Summary
The DJ and broadcaster Bobby Friction champions the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. He is the first Great Lives guest to have named a child after his nominated hero.
Galileo was born on 25th February 1564, in Pisa. He was a best-selling author - the Stephen Hawking of his day - who challenged Aristotle's view of the cosmos and was brought before the Inquisition.
The presenter is Matthew Parris, with additional contributions from Dr David Berman from Queen Mary University of London. Together they discuss whether Galileo should have stood his ground and refused to recant, or if he should be recognised as someone whose experimentation helped define what science is.
Produced by Perminder Khatkar.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the |
| 0:03.8 | podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC. |
| 0:08.6 | It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world. |
| 0:15.0 | What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism |
| 0:20.0 | and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines. |
| 0:23.7 | And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject |
| 0:28.3 | you might not even have thought you were interested in. |
| 0:30.2 | Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment, |
| 0:36.1 | you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:39.8 | Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear. |
| 0:46.0 | For this week's Great Lives, I want to take you back to 1992, the 31st of October, when |
| 0:52.4 | Pope John Paul II, 350 years after our subject's death, |
| 0:57.2 | gave an address on behalf of the Catholic Church in which he admitted that errors had been made by theological advisors in the case of Galileo |
| 1:06.2 | Galileo, Galileo. |
| 1:07.7 | He declared the Galileo case closed, but he did not admit that the church was wrong to convict the Italian physicist, mathematician, |
| 1:15.1 | and astronomer on the charge of heresy because of his belief that the earth rotates around |
| 1:19.9 | the sun. |
| 1:21.4 | And my guest, who's chosen him presents this program with a first. |
| 1:26.5 | The first on great lives to have named his son after the person he's championing, or |
| 1:31.3 | second name of the son anyway. Let me introduce a guest who on the face of |
| 1:35.0 | it couldn't be more removed from 16th century Catholic Italy. A DJ, radio and TV presenter Bobby |
| 1:42.3 | Friction, currently presenting a radio show every afternoon on BBC |
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