The Sun in the Church

The Sun in the Church
By:J. L. Heilbron
Published on 2009-06-01 by Harvard University Press

Between 1650 and 1750, four Catholic churches were the best solar observatories in the world. Built to fix 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 cardinals with a taste for mathematics, |The Sun in the Church| 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. And it offers an enlightening perspective on astronomy, Church history, and religious architecture, as well as an analysis of measurements testing the limits of attainable accuracy, undertaken with rudimentary means and extraordinary zeal. Above all, the book illuminates the niches protected and financed by the Catholic Church in which science and mathematics thrived. Superbly written, |The Sun in the Church| provides a magnificent corrective to long-standing oversimplified accounts of the hostility between science and religion.

This Book was ranked at 41 by Google Books for keyword sun guide to the flat 1999.

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Book which was published by Harvard University Press since 2009-06-01 have ISBNs, ISBN 13 Code is 9780674038486 and ISBN 10 Code is 0674038487

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