

of crafted glass,

and with wise daring they could

reach where neither Enceladus nor Tiphaeus ever reached.

--- Tommaso Perelli (1704-1783)


Incidentally, while a storage locker in the chapel of Santi Cosma e Damiano may not have been one of the grandest of locations to have been interred, the place does have quite an interesting history all of its own. One and a half millennia earlier, one of the church's walls had served as part of the ancient Templum Pacis (Temple of Peace), which had been built by Emperor Vespasian after the sacking of Jerusalem in 71 AD.

On this wall was mounted the world's most remarkable street directory.