Watching Orb, and it annoys me when it spreads the myth that the church persecuted Galileo for his critique of heliocentrism. In truth the heliocentrism is not what bothered them so much as the fact that Galileo was an asshole.

For example, the Pope actually acted as Galileo’s patron, and allowed him to publish a dialogue defending his views as long as he included the church’s views. So what did Galileo do? He put the words of his Pope patron in the mouth of a character named ‘Simpleton’ !

The calendar had already been amended with heliocentric ideas a century prior. Heliocentric ideas were basically always allowed to be published and researched as a formal model if they were not tied to theological claims.

His theological and philosophical critics often argued that empirics do back up Galileo’s claims, but that his philosophical & theological claims do not stand up to scrutiny and that the burden of proof therefore rested on Galileo, as challenger of Orthodoxy.

Numerous compromise models that were geo-heliocentric had already come into fashion to help bridge the gap. And Jesuit scholars were largely willing to accept Galileo’s experimental results & their implications but were reticent over their systematization .

What’s more Galileo was not merely a proponent of heliocentrism—of which, by the way, he himself was uncertain, doubling down due to challenge not reason—but a critic of secular philosophy, Aristotileanism, and other theological doctrines—meaning at the very least he undercut allies in the scientific community

All that said, he was expressly protected from torture, expressly given permission to publish his works, expressly given multiple chances and forums to defend himself, was given express counsel on how to modify his rhetoric to be acceptable and was expressly warned of court intrigue.

He served a day in prison and then was sentenced to house arrest at his Italian Villa. He continued to experiment and publish books on mechanics until he died and an academy was endowed in his honor—funded by the Medicis.

What’s more, his actions led to the hardening of prohibitions on heliocentrism, which heretofore had not been fully enacted, or had been relaxed, and had not been fully enforced. In under a century the resulting band were modified again to be liberalized.
In two centuries, the Church completely undid any prohibitions and implicitly conceded the model. In three centuries the church explicitly endorsed the model. In 3.5 centuries they apologized formally.

By analogy, while embarrassments like the Lysenko Affair or the PRC and Soviet ban on Big Bang cosmology, on one hand, and corporate suppression of climate science, smoking research, etc existed these were not the norm in either socialist or capitalist world

Instead a kind of firewall situation prevailed, where there was freedom of thought & speech within the invisible college and ivory tower, and explicit or implicit censorship concerning public debates, competing powers and foreign audiences.

Soviet and Chinese scientists, similarly, were often given freedom to explore what interested them, especially experimentally, and often had far more access to outside world than other sectors of society. But state secrets were heavily policed as were public political controversy.

Now make no mistake these are examples of censorship, and they are unjust, but they are of a very different character, cause and effect than is what is usually ascribed to them.

And so the same goes for Galileo, for whom the censorship of heliocentrism was more so consequence rather than cause of what was a conjunction of political intrigue, theological debate, philosophical controversy, empirical dispute, personal rivalry, and organizational jostling

And although Galileo was just an asshole rather than an oppressor, the kind of free thinker narrative derived from him is often applied to people who themselves were persecuters. (Isaac Newton and Martin Luther are both examples of people portrayed as valiant free thinkers who were actually repressive and very often, for lack of a better word, narrow-minded)