科学与翻译

Stephen Hawking has said that there is a 50-50 chance that we will find a complete unified theory in the next 20 years. Do you agree that the end of theoretical physics is in sight?

The most common criticism was equating the discovery of a theory that unified the four fundamental forces of nature - a so-called theory of everything - with the end of theoretical physics. Some theoretical particle physicists agreed with Hawking’s prediction about the chances of discovering a theory of everything, although several reckoned that it would take 50 to 100 years. Steven Weinberg, for example, said: “20 years is possible, but unlikely. I would guess 100 years for a ‘complete unified theory’. But a ‘complete unified theory’ would not be the end of theoretical physics.”

Kaku agreed that 20 years will be enough “to prove whether superstring theory is the theory of everything or the theory of nothing - there is no middle path. But even then, knowing the rules of chess does not mean we have become grand masters of chess. Similarly, knowing the rules of the unified field theory does not mean we have become grand masters of that theory. It may take us centuries before we exhaust the full implications and applications of a theory of everything”.

Gerard ‘t Hooft, however, was less optimistic about even the more limited interpretation of Hawking’s statement: “Absolutely not. He has been saying the same thing for more than 20 years. Physicists like him will say this again and again, always projecting the ultimate solution 20 years to the future. Although I do believe an ultimate theory is conceivable, we are many generations away from it.”

“Physics is not like getting to the top of Everest,” said Luciano Maiani, director general of CERN. “It is more like trying to get to absolute-zero temperature. As you get closer, new scales of phenomena appear and these call for a new effort and new understanding.”

Eugene Parker at Chicago was not convinced either. “The idea that when the last field equation is written down on paper, physics will come to an end is naive in the extreme,” he said. “In 1865, for example, Maxwell completed the electromagnetic field equations by adding the displacement current to Ampère’s law. That was the beginning of electromagnetism, not the end. When Schrödinger and then Dirac wrote down the quantum-mechanical wave equation, that was the beginning of quantum mechanics, not the end. When Einstein wrote down the equations of general relativity, that was the beginning of modern gravitational theory and cosmology, not the end.”

Many respondents pointed out that the discovery of a theory of everything will have little impact on the rest of physics “A unified theory would be a tremendous breakthrough,” said astronomer Alex Filipenko at the University of California at Berkeley, “but it would not, for example, lead to solutions of many important problems in condensed-matter physics, biophysics, astrophysics, and so on. It certainly won’t give us a much clearer picture of the origin of life or of intelligence. Much will remain to be done!”
摘自：http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/851

“Lavoisier was a Parisian through and through and a child of the enlightenment,” wrote biographer Henry Guerlac. The son of Jean-Antoine and Émilie Punctis Lavoisier, he entered Mazarin College when he was 11. There, he received a sound training in the arts and classics and an exposure to science that was the best in Paris. Forgoing his baccalaureate of arts degree, Lavoisier yielded to the influence of his father and studied law, receiving a law degree in 1763. But his interest in science prevailed, kindled by the geologist Jean-Étienne Guettard, whom he met at Mazarin. After graduation, he began a long collaboration with Guettard on a geological survey of France.

Lavoisier showed an early inclination for quantitative measurements and soon began applying his interest in chemistry to the analysis of geological samples, especially gypsum. Because of his flair for careful analyses and his prodigious output, he was elected to the Academy of Sciences at the age of 25. At the same time, Lavoisier used part of the fortune he had inherited from his mother to buy a share in the Ferme Générale, a private group that collected various taxes for the government. This fateful decision would later cost him his life at the height of his intellectual powers.

He married Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze on Dec. 16, 1771; he was 28, she was 14. “The marriage was a happy one,” according to McKie. “Mme Lavoisier was possessed of a high intelligence; she took a great interest in her husband’s scientific work and rapidly equipped herself to share in his labors. Later, she helped him in the laboratory and drew sketches of his experiments. She made many of the entries in his laboratory notebooks. She learned English and translated a number of scientific memoirs into French.”

Lavoisier became further involved in public life in 1775, when he was appointed one of four commissioners of the Gunpowder Commission, charged with reforming and improving the production of gunpowder. Lavoisier moved his residence and laboratory to the arsenal in Paris, where for almost 20 years it drew many distinguished visitors. He devoted several hours every day and one full day a week to experiments in his laboratory. According to his wife: “It was for him a day of happiness; some friends who shared his views and some young men proud to be admitted to the honor of collaborating in his experiments assembled in the morning in the laboratory. There they lunched; there they debated. . . . It was there that you could have heard this man with his precise mind, his clear intelligence, his high genius, the loftiness of his philosophical principles illuminating his conversation.”

Ironically, Lavoisier, the ardent and zealous chemical revolutionary, eventually was caught in the web of intrigue of a political revolution. The Traité was published in 1789, the same year as the storming of the Bastille. A year later, Lavoisier complained that “the state of public affairs in France . . . has temporarily retarded the progress of science and distracted scientists from the work that is most precious to them.”

Lavoisier, however, could not escape the wrath of Jean-Paul Marat, the adamant revolutionary, who began publicly denouncing him in January 1791. During the Reign of Terror, arrest orders were issued for all of the Ferme Générale, including Lavoisier. On the morning of May 8, 1794, he was tried and convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal as a principal in the “conspiracy against the people of France.” He was sent to the guillotine that afternoon. The next day, his friend, the French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, remarked that “it took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not produce another like it.”

原文： http://acswebcontent.acs.org/landmarks/chemrevolution/lavoisier.html

The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once proposed a thought experiment that he called “replaying life’s tape”. Suppose we press the rewind button and return to some point in the past, erasing all interim evolutionary developments. If we let the tape run again, will evolution occur in exactly the same way as before? Gould answered “no”, and used the thought experiment to challenge the assumption that biological evolution is a “ladder of progress” that drives life inevitably to the same advanced forms.

It is interesting to think what might happen if we carried out the same thought experiment, not for living things, but for equations. Would the equations develop in an unpredictable way, like the evolution of species? Or would it be inevitable? If we started all over again, would we still have F = ma? Indeed, would we have equations at all?

In the 19th century, the French philosopher Auguste Comte thought he could answer such questions. Comte advanced what he called “a great fundamental law” according to which each branch of human knowledge - as well as each person, state and civilization - passes through three different developmental stages: theological, metaphysical and scientific. In each stage, human beings try different approaches to securing stable and progressive relations with nature to make their surroundings peaceful and predictable. But inadequacies in each approach force human beings to make revisions, leading to the next stage.

The development of the concept of force nicely illustrates Comte’s law. In primitive times, Comte thought, humans saw the world as ruled by deities. This was natural and inevitable, for all humans acquire a notion of force from individual experiences of pushes and pulls in daily life. Projected into nature, this creates a theological picture in which everything from thunder and rain to the stars is the result of spirits behaving and misbehaving. The theological stage is indispensable because, in it, we learn how to explain, strive for consistency and overcome contradictions with new explanations.

But trying to control nature by pleasing the spirits through ritual and prayer (the earliest forms of technology) did not succeed in bringing about the desired predictability. A far more effective way of influencing nature turned out to be studying the changes that the spirits produced - the patterns in the seasons, tides and stars, in the behaviour of fire, and so on. This shift of attention moved humanity into the second, metaphysical stage. Here humans continued to attempt to explain the “why” of things through some ultimate cause or essence. But the supernatural agents were now replaced by what Comte called “abstract forces, real entities or personified abstractions”.

Force, for instance, was explained as operating through the medieval notion of “impetus”, which is passed from one body to another and causes motion. But these metaphysical agents, too, gradually became emptied of meaning, and reason itself did not provide a sufficient ground for understanding nature.

This led to the final - scientific - stage, which saw the maturation of the human intellect. Physics and astronomy, Comte thought, reached this stage in the 17th century. Human beings ceased to ask why phenomena happened and instead sought to answer how they happened by finding the appropriate laws. The number of such laws tends to decrease as science progresses. Gravitation, for example, was found to unify what had seemed to be myriads of forces into one.

Comte never considered the question of whether individual equations such as F = ma would reappear if the process recurred. But had this thought experiment been proposed to him, he would surely have held that the conceptual trajectory that led to F = ma would be more or less repeated, with theological concepts of force giving way to metaphysical concepts and then to mathematical laws governing abstract quantities.

摘自：http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/24291

Muslim scientists placed far greater emphasis on empiricism and experimentation than any previous ancient civilization, and they introduced quantification, precise observation, controlled experiment, and careful records. Their new approach to scientific inquiry led to the development of the scientific method in the Islamic world. In particular, the empirical observations and quantitative experiments of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) in his Book of Optics (1021) is seen as the beginning of the modern scientific method.

Ibn al-Haytham, who is now known as the father of optics, used the scientific method to obtain the results in his Book of Optics. In particular, he combined observations, experiments and rational arguments to show that his modern intromission theory of vision, where rays of light are emitted from objects rather than from the eyes, is scientifically correct, and that the ancient emission theory of vision supported by Ptolemy and Euclid (where the eyes emit rays of light), and the ancient intromission theory supported by Aristotle (where objects emit physical particles to the eyes), were both wrong. It is known that Roger Bacon (who was sometimes erroneously given credit for the scientific method) was familiar with Ibn al-Haytham’s work.

Ibn al-Haytham developed rigorous experimental methods of controlled scientific testing in order to verify theoretical hypotheses and substantiate inductive conjectures. Ibn al-Haytham’s scientific method was very similar to the modern scientific method and consisted of the following procedures:

1. Observation
2. Statement of problem
3. Formulation of hypothesis
4. Testing of hypothesis using experimentation
5. Analysis of experimental results
6. Interpretation of data and formulation of conclusion
7. Publication of findings

The development of the scientific method is considered to be so fundamental to modern science that some — especially philosophers of science and practicing scientists — consider earlier inquiries into nature to be pre-scientific. Some have described Ibn al-Haytham as the “first scientist” for this reason.

In The Model of the Motions, Ibn al-Haytham also describes an early version of Occam’s razor, where he employs only minimal hypotheses regarding the properties that characterize astronomical motions, as he attempts to eliminate from his planetary model the cosmological hypotheses that cannot be observed from Earth.

George Sarton, the father of the history of science, wrote: “The main, as well as the least obvious, achievement of the Middle Ages was the creation of the experimental spirit and this was primarily due to the Muslims down to the 12th century.”

摘自：http://www.answers.com/topic/islamic-science?cat=technology

Aristotle’s Lyceum provided the world’s first comprehensive set of courses on all aspects of knowledge. Although the little room where Aristotle probably taught had space for perhaps just 10 students, the scope of the courses that he gave there, which miraculously survive today in some 30 books of his lecture notes, was phenomenal. It is hard to believe they were written by a single person.

Aristotle had an extraordinary range of interests and learning. His courses included philosophy, logic, astronomy, physics, biology, meteorology, poetry, drama, ethics, politics, psychology and economics - in fact, many of the subjects of a modern university. Some of his biological insights were not rediscovered until the 19th century and his logic was not superseded until the work of Gottlob Frege in the early part of the 20th century.

Born in northern Greece in 384 BC, Aristotle’s ideas dominated western science and philosophy for nearly 2000 years, from his death in 322 BC until Galileo’s destruction of his mechanics in 1609. Unfortunately, with the rise of modern physics over the past three centuries, Aristotle’s achievements have been eclipsed. We honour the thinkers of antiquity who guessed right - the atomic theory of Democritus, the heliocentric view of Aristarchus - but not the man who we can truly say invented science. For his physics and astronomy, Aristotle has become identified as the barrier to scientific progress in the renaissance.

After he died, Aristotle’s books, which represent perhaps just one-third of his total output, are said to have been buried in a cave in Asia Minor for 200 years. Although the Peripatetic philosopher Andronicus did prepare an edition of Aristotle’s works in Rome shortly after their rediscovery, they were entirely lost to Europe following the fall of the Roman empire. It was not until the 11th and 12th centuries - thanks to Arabic translations from the Islamic kingdoms of Sicily and Spain - that his writings were rediscovered in Europe.

摘自：http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/3494

Science (from the Latin scientia, ‘knowledge’), in the broadest sense, refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. Examples of the broader use included political science and computer science, which are not incorrectly named, but rather named according to the older and more general use of the word. In a more restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on the scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research.

Fields of science are commonly classified along two major lines: Natural sciences, which study natural phenomena (including biological life), and Social sciences, which study human behavior and societies.

These groupings are empirical sciences, which means the knowledge must be based on observable phenomena and capable of being experimented for its validity by other researchers working under the same conditions.

Mathematics, which is sometimes classified within a third group of science called formal science, has both similarities and differences with the natural and social sciences. It is similar to empirical sciences in that it involves an objective, careful and systematic study of an area of knowledge; it is different because of its method of verifying its knowledge, using a priori rather than empirical methods. Formal science, which also includes statistics and logic, is vital to the empirical sciences. Major advances in formal science have often led to major advances in the physical and biological sciences. The formal sciences are essential in the formation of hypotheses, theories, and laws, both in discovering and describing how things work (natural sciences) and how people think and act (social sciences).

The word science comes through the Old French, and is derived from the Latin word scientia for knowledge, which in turn comes from scio. ‘I know’. The Indo-European root means to discern or to separate, akin to Greek schizein, to split, Latin scindere, to split. From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, science or scientia meant any systematic recorded knowledge. Science therefore had the same sort of very broad meaning that philosophy had at that time. In other languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, the word corresponding to science also carries this meaning.

From classical times until the advent of the modern era, “philosophy” was roughly divided into natural philosophy and moral philosophy. In the 1800s, the term natural philosophy gradually gave way to the term natural science. Natural science was gradually specialized to its current domain, which typically includes the physical sciences and biological sciences. The social sciences, inheriting portions of the realm of moral philosophy, are currently also included under the auspices of science to the extent that these disciplines use empirical methods. As currently understood, moral philosophy still retains the study of ethics, regarded as a branch of philosophy.

Today, the primary meaning of “science” is generally limited to empirical study involving use of the scientific method.

摘录自：http://www.answers.com/science

What is Pseudoscience?

伪科学一词最早出现在1843年，是由一个希腊词根 pseudo 和一个拉丁词根 scientia 组成。pseudo 对应英文为 false，scientia对应英文为 science。false，有虚伪，虚假，错误，捏造等含义；scientia 指知识或某一领域内的学问。pseudoscience 一词在使用时常含贬义，汉语一般译为伪科学。

关于伪科学（pseudoscience）一词的定义是有争议的，通常的定义是：

自称为科学，但又不遵循科学方法的知识或理论。

伪科学貌似科学，但无法用科学方法予以检验。在西方，骨相学（Phrenology），占星术（astrology）等被认为是典型的伪科学。

19世纪卡尔·波普尔提出可证伪性（falsifiability）是区分科学与非科学（包括伪科学）的标准。比如：

上帝创造了宇宙（God created the universe）。

就是不可证伪的，所以这样的知识属于非科学，它们在科学的领域之外。按照波普尔的可证伪原则：哲学、数学、神学、宗教等都不是科学。但波普尔并未给出非科学与伪科学的清楚划分。他列举星相学、精神分析为伪科学的代表，而爱因斯坦的相对论为科学的代表。

1978年，Paul Thagard 提出将那些在相当长时间内比其他竞争理论发展缓慢的理论区分出来，会有助于我们判定伪科学。原文：

Paul Thagard (1978) proposed that pseudoscience is primarily
distinguishable from science when it is less progressive than
alternative theories over a long period of time, and the
selective and or lack of attempts by proponents to solve
problems with the theory.

1984年，Mario Bunge 提出将“信仰领域”（belief fields）和“研究领域”区分开，会有助于我们判定伪科学。

科学哲学家保罗·费耶阿本德（Paul Feyerabend）认为，在社会科学领域，区分科学与非科学是不可能的，也是不必要的。而且在科学的某个领域内适用的判定（伪科学）标准未必适用于其他领域。Thagard (1978)从社会学的角度就伪科学问题讨论：

教育人们科学是如何地区别于伪科学是努力让公众不要漠视科学的哲学努力。

原文：

elucidation of how science differs from pseudoscience is the
philosophical side of an attempt to overcome public neglect of
genuine science.

根据美国1988年关于公众科学知识的调查，50%的成年美国人反对进化论，88%的人认为占星术是科学。

伪科学标志小结

1. 含混，夸大或无法验证的断言（Use of vague, exaggerated or untestable claims）
2. 对理论超级自信（Over-reliance on confirmation rather than refutation）
3. 对其他专家的检验缺乏开放态度（Lack of openness to testing by other experts）
4. 缺乏进展（Lack of progress）
5. 过于个人化（Personalization of issues）

科 学也是区别于启示（revelation）, 神学（theology）, 或属灵的（spirituality）。如果不自称是科学的或与公认科学事实违背，使用启示的方法获得知识不被认为是伪科学。（注：这里的讨论与西方基督 教传统有关，托马斯·阿奎那认为信仰和理性是获得知识的两个可靠来源，但它们都只在各自领域内适用，不互相冲突，见：关于上帝“存在”的说明。托马斯·阿奎那是经院哲学的代表，罗马天主教会的官方哲学。）

伪科学与前科学

前 科学（protoscience）指的是科学建立之前所形成的理论，如化学的前身是炼金术，医学的前身是巫术等。费耶阿本德认为很难在科学，前科学，伪科 学之间进行区分。如前科学很容易与伪科学混淆，但前科学在科学发展的历史过程中是有价值的。（注：炼金术的基本理论或根本目的是：将贱金属变为贵金属。用 化学的概念看，这是错误的，但炼金术使用的基本方法，如使用天平对质量进行精确测量对导致化学的产生是极其关键的。）

科学与伪科学的分界问题

经过一个多世纪科学哲学家（或科学史家）与科学家在多个学科领域的对话，尽管大家对科学方法有很大程度上的认同，科学与伪科学的分界问题仍然是个有争议的问题。

很多被贴上伪科学标签的研究者及其理论的支持者质疑分界太过严厉，一些现在被接纳为科学的领域曾被认为是伪科学或具有伪科学的某些标志，如结果没有可重复性，缺少可证伪性。（注：维基百科中未给出参考文献。）

有些理论家认为实验验证本身并非一定是科学方法，科学史家托马斯·库恩认为在他的理论（范式理论）和卡尔·波普尔的理论中实验方法并不是决定性的因素。

原文：can testing play a quite decisive role?

Daniel Rothbart 认为科学的重要标志并非实验的成功，很多真科学往往已经被实验否定。

原文：

the defining feature of science does not seem to be experimental success, for most clear cases of genuine science have been experimentally falsified

这 是否意味着科学理论必须能够解释所有与其竞争的其他理论所无法解释的现象，在经验上与竞争理论相冲突并导致与竞争理论不一样的实验结果。这样一个理论是科 学的或非科学的就依赖于历史的环境。如果它比同时代的其他解释更好，就意味着科学进步。比如在古希腊，很多领域，如：迷信（superstition）， 宗教（religion），魔法（magic）和神秘（the occult）被认为是正统的科学。这就是科学理论相互竞争的模型，Rothbart 认为这并不是一个完全有效的模型。（注：在古希腊，即便是苏格拉底这样死于渎神指控的哲学家，他认为自己是信神的。更具体一点，托勒密的地心说当时在预言 天文现象时要比日心说更有优越性。）

库恩认为相互竞争的范式（注：科学史家拉卡托斯称之为科学研究纲领。）之间的竞争很容易导致相互漫骂，他们会各自向公众寻求支持，而公众是缺乏判断竞争理论的能力的。科学哲学家 Larry Laudan 更认为伪科学一词并无科学意义，它大多时候描述了我们的情绪：

如果我们需要站出来并进行理性的讨论，我们会冒出伪科学或不科学这样的词汇，它们完全是空洞的说法并仅仅对我们的情绪有影响。

原文：

“If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like ‘pseudo-science’ and ‘unscientific’ from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us”.

哈佛大学心理学教授 Richard McNally 认为：伪科学一词仅仅是在传媒争论中快速否定对方的煽动性的废话。

原文：

“The term ‘pseudoscience’ has become little more than an inflammatory buzzword for quickly dismissing one’s opponents in media sound-bites”

科学共同体

库恩是当代最有影响力的科学史家，他从社会学的角度看待科学的问题，科学家是以共同方法、价值观（范式）组织起来的社会群体，科学共同体的工作（一般体现为科学期刊内的文章）是典型的科学工作。

曾经被认为是伪科学的科学

在科学史中我们甚至可以找到曾经被（科学共同体内）大多数学者认为是伪科学的理论后来又成为大家公认的理论，如：著名的大陆漂移学说。

科 学家有时会因为理论缺少可能的实验检测，而称该理论为伪科学，比如宇宙论就曾被认为是伪科学。（注：说到宇宙学，我立刻想到的是“针尖上能占多少个天使” 这样的中世纪哲学问题。）现在很热门的弦论(string theory)也因为同样的理由被一些物理学家批评。如：李·斯莫林(Lee Smolin)的The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next.一书。

参考阅读

1. Answers: Pseudoscience
2. Book Review: The Trouble with Physics

Being one of the most renowned scientist of his time Galileo’s opinions were scrutinized not only be his peers, but by also by Church officials and the public in general. This made Galileo the lightning-rod of many complaints against the Copernican doctrine (and also some against Galileo himself). He did not come out unscathed out of these encounters.

In 1611 Galileo came to the attention of the Inquisition for the first time for his Copernican views. Four years later a Dominican friar, Niccolo Lorini, who had earlier criticized Galileo’s view in private conversations, files a written complaint with the Inquisition against Galileo’s Copernican views. Galileo subsequently writes a long letter defending his views to Monsignor Piero Dini, a well connected official in the Vatican, he then writes his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina arguing for freedom of inquiry and travels to Rome to defend his ideas

In 1616 a committee of consultants declares to the Inquisition that the propositions that the Sun is the center of the universe and that the Earth has an annual motion are absurd in philosophy, at least erroneous in theology, and formally a heresy. On orders of the Pope Paul V, Cardinal Bellarmine calls Galileo to his residence and administers a warning not to hold or defend the Copernican theory; Galileo is also forbidden to discuss the theory orally or in writing. Yet he is reassured by Pope Paul V and by Cardinal Bellarmine that he has not been on trial nor being condemned by the Inquisition.

In 1624 Galileo meets repeatedly with his (at that time) friend and patron Pope Urban VIII, he is allowed to write about the Copernican theory as long as he treated it as a mathematical hypothesis.

In 1625 a complaint against Galileo’s publication The Assayer is lodged at the Inquisition by a person unknown. The complaint charges that the atomistic theory embraced in this book cannot be reconciled with the official church doctrine regarding the Eucharist, in which bread and wine are “transubstantiated'’ into Christ’s flesh and blood. After an investigation by the Inquisition, Galileo is cleared.

In 1630 he completed his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in which the Ptolemaic and Copernican models are discussed and compared and was cleared (conditionally) to publish it by the Vatican. The book was printed in 1632 but Pope Urban VIII, convinced by the arguments of various Church officials, stopped its distribution; the case is referred to the Inquisition and Galileo was summoned to Rome despite his infirmities.

In 1633 Galileo was formally interrogated for 18 days and on April 30 Galileo confesses that he may have made the Copernican case in the Dialogue too strong and offers to refute it in his next book. Unmoved, the Pope decides that Galileo should be imprisoned indefinitely. Soon after, with a formal threat of torture, Galileo is examined by the Inquisition and sentenced to prison and religious penances, the sentence is signed by 6 of the 10 inquisitors. In a formal ceremony at a the church of Santa Maria Sofia Minerva, Galileo abjures his errors. He is then put in house arrest in Sienna. After these tribulations he begins writing his Discourse on Two New Sciences.

Galileo remained under house arrest, despite many medical problems and a deteriorating state of health, until his death in 1642. The Church finally accepted that Galileo might be right in 1983.

原文：Galileo and the Inquisition

参考译文：

伽利略

作为当时最著名的科学家，伽利略的观点不仅要受到同行的挑剔，还要经受教会官员及一般大众的审视。这让伽利略成为了当时反对哥白尼学说声浪的众矢之的（还有一些是反对伽利略自己的）。他并未安然无恙的度过这些交锋。

1611年，伽利略由于他的哥白尼地动说首次受到了宗教裁判所的关注。四年后，一个曾早先在私下交谈中批评过伽利略的观点的多明我会修道士 NIccolo Lorini向宗教裁判所提交了一份反对伽利略的哥白尼地动说的书面控告。伽利略随后给他一位关系密切的梵蒂冈官员，Piero Dini阁下写了一封长信为自己的观点辩护，此人与梵蒂冈教廷联系紧密。然后他在一封给克里斯蒂娜女大公的信中要求有调查并到罗马去为自己观点辩护的自 由。

1616年，一个委员会向宗教裁判所声明，所谓太阳是宇宙中心而地球绕其每年公转的理论在哲学上是荒谬的，至少在神学上是错误 的，形式上是异教的。 根据教皇保罗五世的命令，红衣主教贝拉敏（Bellarmine）把伽利略叫到他的住所正式发布了一个警告让伽利略不要再坚持维护其哥白尼地动说。伽利略 在口头和书面上均被禁止讨论该理论。不过他得到了教皇保罗五世和红衣主教贝拉敏的保证，他没有被审判也没有被法庭宣布有罪。

贝拉敏主教警告伽利略不要对神学发表武断的见解；

1624年，伽利略反复地与他的朋友（当时的）和保护人教皇乌尔班八世会面，他被允许记录哥白尼学说，但只能把它看作是一个数学假设。

新任教皇乌尔班八世起初是伽利略的朋友；

1625年，一份匿名者对伽利略著作《试金者（The Assayer）》的控告出现在宗教裁判所。控告称此书所持的原子理论无法与官方教义中的圣餐论，即面包和葡萄酒变为耶稣的身体和血相符。经过法庭的调查，伽利略被认为无罪。

1630 年，他完成了《关于两个世界系统的对话》一书，其中讨论并对比了托勒密和哥白尼模型，并且（有条件地）由梵蒂冈同意出版。该书于1632年 印刷，但被各方面教会官员的争论说服的教皇乌尔班八世禁止了其发行；这件案子被提交到宗教裁判所，正在病中的伽利略被传唤到罗马。

伽利略接受审讯；

1633 年，伽利略被正式审问了18天，4月30日他承认在讨论中也许将哥白尼学说过分强调，且提出将在下一本书中反驳它。但教皇不为 所动，仍然决定将伽利略无限期监禁。不久，在正式威胁将被用刑后，伽利略被法庭讯问并被判入狱和忏悔，10个审判者中有6个在判决书上签了字。在圣玛丽亚 ·索菲亚·米诺娃教堂的一次正式仪式上，伽利略公开发誓放弃他的错误。他随后在锡耶纳（Sienna）被软禁。在经历过这些苦难之后，伽利略开始写他的 《两门新科学的讨论》。

被软禁后的伽利略生活舒适，并继续进行自己的研究和写作；

尽管有很多身体问题及健康的持续恶化，伽利略到1642年去世前一直被软禁。而罗马天主教会直到1983年才最终承认，伽利略应当是正确的。

原文：Galileo and the Inquisition

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评论： 伽利略本人是虔诚的天主教徒，伽利略对科学与宗教的问题也有自己的观点，他力劝教皇把基督教教义与具体的科学研究区分开来，这样做不仅对教会无害， 反而有利于教会的利益。但当时罗马天主教会正受到空前的挑战，所以伽利略的审判已不仅仅是关于信仰和科学的冲突了，在其背后还隐藏着教会的政治利益。

后来一些作者对伽利略因维护哥白尼学说而遭受迫害，多少有些夸张和自以为是，比如：

伽利略眼前顿时一片黑暗，等待他的命运是终身监禁和失去科学研究的自由，但是这个倔强的科学家最后在判决书上签字时，嘴里仍然自言自语地说：

“地球确实是在转动的啊！”

这样的场景显然是后人煽情的杜撰，不可看作是史实。

怀特海曾对伽利略的审判作如下评论：

在发生三十年战争和荷兰的阿尔瓦（Alva）事件的那30年中科学家所遭遇的最坏境遇就是：伽利略在平安地死于病榻以前，受到体面的软禁和轻微的申斥。