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FAITH IN SCIENCE 

The NJ Star Ledger
Matt Zoller Seitz 
Monday, October 28, 2002
 

THE ASTRONOMER Galileo Galilei, whose story is told on PBS' "Nova" Tuesday 
night, was the definition of a great man. He devised revolutionary theories and insisted on their importance at risk to his reputation, his health and his freedom. He went his own way and suffered. 

Resisting cultural pressure to become a monk (and his dad's urgings to study medicine), the eccentric Italian studied science instead. He invented telescopes that allowed him to identify the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. He wrote a groundbreaking study of the tides proving that Galileo's predecessor, the astronomer Copernicus, was right -- Earth did revolve around the sun, not the other way around. 

This ticked off the Catholic Church, which warned him against heresy. Galileo couldn't resist following up with another paper which argued that rational scientific theories should be embraced even if they make a popular majority feel uncomfortable.For daring to reject the Church's version of heavenly mechanics, Galileo was hounded, interrogated, forced to "modify" his views and ultimately imprisoned. 

Tuesday's edition of "Nova" (8 p.m., 2 hours), titled "Galileo's Battle for the Heavens," explores the great man's life in brisk strokes, mixing historical imagery, travel footage and dramatic re-creations (in which Galileo is played by the fine English character actor and author Simon Callow ). 

It also explores a rarely investigated aspect of Galileo's life: From cradle to grave, he remained a religious man, specifically a Catholic, and spent much of his mental effort trying to reconcile faith with science. 

Just as artists and architects hundreds of years ago did their greatest work to honor, understand and dramatize their faith, Galileo worked up detailed, revolutionary science theories to measure the world God created. He had a daughter, Virginia, out of wedlock; when she grew up to become a nun, Galileo remained close to her. 

The struggle to reconcile religion and science is an elemental one for scientists, even today -- but it's not one that our secular world is interested in examining. We like black-and-white conflicts. "Nova" dares complicate matters by acknowledging Galileo as a man of contradictions and a product of his time. 

Dava Sobel , author of the 1999 book "Galileo's Daughter" and an adviser to the "Nova" special, describes Galileo as "the first modern scientist." While he was religious, he subtly avoided what was once considered the scientist's primary mission: to deduce God's intentions by observing the world He created. 

"His lasting, profound contribution to science was to show you that you had to do the math and that it was not up to a scientist to explain why things happen, but to accurately observe and describe them, using mathematics," Sobel says. "He was not a model, but a man, with passions and relationships. 

"It is possible to see him in the context of his time," Sobel continues. "That time was Catholic Italy (400 years ago). Even though he was able to turn the world inside out with his theories, his religious beliefs were something else. Today there are scientists who are religious, but they don't like to say so because it's not popular and it's not considered consistent with our view of what a scientist should be."