Event #1

Wonder is the source of modernity. On a clear autumn night in 1609, Galileo Galilei pointed his rudimentary telescope to the stars and saw something that no one before him had ever seen. From those ‘wonderful observations’ began the scientific revolution that would change our view of the world and of ourselves. Astronomical discoveries, however, are shocking and create conflicts between truth and power. One of the most famous and controversial court cases started at the time: the trial for heresy held by the Holy Office, the Inquisition Tribunal in Rome. Galileo was arrested, interrogated, threatened with torture, and his work was put on the Index. We know that he eventually submitted to the humiliation of abjuration. Was this the ingenious stratagem of a heroic defender of freedom of thought against all dogma to escape martyrdom and secretly promote human emancipation? Or was Galileo a hypocritical and cowardly man, surrendered to obscurantism? This enigma anticipates the dilemmas that shook the Manhattan Project scientists engaged in building the first atomic bomb. And it brings us to our questions about today’s dominance of technology, when new capital risks seem to be looming over mankind: climate catastrophes, the spectre of nuclear weapons, the proliferation of technologies undermining free will. So let us go back to that fateful day in 1633 and go over those distressing hours before the sentence when Galileo had to decide what he would say to his judges.