Our government grants out millions of dollars through the National Science Foundation to fund scientific research. To this day, millions of tax dollars are spent to dig up fossilized animal bones in the attempt to find proof that life evolved as the result of random mutations. The disproof costs nothing, but will always be ignored. In the field of evolutionary theory, science has become a religion.

     Galileo funded his own research. He built his own telescope with his own resources. He then sold telescopes to the Italian Navy. He used the profits to give himself more time for scientific research. In our modern time, millions of taxpayers provide funding for such things as particle accelerators.

     Galileo must have been very excited when he realized he had discovered satellites orbiting Jupiter. The fact that objects were orbiting the planet Jupiter showed that not everything orbited the Earth. This gave support to the Copernicum system, which Galileo believed was true.

     A former student wrote to Galileo, and told him he should examine Venus with his new telescope. If Venus orbited the Sun, then there should be phases just like the moon, with Venus appearing as a crescent waxing to a full disc, and then waning back to a crescent. The hunch turned out to be correct. Galileo believed he would be able to convince the clergy that his findings were true, and then they would just accept the fact that the Earth moved around the Sun.

     The main opposition to Galileo’s theory wasn’t the fact that the Earth moved around the Sun but rather, that the Earth moved at all. It seemed to other people that if the Earth were moving, we would be able to feel it. You can’t see it moving, and you can’t feel it moving. Critics said that if the Earth were rotating, the clouds would be flying away over the horizon, and birds would not be able to land because the Earth would be moving too fast. In fact, things would fly of the Earth due to centripetal force.

     Galileo misjudged human nature. He thought that logic and mathematics were real to people other than himself and his students. The problem really starts right in the human brain. In order to perceive the world, the brain must construct a model of the world based on electro-chemical signals entering the brain from outside sensory devices. The brain automatically assumes things. The ground does not look or feel like it’s moving, and the fact that it is stationary would be considered the truth for any brain that is basically tasked in solving problems of day to day survival. When building a shelter or planting a crop, ground movement is not usually taken into account, as it has no direct effect on the results.

     Today, if someone tried to suggest that the Earth was flat and stationary, the idea would be totally bizarre. We’ve all been taught about gravity and the solar system since we were little children. We have regularly scheduled space flights and many thousands of photographs of the Earth taken from space. Our brains know that the Earth is moving and it doesn’t seem strange, but the people in Galileo’s day did not know what we know.

     To them, the concept of a moving Earth was so strange that it just could not even be considered. They would not even look at the evidence. They just rejected it flat out for no logical reason. It just did not fit the model of the world that their brains had already created.

     Galileo desperately needed proof that the Earth was moving. He noted that if a man were sitting on a stationary horse, and he released a ball from his hand, the ball would fall straight down and land half way between the horse’s front and rear legs. If the same man released a ball while the horse was moving forward at full speed, the ball’s forward momentum would continue while the ball descended, and land at the same relative point half way between the horse’s legs. This was the beginning of his studies into the laws of motion and falling objects.