Galileo wasn't the problem

... but there was a problem, in Catholic parts of Europe. This problem last month received a timespan: about AD 1550-1725. Matías Cabello - going from er, Wiki - blames the Counter-Reformation. Galileo sits in the early 1600s when the Catholic decline was reversing. But not well and not consistently.

After AD 1725 the Catholic nations start catching up again. One might even take some solace in the differential. But up to 1850, the lines still hadn't caught up. I take it that Rhine Germany, north Italy, and France were pulling most of this freight.

As Whyvert notes (as a lot of us Catholics note) what about the Protties huh? They weren't pro-science! (Some still aren't.) Well... yeah, but the Reform was also disorganised; so that if some nerd didn't feel welcome in Muenster he might try Uppsala, or even London.

Incumbent upon this blog is to remind its readers that mathematics often thrives where "science" is limited. A Calvinist or, in the Catholic world, a Jansenist can make great strides in pure mathematics - Blaise Pascal being the obvious contemporary example.

I expect that the more-practical Mediterranean Europeans, if they wanted to get their nerd on, had a whole New World to explore. Many many churchmen and lay Catholics roamed Mesoamerica taking notes. Wiki won't count these natural-historians, anthropologists, and linguists as "scientists" because... they weren't, not exactly. But much scientody wouldn't be possible today without their attention to detail.

Also of no matter to Wiki would be Catholic engineers, like those building the Spanish and Portuguese fleets. Again: maybe they shouldn't count, either.

I'll float that the other problem with the sixteenth-century Holy Office, beyond having the power, is that its main target was autism, Pascal notwithstanding. Could a Newton thrive in seventeenth-century Rome? Like Galileo or (ugh) Bruno, he'd want to branch into theology. The Inquisition couldn't let him; the Inquisition had the power to stop him. But the Inquisition would also stop all the good he was doing. I don't care about Bruno but I do wish we'd done better with Galileo. In England by contrast as long as Newton was profitably hanging counterfeiters, everyone allowed to him his hobbies.