Daily history

Good Morning,


The format for today will be a little different. The first segment is about one of the greatest scientific minds that world had ever known but the dispersion of his enlightenments was suppressed by the Catholic Church because what truths he had undeniably discovered was not what the Pope believed. Galileo was not the only one that was suppressed in this fashion, in fact there were hundreds if not thousands that were tortured and killed because their beliefs were opposed to the Vatican tenets. I did have one subscriber that tried to tell me that the Catholic Church is not a subject to be discussed in an unflattering manner because she was very sensitive to criticism of her church. How can this person ignore the thousands of human being that were slaughtered in the most unspeakable manner in the name of the Catholic Church? Anyway, a blog is not a news report; it is an expression of one person’s opinion and is not, under any circumstance, subject to censorship.

The regular history lesson will follow the biography.

                      Galileo Galilei

                   The Father of Modern Science

Galileo was born in Pisa, Italy on February 15, 1564. He was the son of Vincenzo Galilei who was a mathematician and musician. His mother was Guilia Ammannati. Galileo was the youngest of seven children. From a very early age he was tutored and attended the University of Pisa but was forced to cease his study there for financial reasons. But his brilliance was recognized and he was offered a mathematic teaching position on the faculty in 1589. A little later he took a position on the faculty of the University of Padua teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy. He held this position until 1610. It was during this time that he explored science and made his most important discoveries.

Even though Galileo was a devout Catholic he fathered three children out of wedlock, two daughters and one son. All were the children of Galileo and Marina Gamba. By the law in those days, the daughters had to go to a convent because of their illegitimacy and attended the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri.

In 1612 he went to Rome and joined the Accademia dei Lincei. Opposition to the Copernican theory which Galileo supported arose primarily from the Catholic Church. The Copernican theory suggested that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the “universe”. In 1614 a Catholic priest from the pulpit denounced Galileo’s opinions about the motions of the planets as being on the cusp of heresy. Galileo went to Rome to defend himself from these accusations. But in 1616 Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino personally handed Galileo an admonition enjoining him from advocating or teaching the Copernican theory as religious doctrine. Galileo did not back off totally from his beliefs and published two different books that danced around the Copernican theory without really advocating it. In 1632 he was called to appear before the Holy Office in Rome. The court condemned his teachings and was held in prison until December 1633 when he was allowed to retire to his villa in Arcetri under house arrest. This outrage with the church sticking their bloody nose into academia just confirms my belief that the church should stick to saving my soul and let academia do its thing unmolested. Anyway, this great mind left this earth on January 8, 1642 at the age of 78. Galileo was totally blind for the last year of his life and was escorted by one of his students, Vincenzo Viviani, who was with him when he died.

Galileo’s contributions to the scientific world are almost too many to count. The biggest problem that he had was before he could teach a theory to his students he had to pass it before the hierarchy of the church first. He was staunchly opposed to the blind obedience to an authority (like the church) or other thinkers (like Aristotle) in matters of science so as to keep a separation between philosophy and religion. These thoughts are why Galileo is known as “the father of science”. He pioneered the use of quantitative experiments and analyzing the results mathematically. There had never been such a procedure used in the history of science but it is well used to this day. Galileo said “The language of God is mathematics.” Up until this point the scientists followed Aristotle’s logic unquestioned, not mathematics. Then came Galileo explaining that all falling bodies fall at the same rate regardless of their weight, air resistance not withstanding. This is the exact opposite of what was taught by Aristotle. Galileo did an experiment off the leaning tower of Pisa whereby he dropped two different sized balls simultaneously and they hit the ground at the same time. Later scientists used his information in computing terminal velocity. Galileo did not invent the telescope but improved it enough to where he could discern the four moons of Jupiter and determined that they were in orbit around Jupiter and was able to plot sun spots. He published his first treatise on what he had observed in the sky with a small pamphlet named “Sidereal Messenger”. When Galileo stated that the four moons of Jupiter were in orbit around Jupiter, the other scientists and the ever loving church about peed their pants because it was the church’s theory that everything orbited the Earth. Another thing that went a long way toward the Earth not being the center of the universe was that Galileo saw that Venus went through phases like the moon meaning it was orbiting the sun, not the Earth. He also observed that the Moon had a rough and irregular surface and he made rough estimates as to their height by observing the shadows. Aristotle had said that the Moon was a perfect sphere. All of the brilliant scientific minds of the time could not describe what caused the tides, including Galileo. He said it was centrifugal force, he was wrong. It took Isaac Newton and his laws of gravity to settle this issue. Galileo understood the mathematics required to dissect and measure the area of a parabola. There is almost no limit to where Galileo’s star would have risen had it not been for the interference of the church. Speaking of Isaac Newton, he was born one year, almost to the day, after Galileo died. And that ain’t all. The famous present day astrophysicist Stephen Hawking was born to the day 300 years after the death of Isaac Newton. Both Hawking and Newton were Englishmen, both attended Cambridge University and both were/are presidents of the Lucasian and Royal Societies. I ask this question: Are Galileo, Newton and Hawking the same person? In my mind, there are too many coincidences to ignore.

By the way, It took the Catholic Church until the 19th century to admit they were wrong about fostering the earth as being the center of the Universe. Religious beliefs taught in schools? I don’t think so.

This date in history July 23

1967    There was an area in inner city Detroit called Virginia Park on 12th street. At this point in time there were about 80,000 blacks crammed into about 460 acres living in rat infested absolute squalor. The only white faces seen were shop owners that commuted in to run their businesses. A black man named William Scott ran an illegal after-hours club in the “community center”. At 3:30am on this date, the Detroit police raided Scott’s club. The people that were in there (about 80) were reluctant to leave and the police called in some paddy-wagons and began arrested the patrons. A crowd began to gather on the sidewalk outside the club and some harsh words were thrown at the cops. Then there was a bottle broken on the sidewalk, and then another and soon the cops were under an all out attack and a riot was under way. The cops beat a hasty retreat and thousands of others spilled out into the streets and wholesale looting began. About 6:00am a fire was detected in one of the buildings and soon the whole block was aflame. The riot spread like wildfire and there was nothing the Detroit police could do to stop it. When firemen showed up to fight the fire, they were shot at by snipers and had their fire hoses cut. Finally the mayor of Detroit called Governor George Romney and asked for help and he sent in the National Guard. Even these troops were over their head and Governor Romney asked for federal help from the President, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson sent in the long suffering 82nd Airborne who began patrolling the streets in armored vehicles but that did not stop it, the riot had spread to a very large area. Finally after 4 days of unabated riots, things began to calm down. The tally was 46 killed, 324 wounded, 7,000 arrested and 5,000 homeless. It was the worst riot in the United States in 100 years. I don’t really get it. Why burn down your own town? But I have never had to live in rat infested absolute squalor.

1878    On this date a highway bandit known as “Black Bart” stops and robs a stage coach in California. It was Bart’s style to wear a flour sack with eye holes cut in it on his head and did not speak in a threatening manner. He took the strong box containing $400 and a diamond watch and ring from one of the passengers. The strong box with a note inside was recovered by law enforcement. The note read:

“Here I lay me down to sleep

To await the coming morrow,

Perhaps success, perhaps defeat

And everlasting sorrow,

Yet come what will, I’ll try it once

My condition can’t be worse,

And if there is money in that box,

‘Tis money in my purse.”

This was not the first time that Bart had robbed a stage of the strong box and left a poem but it was the last time that he got away with it. On his next heist he retrieved over $4,000 from the strong box but he mistakenly dropped a handkerchief. The cops found a laundry mark on it and traced it to an elderly man named Charles Bolton living in San Francisco. He was arrested but bristled when the police called him a “ruthless robber”. Bolton emphatically insisted that he was a gentleman that had gotten used to living the high life. He did a short stretch in the slammer and was paroled because of his age. He spent the rest of his days relaxing in Nevada.

1917    On this date Della Sorenson kills her first of seven victims when she poisons her sister-in-law’s infant daughter. Over the next seven years friends, relatives and acquaintances die under mysterious circumstances. Her next victim was her mother-in-law who was also poisoned as they all were. She did not stop there; she poisoned her own daughter and then her husband. Waiting only 4 months, Della re-married and moved to Dannebrog, Nebraska. Shortly after this she was visited by a former sister-in-law and her infant child. You guessed it; Della fed that baby poisoned candy and he died. The same sister-in-law came back a year later with another baby. She was obviously oblivious to what Della was up to. Della fed this baby poison but it just got sick and recovered. The same thing happened to her second husband; he was poisoned and was sickened but recovered. She delivered a daughter of her own and when the child was one year old, Della poisoned and killed her. The police finally figured out that all these deaths were not a coincidence and arrested Della. She confessed and said “I really like going to funerals, I like to see people die.” The police and the justice system in their wisdom figured that Della was a fruit cake and she spent the rest of her days in an asylum. While there she tried to get the prison officials to get her some rat poison.

Born today:

1888    US writer Raymond Chandler. He was the author of only seven novels but was enormously popular. He invented a hard nosed private detective named Phillip Marlowe and most of his novels included the Marlowe character. One Marlowe’s famous lines was “She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.” I think I know this woman.

1912   British actor Michael Wilding. He said “You can always tell an actor by the glazed look in their eyes when the conversation wanders away from them.” Then that must mean that most of the people I have seen in “Richard’s” the biker bar near Mount Pleasant are actors because they have a glazed look in their eyes but I think it ain’t because of their egos.

1973    Cigar model and all around good egg, Monica Lewinsky. When speaking of alleged friend Linda Tripp she said “She can reconstruct her face, hair and body but she is still revolting to me.” Monica left the Clinton White House as a living legacy.

2001    Award winning author, photographer and died in the wool Mississippian Eudora Welty. She said “Never think you have seen the last of anything.” Say it isn’t so, Eudora. Think of when Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, Diane Feinstein and Lindsay Graham, et al are gone, for crying out loud.

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow