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The Sun in the Church

Cathedrals as Solar Observatories

Posted December 1, 1999

By John L. Heilbron

Professor of the History of Science and former Vice Chancellor, now Senior Research Fellow, Worcester College, Oxford

Between 1650 and 1750, four Catholic churches were the best solar observatories in the world. Built to establish an unquestionable date for Easter, they also housed instruments that threw light on the disputed geometry of the solar system, and so, within sight of the altar, subverted church doctrine about the order of the universe.

A tale of politically canny astronomers and of cardinals with a taste for mathematics, Heilbron tells how these observatories came to be, how they worked, and what they accomplished. It describes Galileo's political overreaching, his subsequent trial for heresy, and his slow and steady rehabilitation in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Above all, the book illuminates the niches protected and financed by the Catholic Church in which science and mathematics thrived.

A reviewer for the New York Times Book Review said Heilbron "...turns the tables on tired stories of the war between science and religion."

Harvard University Press
366 pages

 

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December 1, 1999 - January 11, 2000 (Volume 28, Number 16)
Copyright 1999, The Regents of the University of California.
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