Blindness as Galileo's Demise

In Galileo the play as well as in his life, mainly physical and metaphorical blindness have a large role. Metaphorically, people of the community are blind to Galileo and the sciences because the do not want to see or believe anything other than the church. Also in this time, the church and God were the only things used for reasoning and usually the Bible or word of mouth was used as proof. When Galileo came along it was absolutely radical to think that there was anything of the science nature.
Galileo was an Italian scientist who designed the basic laws of falling bodies, which although was verified by careful and precise measurements, was not believed by much of the surrounding community. He also spent much of his efforts working with and trying to decipher different aspects of space and the solar system. He constructed a telescope which he used to study lunar craters, sun spots, and also discovered four moons that revolve around Jupiter, as well as advocated the Copernican cause. Although Galileo continually found new evidence to support his claim, the church and the majority of the public was very against this as it went against everything the Bible and the church had preached. The feeling that many shared was that if God had created humans as His ultimate creation he would have put them in the center of the universe. In 1616 the Church had sent Galileo a formal warning saying that they viewed his theory as a denial of the Christian Doctrine and therefore he stopped publishing anything about his theories or discoveries for the next ten years, even though the Pope had encouraged him to publish he work “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which very openly argued for the Copernican system or theory. At this point after this work was published in 1632, the Church had him tried before the Inquisition accusing him of heresy, and also forced him to relinquish his views and surrender to the Church. For the last eight years of his life Galileo was forced to life under a house arrest, although he continued to write and in 1638 he published his last work which was a compilation of all his physics research and had it published in Germany due to the Inquisition that was still in place in Italy.
Shortly before Galileo’s last work was published, in 1637 he began to loose his eye sight. It is thought that this was largely due to his hand made telescope and also mainly due to the fact that he had stared at the sunspots on the sun for too long and too frequently during his studies. The sunspots along with the way in which the telescope was made damaged his eye and deteriorated his eye sight. This along with his old age lead to him eventually becoming blind. In this case what lead to Galileo’s success also lead to his demise. All of his hard work, observations, and calculations in order to try and explain the solar systems set-up lead to him no longer being able to study, even if it wasn’t for the Inquisition being in place and the Churches ruling. So by the end of Galileo’s life, the metaphorical blindness of the community he lived in being ignorant of his studies as well as not wanting to believe that there was any other explanation for what they had believed and followed for so long resulted in a request to stop his studies. Also his physical blindness finally put his studies and observations to conclude.