Quite Interesting @qikipedia is the Twitter account of the highly successful British television comedy panel game QI (Quite Interesting). For those who are not aficionados of this piece of modern television culture it is described on Wikipedia thus:

The format of the show focuses on Davies and three other guest panelists answering questions that are extremely obscure, making it unlikely that the correct answer will be given. To compensate, the panelists are awarded points not only for the right answer, but also for interesting ones, regardless of whether they are right or even relate to the original question, while points are deducted for “answers which are not only wrong, but pathetically obvious”– typically answers that are generally believed to be true but in fact are misconceptions. These answers, referred to as “forfeits”, are usually indicated by a loud klaxon and alarm bell, flashing lights, and the incorrect answer being flashed on the video screens behind the panelists. [my emphasis]

Given the section that I have highlighted above the Twitter account should have points deducted to the sounds of a loud klaxon and an alarm bell accompanied by flashing lights for having tweeted the following on 12 September

It wasn’t until 1992 that the Catholic Church finally admitted that Galileo’s views on the solar system were correct – @qikipedia

This is of course complete rubbish. In what follows I will give a brief summary of the Catholic Church’s ban on heliocentrism, as propagated by Galileo amongst others.

The initial ban on propagating heliocentrism as a proven theory, one could still present it as a hypothetical one, was issued by the Inquisition in 1616. Interestingly whilst the books of Kepler and Maestlin, for example, were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, Copernicus’ De revolutionibus was not but merely banned temporarily until corrected, which took place surprisingly rapidly; correction meaning the removal of the very few passages where heliocentricity is presented as a fact. By 1621 De revolutionibus was back in circulation for Catholic astronomers. Galileo’s Dialogo was placed on the Index following his trial in 1632.

Books openly espousing heliocentricity as a true fact, which was more that the science of the time could deliver, were placed on the Index by the Catholic Church, so all good Catholics immediately dropped the subject? Well no actually. The ban had surprising little effect outside of Italy. Within Italy, astronomers kept their heads below the parapet for a couple of decades but outside of Italy things were very different. Protestant countries, naturally, totally ignored the ban and even astronomers in Catholic countries on the whole took very little notice of it. The one notable exception was René Descartes who dropped plans to publish his book Le Monde, ou Traite de la lumiere in 1633, which contained his views supporting heliocentricity, the full text only appearing posthumously in 1677. Quite why he did so was not very clear but it is thought that he did it out of respect to his Jesuit teachers. However, Descartes remained the exception. Galileo’s offending Dialogo quickly appeared in a ‘pirate’ edition, translated into Latin in the Netherlands, where later his Discorsi, would also be published. I say pirate but Galileo was well aware of the publication, which had his blessing, but officially knew nothing about it.

Within Italy once the dust had settled Catholic astronomers began to publish books on heliocentricity that opened with some sort of nod in the direction of the Church along the lines of, “The Holy Mother Church has in its wisdom condemned heliocentricity as contrary to Holy Scripture…” but then continued something like this “…however it is an interesting hypothetical mathematical model, which we will now discuss.” This face saving trick was accepted by the Church and everybody was happy. By the early eighteenth century almost all astronomers in Italy, with the exception of some Jesuits, were following this course.

In 1758 the ball game changed again as the then Pope basically dropped the ban on heliocentricity, although this was done informally and the formal prohibition stayed in place. The publication of a complete works of Galileo was even permitted with a suitable preface to the Dialogo pointing out its faults. From this time on Catholic astronomers were quite free to propagate a factual heliocentricity in their publications.

This was the situation up till 1820 when an over zealous Master of the Sacred Palace (the Church’s chief censor), Fillipo Anfossi, refused to licence a book containing a factual account of heliocentricity by Giuseppe Settele. Settele appealed directly to the Pope and after deliberations the ban on heliocentricity was formally lifted by the Church in 1821. The next edition of the Index, which didn’t appear until 1835, no longer contained books on heliocentricity. Anfossi and Settele only feature in the history of science because of this incidence.

So to summarise, the Church only banned factual claims for the heliocentric system but not hypothetical statements about it, so this is how Catholic astronomer got around the ban. In 1758 the Pope informally lifted the ban clearing the way for Catholic astronomers to write freely about it. In 1821 the ban was formally lifted and in 1835 books on heliocentricity were removed from the Index, so where did QI get their date of 1992 from?

In 1981 the Church constituted the Pontifical Interdisciplinary Study Commission to re-examine the Galileo trial, which came to rather wishy-washy conclusions. In 1992 the Pope held a speech formally closing the commission and saying that the whole affair had been rather unfortunate and that the Church had been probably wrong to prosecute Galileo.