On June 22, 1633, Galileo Galilei knelt before the Roman Inquisition and renounced the truth he'd discovered with his own telescope: that the Earth orbits the Sun. The Church sentenced him to house arrest for life. Nearly 360 years later, the Vatican formally acknowledged it had been wrong. Today it runs its own astronomical observatory — and the current Pope holds a mathematics degree. This episode of Sidequests traces the full journey from Galileo's trial to the modern Vatican's embrace of science, marking the anniversary of one of history's most consequential — and most reversed — institutional judgments.
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