| For heliocentrism the article "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down-and-Dirty Mud-Wrassle" by Michael F. Flynn from the Jan/Feb 2013 issue of Analog is pretty good. Here's a scan online [1]. The Church's position at the time was that God made the universe, and if empirical evidence from observing that universe clearly showed that it did not work the way the Church thought the Bible said it worked, then the Church must have misinterpreted the Bible. Galileo's problems came from a combination of several factors, none of which stem from proposing a non-geocentric universe. 1. Galileo's heliocentric theory wasn't actually better at explaining observations than geocentric theories were. Galileo, like the Church believed in an intelligently designed universe created by an all-powerful God. He believed that such a God would choose laws of physics that were beautiful and elegant. Where his heliocentric approach would require something non-beautiful or inelegant to fit observation he dismissed the observations as optical illusions or observational error. It's commonly believed that the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus rule out geocentric theories, but that is not quite correct. They rule out the Ptolemaic system which was the leading geocentric theory, but they do not rule out the Tychonic geocentric system. 2. He had a very big ego. 3. He was an asshole. He was very intolerant and rude to his rivals and to those he considered to be his inferiors. And thanks to that big ego "inferiors" included pretty much everyone else. 4. He was a celebrity who was regularly invited to hang out with the rich and powerful. 5. He had an atrocious sense of politics. He either failed to realize or ignored that some of the people he was an asshole towards had the wealth and power to make his life miserable if he didn't stop being an asshole toward them. [1] https://faculty.fiu.edu/~blissl/Flynngs.pdf |