Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and the Royal Society

Just because Lloyd J and Michinson J, The Book of General Ignorance, Faber & Faber, 2006 and The Schiller Institute, Venice’s War Against Western Civilization, Summer 1995 issue of FIDELIO Magazine are sources which can be challenged on various points, does not mean that certain other points they make do not hold up, particularly when they allude to the same process.

One contention below is that Galileo, whilst not actually a charlatan or quack, was certainly promoted for political reasons extant today and this is the central point, plus his scientific brain was not of the same order as, for example, Kepler.

Most well-read people are aware that there is mistaken knowledge in many fields which has become the accepted version and even knowledge based on disinformation.

The BGI [above] points to one of these:

Aristarchus of Samos, born c 310 BC, suggested the earth and planets travelled around the sun, plus he calculated the relative distances of Earth, Moon and Sun and worked out that the heavens were not a celestial sphere but a universe of almost infinite size.

He studied at the Lyceum at Alexandria and was known primarily as a mathematician. He also invented a hemispherical sundial. He was later mentioned by the Roman architect Vitruvius as a man who was “knowledgeable across all branches of science”.

Only one of his works survives: On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon. It doesn’t mention his sun-centred theory but a single remark in one of Archimede’s texts does, only to disagree with it.

Copernicus was certainly aware of Aristarchus because he credits him in the MS of his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. However, when the book was published in 1514, all reference to Aristarchus had been removed.

Similarly, Einstein was preceded on relativity by Galileo himself:

The theory of relativity was stated by Galileo in his Dialogue concerning the World’s Two Chief Systems, 1632.

An interesting aside here was:

The Catholic Church rounded smartly on Galileo but he did not rot in a rat-infested cell for his principles. He began his sentence in the luxurious home of the Archbishop of Sienna before being taken back to a comfortable house arrest in his villa near Florence.

Why such preferential treatment for a supposed heretic? And was he the vast intellect of popular imagination?

He was perfectly capable of making mistakes. His favourite argument for a moving earth was that this causes the tides. This argument was refuted by eyewitness testimony of seafarers who pointed out that there were, in fact, two tides a day.  Galileo refused to accept it.

Why?  Why would a supposed scientific brain refuse to accept something so easily verified by basic observation?  It needs to be pointed out that BGI has no political axe to grind, unlike Schiller below and thus it’s worthy of note that not only was he accident prone but he was also capable of tenaciously hanging onto exploded ideas which fitted the narrative and rejecting facts which didn’t.

Years ago, I made reference to a Perry Mason novel in which there’s a character, an investigating officer named Sergeant Holcombe who has created a narrative as to a young woman’s guilt in a murder.

Perry Mason comes up with a counter-narrative which was derived from the facts, awkward though they were.  The dialogue went like this:




‘You just ignore ’em,’ said Holcombe.


The Schiller text below puts Galileo’s anomalies in perspective.   In that text, certain “scientists” were chosen for promotion because of the direction of their beliefs at that political juncture in the west, particularly as they would not buck the narrative.

Scientus, in Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens, 2010, has this:

There was another, more pragmatic criticism: the Copernican model of planetary motion did not seem to work better than the geocentric Ptolemaic model. It is often forgotten that it was Kepler who made the Copernican model work, and Galileo knew of his work and rejected it.

We now know, using computer analysis and modern statistical techniques, that the original Copernican model was approximately as accurate as the Ptolemaic but performed worse for some planets. Galileo and Copernicus used perfect circles to model planetary motion. This would prevent their models from ever becoming much better than the geocentric model.

Where one scientist ignores another, sometimes in favour of a third , is worth pursuing, if only to see who was paying whom and with what desired result?   Scientus continues:

Biographies such as Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens commonly portray Galileo relationship with his contemporaries as a lone star in an otherwise dark sky. Discounting Galileo’s contemporaries distorts the discussion of both church and science. Galileo had many important contemporaries including Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Gassendi and Mersenne.

A timeline of science contemporary with Galileo is found at Galileo’s Contemporaries. After Galileo’s death, when Newton took science the next giant step forward, it was Kepler’s work that he used as the anchor for his greatest work (the Principia Mathematica). Newton’s philosophy of science was also more influenced by the priest-scientist Gassendi than by Galileo.

Galilean biographies rarely mention Kepler. In the case of Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens this distortion reached extremes. Like many Galileo discussions, it presents Giordano Bruno as an important scientific figure, mentioning him 7 times, and completely discounts Kepler’s contributions, not mentioning him once. Bruno did not contribute a single advance in fact or theory to the science of the day.

Now, whilst true that Newton did base work on Kepler, he himself enjoyed the same patronage as Galileo.   The whole history of how certain ideas are promoted and others rejected becomes easier to understand if there were some august body, for example, which could pronounce on scientific theories, according them the weight of official approval. If the Bible was the be-all-and-end-all of Church orthodoxy, Science also needed such a body which could hardly be gainsaid.

Enter the Royal Society, a political body if ever there was one. The RS itself acknowledges its debt to the “hidden college”:


The RS intends its admission of the invisible college to mean those brave souls who argued for natural philosophy in the face of dogmatic Church orthodoxy but what it does not say is that the invisible college is also an entirely different reference to keepers of the hidden knowledge, e.g. the Freemasons [see below].

There has always been a counter-heavyweight to the monolithic Church model of how the world operates and it merges those of genuinely inquiring minds with those having specific agendas, with the latter more active, more organized, backed by money and therefore having their way.  This is very much seen today with the IPCC.

It’s also almost an analogy for the way the modern left-liberal goes along with policies he vaguely sees as supporting the underdog but in fact, are supporting the enslavement of the globe.  There are good people in the anti-Church mindset but there are also quite nasty combinations of people of like mind as well.

You see, you don’t even need to go to conspiracy sites to see this – you only need go to official sites of organizations themselves, e.g. the Freemasons:


Jumping to the current day [source: hauntingthelibrary July 5, 2011]:

In a move which once and for all removes [JH: confirms?] any doubt any reasonable person may have had on the impartial nature of climate science, the head of the Royal Society, Paul Nurse, has issued a statement calling for climate scientists to get get involved in activism and political agitation. An interview with the left-wing magazine, The New Statesman, quotes Nurse calling for climate scientists to drop any pretense of impartiality, and start agitating for political change:

Nurse’s undergraduate socialist spirit is still alive and well: he wouldn’t be against scientists getting involved in activism. “We are citizens, and citizens should be involved in politics, and I think those that have a strong view should be involved in party politics,” he says. “I’m happy to see fellows of the Royal Society politically engaged, if that’s what they see as right.”

So we’re hardly speaking of objective groups behind the RS, which was no more nor less than the oligarchy’s front institute for pushing its agenda. The Schiller Institute gives it a different name: The Venetians but we’re basically speaking of the same groups of people and the same names which keep popping up, such as Voltaire but some less well known ones as well, such as Zorzi, Contarini, Conti and Sarpi.

Just a note about Schiller’s Venetians. The name refers to the geographical roots rather than the philosophical and political movements but you may as well substitute other names for the same group of people and what they were trying to push Europe-wide.

We might start with the expurgated version of Paolo Sarpi is in Wiki, for general information.

Schiller [attributed at the top]:

Sarpi also marks a turning point in the methods used by Venetian intelligence to combat science.

Under Zorzi and Contarini, the Venetians had been openly hostile to Cusa and other leading scientists. Sarpi realized that the Venetians must now present themselves as the great champions of science, but on the basis of Aristotelian formalism and sense certainty.

By seizing control of the scientific community from the inside, the Venetians could corrupt scientific method and strangle the process of discovery. Sarpi sponsored and directed the career of Galileo Galilei, whom the Venetians used for an empiricist counterattack against the Platonic method of Johannes Kepler.

Galileo Galilei taught mathematics at the University of Padua from 1592 to 1610, and it was during his stay on Venetian territory that he became a celebrity. Galileo was a paid agent of Paolo Sarpi, the chief of Venetian intelligence, and, after Sarpi’s death, of Sarpi’s right-hand man Micanzio.

Galileo’s fame was procured when he used a small telescope to observe the four largest moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the phases of Venus. (The first telescope had been built by Leonardo da Vinci about a hundred years before Galileo.)

He reported these sightings in his essay The Starry Messenger, which instantly made him the premier scientist in Europe and thus a very important agent of influence for the Venetian Party.  This entire telescope operation had been devised by Paolo Sarpi, who wrote about Galileo as “our mathematician.”  In 1611, a Polish visitor to Venice, Rey, wrote that the “adviser, author, and director” of Galileo’s telescope project had been Father Paolo Sarpi.

Kepler and Galileo were in frequent contact for over thirty years. In 1609, Kepler published his Astronomia Nova, expounding his first and second laws of planetary motion. Nonetheless, in Galileo’s Dialogues on the Two Great World Systems, published in 1633, Kepler is hardly mentioned. At the end, one of the characters says that he is surprised at Kepler for being so “puerile” as to attribute the tides to the attraction of the Moon.

Sarpi’s achievement for Venetian intelligence was to abstract the method of Aristotle from the mass of opinions expressed by Aristotle on this or that particular issue. In this way, sense certainty could be kept as the basis of scientific experiments, and Aristotle’s embarrassingly outdated views on certain natural phenomena could be jettisoned.  In the Art of Thinking Well, Sarpi starts from sense perception and sense certainty. Galileo’s epistemology is identical with that of Sarpi.

For Galileo, the trial before the Inquisition was one of the greatest public relations successes of all time. The gesture of repression against Galileo carried out by the Dominicans of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome established the equation “Galileo = modern experimental science struggling against benighted obscurantism.”

That equation has stood ever since, and this tragic misunderstanding has had terrible consequences for human thought. Lost in the brouhaha about Galileo, is the more relevant fact that Kepler had been condemned by the Inquisition more than a decade before.

During the first half of the 1700s, the most important activities of Venetian intelligence were directed by a salon called the “conversazione filosofica e felice”, which centered around the figure of Antonio Schinella Conti. Conti was a Venetian nobleman, originally a follower of Descartes, who lived for a time in Paris, where he was close to Malebranche. Conti went to London where he became a friend of Sir Isaac Newton.

The British oligarchy praises Newton as the founder of modern science.

But Newton’s real interest was not mathematics or astronomy. It was alchemy. His laboratory at Trinity College, Cambridge was fitted out for alchemy. Here, his friends said, the fires never went out during six weeks of the spring and six weeks of the autumn.

And what is alchemy? What kind of research was Newton doing? His sources were books like the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum of Elias Ashmole, the Rosicrucian leader of British speculative Freemasonry.


In his Opticks, he asks, “Have not the small particles of bodies certain powers, virtues, or forces, by which they act at a distance. … How those attractions may be performed, I do not here consider. What I call attraction may be performed by Impulse, or some other means unknown to me.”


How then did the current myth of Newton the scientist originate? The apotheosis of Newton was arranged by Antonio Conti of Venice. Conti understood that Newton, kook that he was, represented the ideal cult figure for a new obscurantist concoction of deductive-inductive pseudo-mathematical formalism masquerading as science.

Venice needed an English Galileo, and Conti provided the intrigue and the public relations needed to produce one, first through the French networks of Malebranche, and later, Voltaire.


Conti’s agents in this effort included Montesquieu and Voltaire. Conti was also active in intrigues against the German philosopher, scientist, and economist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whom Conti portrayed as a plagiarist of Newton. Conti also influenced Georg Ludwig of Hanover, later King George I of England, against Leibniz.

The Conti conversazione was also sponsored by the Emo and Memmo oligarchical families. Participants included Giammaria Ortes, the Venetian economist who asserted that the carrying capacity of the planet Earth could never exceed three billion persons.

Ortes was a student of the pro-Galileo activist Guido Grandi of Pisa. Ortes applied Newton’s method to the so-called social sciences. Ortes denied the possibility of progress or higher standards of living, supported free trade, opposed dirigist economics, and polemicized against the ideas of the American Revolution.

The ideas of Conti, Ortes, and their network were brought into Great Britain under the supervision of William Petty, the Earl of Shelburne, who was the de facto doge of the British oligarchy around the time of the American Revolution. The Shelburne stable of writers, including Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, and other exponents of British philosophical radicalism, all take their main ideas from Conti and especially Ortes.

Francesco Algarotti, author of a treatise on “Newtonian Science for Ladies,” was another Venetian in the orbit of the Conti conversazione. Algarotti was close to Voltaire, and, along with the French scientist Pierre Louis de Maupertuis, he helped form the homosexual harem around British ally Frederick the Great of Prussia.

The contention in this post was that science is not always free of values and metaphysical overtones [e.g. Newton’s sidetracking was hardly incidental or unusual, given his backers] because it needs to be funded and that immediately brings in elements poised to offer such support and indeed to create new orthodoxies in the name of Science [capital S].

This can be traced back to organizations with specific agendas and though to publicize these involves seeking out little known histories which did not get to be championed at the time [e.g. Galileo’s skewing of the truth], taken as read today, nevertheless this is far more the true state of affairs than to blindly accept that Great Science is the bastion of fundamental truth.

To repeat one central point made by the Schiller Institute above:


This is what we’re up against. Our intellectual, philosophical and scientific heroes are in many cases recipients of misplaced adulation, given the biased nature of what they were proposing. This is why it is so hard for some to think ill of the Frankfurt School, which has been shown to be a nest of vipers. Voltaire, in his time, was one of the worst and the blood of many French people is upon him. Darwin was certainly backed.   Marx was no bright star against a dark sky but was part of a general movement at the time which threw up [used in both senses] the sort of guff he came out with which has blighted society ever since.

It was summed up by the character René Mathis, in Quantum of Solace who said:

But I guess when one is young, it seems very easy to distinguish between right and wrong but as one gets older, it becomes more difficult – the villains and the heroes get all mixed up.

When we don’t know our real enemies and confuse them for icons, then society is in deep trouble, as indeed it has been for quite some time.

5 comments for “Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and the Royal Society

  1. dearieme
    March 11, 2012 at 17:43

    “But Newton’s real interest was not mathematics or astronomy. It was alchemy.” That rather misses the point that he was also the best theoretical physicist in history, perhaps the greatest experimental physicist and one of the greatest half dozen mathematicians. The fact that he could be all these while wasting time on alchemy and crackpot religion does leave one with the distinct impression that he was much the cleverest chap ever recorded.

  2. March 11, 2012 at 18:38

    A cleverly manipulated one.

  3. Rossa
    March 12, 2012 at 08:50


    As astronomy is based on numbers it is a good foundation to have for the practice of alchemy. Newton is known for his interest in astrology, also based on a numerical system, and alchemists often used astrology to decide the best date and time to ‘create’ their concoctions like seeking to turn base elements into gold.

    His membership of secret societies also associated with astrology and occult practices would also follow from this or vice versa.

  4. March 12, 2012 at 08:59

    It certainly would, no argument there or with Dearieme. However, that does not preclude the actual dark mysteries he was exploring, kindly provided by his contemporaries – there’s a whole esoteric literature after all.

    The consensus is that he wasn’t the things claimed, e.g. a member of a lodge but the lodges certainly claim him, plus the disinformation, e.g. Priory of Sion, surround him.

    It might well be that these are just red herrings and that the real thing was the ascendancy of the Royal Society and related organizations, which kicked off the hijacking of the Enlightenment.

    And courtesy AK Haart:

  5. Moggsy
    March 12, 2012 at 09:25

    Galileo was doing ok. Politically in.. and treading on other thinkers toes.

    Until he published this thing where he had a smart character a bit like him saying all the clever stuff and a really dumb character saying all the stupid stuff who seemed a bit like the Pope.

    He would have been ok then if he hadn’t made too many enemies toe treading. So they went to the Pope and said. Did you see this? Don’t you think it’s just a bit too much like you? What will everyone think. You gotta do something about him or you will look weak.

    So the Pope took the rug out from under him to teach him a lesson.

    Useful propaganda for science later on, so history gets revised. Not the first time, or the last. There is plenty of stuff about that “everyone knows” that wasn’t quite that way.

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