Images selected by
Alan Griffiths
A visual journey through the known universe with NASA and ESA.
In a 1615 letter from Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) to Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany he wrote...
Some years ago, as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts; not their diminution or destruction.
Source: Perry McAdow Rogers Aspects of Western Civilization: Problems and Sources in History (Prentice Hall, 1988)
