Galileo had a tough job also

At COFES, we had a stimulating evening twenty miles out in the desert from downtown Phoenix, amongst giant saguaro cactus and a few scraggly sagebrush, for a kickback cowboy dinner -- steak, pork 'n beans, corn on the cob (not sure where that comes from for cowboys).  And music, with banjos played by beer-gut cowboys with big hats, alligator boots, and chaps.  Great fun.

And then, outside, there were two telescopes.  One, a 6 inch affair, was trained on Saturn; the other, at 4 inches, on the half-full moon.  The night had intermittent wispy clouds, so the two objects occasionally went out of view, which occasioned a lot of sidebar conversation.

The stimulating one for me was to speculate on Galileo's first thoughts when he saw Saturn's rings.  Did he say, "Whoa, shit, what is THAT?" or words to that effect?  Probably the first human to ever see such a thing, he had to gasp in some surprise, and probably sit down to ponder just what he'd found.

I mean, like, what reference Wikipedia entree could he look under?  And who could he tell?  He was already in the doghouse for all sorts of claims that the Queen found distasteful.  This didn't augur well.

Galileo, among others, had been experimenting with telescopes for some time.  He had found the phases of Venus, effectively overthrowing the Ptolemian system for the Copernican view -- the two raging debates at the time (geocentric vs. heliocentric), he'd described the craters and mountains of the moon in opposition to other learned astronomers of the day, and he'd already found the Milky Way was myriads of stars.  But the rings of Saturn -- he called them "appendages" -- didn't fit anything he'd seen.

He was already in jeopardy for his unorthodox views, though years from the inquisition confrontation.  So his report of the Saturn story was in a letter to the Queen rather than a book, which had been his preferred style.  He of course published the letter, kind of a brochure or monograph if you will.   Skirting the issue, some might say.

Forty years after his original works, eight years after the Inquisition put him under house arrest for the rest of his life, he did the opus scientific work that, much later, Einstein would say "puts him in first place" among theoretical physicists.

Being first is sometimes awkward