Do we like Galileo Galilei?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or acts turned up, and he took a real hit for his work, though he did back down under threat.
Galileo was born in Pisa on 15 February 1564. He started in medicine at the University of Pisa, drifted into mathematics, and by 1592 was teaching at Padua, where he stayed for 18 years. That's the unglamorous run-up to the bloke who changed how we look at the sky.
In 1609 he built his own telescope, improving on a Dutch design, and the next January he turned it on Jupiter. He noticed the little lights moved differently from the stars, and by 15 January he worked out they were moons orbiting the planet. He published the lot in The Starry Messenger in March 1610 and named the moons after his patrons, which was a handy bit of career management.
Then came the stoush. In 1616 the Church warned him off holding or defending the idea that the Earth moves around the sun. In 1632 he published his Dialogues, written for general readers, and in 1633 he was put on trial before the Inquisition. At the hearing he said he did not “hold” the Copernican view, and the Church found him “vehemently suspected” of heresy.
The sentence banned the Dialogues, set imprisonment at the Holy Office's discretion, and ordered weekly penitential psalms for three years. It was reportedly softened to house arrest, and he spent his last years there, blind but still working. His Two New Sciences was published in Leiden in 1638. Backing down under that kind of threat is human, and it didn't stop the work.
On the harm test, there's nothing here. No hate, no grift, no punching down turned up in what we read, and he argued that evidence should settle questions about the physical world. Nobody can call him a culture warrior. The caveat is that a 17th-century record is thin on the everyday details a modern card would check, and we haven't gone digging through his private letters.
Nothing new on him lately, bar the usual anniversary pieces. The Church has long since changed its mind. In 1992 Pope John Paul II said the theologians who judged him had erred by reading Scripture too literally on the physical world. Historians still argue over how far that went, but it's on the record.