And yet it moves
"And yet it moves" (Italian: Eppur si muove; [epˈpur si ˈmwɔːve]) is a phrase said to have been uttered before the Inquisition by the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei in 1633 after being forced to recant his belief that the earth moves around the sun. Some historians believe this might have happened instead upon his transfer from house arrest under the watch of Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini to that of someone less favorable towards his views, near Florence.[1]
There is no contemporary evidence that Galileo uttered this expression at his trial; it would certainly have been highly imprudent for him to have done so. The earliest biography of Galileo, written by his disciple Vincenzio Viviani in 1655-1656 does not mention this phrase, and depicts Galileo as having sincerely recanted. The legend is first recorded by Giuseppe Baretti in his work Italian Library in 1757 (124 years after the supposed utterance) and became widely published in Querelles Littéraires (1761).[2]
In 1911, the line was found on a Spanish painting owned by a Belgian family, dated 1643 or 1645. The painting is obviously ahistorical, because it depicts Galileo in a dungeon, but nonetheless proves that some variants of the "Eppur si muove" legend had been circulating for over a century before it was published,[3] perhaps even in his own lifetime.
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[edit] Notes
- ^ Stephen Hawking, On the Shoulders of Giants, Running Press Book Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, 2002, p. 397.
- ^ A. Rupert Hall, "Galileo nel XVIII secolo," Rivista di filosofia, 15 (Turin, 1979), pp. 375–78, 83.
- ^ Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography, (Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, 2003) p. 357.
