Reports of Me Breaking My Neck Might Not Follow

I have got a ton of snow to move from a roof today and I won't have any time to write.  I've been reading and re-reading this excellent article, The Galileo Legend As Scientific Folklore by Thomas M. Lessl and recommend it over anything I'd write on the topic.   Especially interesting, to me, were his analysis of Fred Hoyle's and Bertrand Russell's use of what scientists and others turned the history of Galileo's problems with Pope Urban VIII, Giordano Bruno and the rest of it into.   Lessl analyzed dozens of accounts by scientists. science writers and found in science textbooks and found that all of them botched the history and botched it for clearly ideological purposes, imposing false assumptions about the state of astronomical knowledge at the time, frames of reference and expectation that wouldn't be invented for several centuries, etc.

It was one of the most annoying things about the Seth MacFarlane-Neil Degrasse Tyson "Cosmos" event last year that when historical inaccuracies contained in it were brought out, Tyson seemed to think that as the mere presenter he didn't have responsibility for the non-truth of what he told an international audience, certainly not about something as unimportant as history.   That attitude is common among all too many scientists who clearly believe they have a right to misrepresent the past.  Considering how many of them will have a hissy fit when creationists misrepresent a far more remote and less documented past about which our knowledge can't achieve anything like a certainty that the lives and trials of Bruno and Galileo can, that arrogance is even more marked.   It is a bit of a strange coincidence that the article ends with Richard Lewontin on a general point not related to the Galileo legend, directly,  Lewontin is one of the few prominent materialist scientists and science writers who does, actually, have respect for history and its honest and accurate telling.

Anyway, do read the Lessl article, it is thoroughly enjoyable and I can't imagine anyone having written a better article on the topic of the folklore that so many even real scientists believe is gospel truth.   Not to mention the sci-rangers and wannabees.  Well, not to the extent that they'd learn the requisite math.

Update:   All done, for this storm, at least.  That was a lot easier to do twenty years ago.