Galileo, Psalm 145, & the Heavens

I will extol you, my God and King,
    and bless your name forever and ever.

Every day I will bless you
    and praise your name forever and ever.

Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised;
    his greatness is unsearchable.

One generation shall extol your works to another
    and shall declare your mighty acts.

They will recount the glorious[a] splendor of your majesty,
    and on your wondrous works I will meditate.

They will proclaim the might of your awesome deeds,
    and I will declare your greatness.
 They shall celebrate the fame of your abundant goodness
    and shall sing aloud of your righteousness.

My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord,
    and all flesh will bless his holy name forever and ever.

                                      Psalm 145: 1-7, 21 (of 21 Verses)

In January a historian spotted a verse or verses from a psalm in a very old manuscript. This note is now attributed to Galileo, a discovery that intrigues me. 

Here is the description from an article in the Smithsonian Magazine: 

Historian Ivan Malara spotted the inscriptions in January while leafing through a 1551 copy of the Almagest at Italy’s National Central Library of Florence. Malara realized that a loose page in the text—a second-century C.E. astronomical manual by the Greco-Roman polymath Ptolemy, which asserts that Earth is at the center of the universe—contained a transcription of Psalm 145. The handwriting was reminiscent of Galileo’s, an astronomer often lionized as the “father of modern science.” Additional annotations in the book’s margins similarly matched Galileo’s hand.

There are lots of reasons to remember Galileo, not the least of which is the conflict between the astronomer and the Roman Catholic church regarding his proposition that our solar system is heliocentric solar rather than geocentric .Galileo was tried for his supposedly heretical premise that the Earth and other planets were in orbit around the Sun rather than the Earth being at the centre. He did avoid torture or execution but as the result of two trials for heresy he was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life and ordered not to promulgate his dangerous views. 

It isn't widely shared that Jesuit astronomers came to similar conclusions shortly after Galileo did but it took until 1992, a mere 359 years, for the RC Church to admit it was wrong. While the inquisition of Galileo is often cited as evidence of the anti-science outlook of the Church the RCs have an astronomical observatory near the Vatican and another in Arizona. Guy Consolmo, the director of astronomy for the Vatican believes in science and religion working alongside one another rather than as competing ideologies.

You may have been aware that six planets were in alignment Saturday night, all of them in orbit around the sun. And early tomorrow morning there will be a lunar eclipse. Set your alarm!

I would love to know what portion of Psalm 145 captured Galileo but I suppose we'll never know. It's hard to imagine that he was kindly disposed toward religion as his life progressed yet we can thank the Creator for his contributions to our understanding of the heavens. 

                                                           Vatican Observatory