This is CBSI on the World. I'm John Batchel with Matthew Shindell, the space historian curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, a really cool job, and the book is really cool.

For the Love of Mars is about human history and the Martian planet, projections, interpretations, and now

science. Matt Descartes died 1650. Christian Huygens, Giovanni Cassini, died 1712. Isaac Newton

died 1726. These men, Leonard Hewler of all physics, these men put together

what we understand to be science, following Galileo's groundbreaking martyrdom to what he saw

through the telescope. All of this is going on simultaneously with them inheriting the old world.

Were they seen as rebellious of the ancients when they provided these interpretations

of observation and mathematics?

I think yes and no, right?

Galileo didn't see himself necessarily as being rebellious.

He thought he was still working within that same tradition, but trying to modernize it based on, you know, new observations, new mathematics.

Now, I don't want to try to get too deep into what Galileo really

thought he was doing, but at least this is the way that he would describe it in letters that he

wrote to his patrons. And, you know, Galileo's observations of the moon certainly gave people

a reason to think that there was something different going on in the heavens

than what they had, you know, inherited from Aristotle.

And there did seem to be the need for some new ways of thinking about the solar system.

But the truth is that, you know, there were multiple

models of the universe kind of circulating at that time, each kind of not seeming perfect, right,

not being the obvious choice for what was happening. You had the old Aristotelian model or the Ptolemaic model with the Earth at the center.

You then had Tycho Brahe's model where you had the Earth at the center,

but everything else but the moon orbiting around the sun.

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