In 1610, Galileo Galilei turned a new invention called a telescope toward the sky at night. What he saw stunned him -- stars never before seen by a human eye, and craters and mountains on a moon believed to be as smooth as a pearl. When Galileo turned his instrument toward Jupiter, he discovered the most astonishing sight of all -- that faint pinpricks of light never before seen around the vast planet were moving, obviously in orbit . This observation provided powerful evidence that Nicolaus Copernicus was right -- that the Earth and the planets were not shiny, smooth spheres circling a stationary Earth, which was holy doctrine at the time. If previously unknown moons could circle a planet that supposedly circled the Earth, then perhaps the Earth itself was moving around the sun. For weeks after his sighting, and the publication of an instant best seller about the moons, Galileo proudly offered the prominent citizens of Florence and other Renaissance cities a peek into his telescope. Everyone peered into the heavens and was astonished -- except for certain Church officials. They refused to even look, lest their observation contradict Church dogma. Now, with two days to go before the election, talk of God, genes and of ideology versus empiricism resounds in a political season in which science has become as much a hot-button issue as it was in Galileo’s day.
