The Catholic authorities couldn't ignore his fiery advocacy of Copernicism. Denying that the earth was the center of universe was to them heretical. He was examined by the inquisition in 1616 and promised to present his ideas as theories, not truths that contradicted the Genesis story. In fact he did no such thing and in 1633 the inquisition held a second trial in which he was forced on threat of torture to recant his view that the earth moved around the sun. He was put under house arrest and stayed in his villa near Florence until his death 9 years later in 1642.

Galileo's fate is often cited as a cautionary tale about religious authority using dogma to trump scientific conclusions derived from evidence. Galileo and others of his time maintained that the bible told man how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. The Roman Catholic Church has, of course, long since reversed its attitude on the discoveries of astronomy as well as other sciences and for centuries has encouraged both lay adherents and clergy to take free rein to conduct scientific work as long as it does not use morally repugnant methods. It was the 20th century before the church acknowledged their mistake about Galileo.

It was another three centuries before scientists began to think constructively about the first beginnings of the universe. During that time it was realized that the earth was at least a billion years old and therefore the universe was even older. Better and better telescopes made it clear that there was a universe of stars and nebulae out there so vast that even with light traveling at a previously unimaginable speed of 186,000 miles per second, it took years for light from stars to reach the earth. Nevertheless, it was considered that the universe was infinitely old and hence one did not have to think about how it was created.

20th Century thought can be said to start with Albert Einstein and his theories of relativity. After finishing a not very promising university education, Einstein could not get an academic position and took a job as patent clerk in Switzerland. He was of the class of scientists who personally made no observations but took the observations of others and spun theories. Working with pencil and paper, he did "thought" experiments and made mathematical calculations. Starting in 1905, when he was 25, he published his results in a series of papers that eventually revolutionized man's thinking about physics and the nature of the universe.

Observational scientists eventually confirmed many of his predictions. For instance, his theory of relativity predicted that a large heavy body would bend the path of light rays passing close by. James Eddington organized, and the British Admiralty financed, two expeditions in 1919, one to Brazil and the other to equatorial Africa, to observe stars during the darkness created by an eclipse of the sun. They hoped to determine if indeed the massive body of the sun would change the apparent position of stars whose light passed nearby. They succeeded brilliantly and showed that the sun's mass bent the starlight by just the amount predicted by Einstein's calculations.

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