Imagine waking up tomorrow with the solution to the Voynich Manuscript.

[rikforto]

[Sigh.] There is something known (in French) as the Galileo syndrome. It is not enough to break paradigms to be the new Copernicus/Galileo, you also need to be right.

Gaillieo's use of Biblical evidence and the centrality of the analysis that the tides were caused by the oceans sloshing during the Earth's transit really are great examples of how it's possible to have a correct insight and be wrong from the perspective of arguing it. The former argument was the crux of his trial and the fact the latter argument was wrong a significant piece of why it took so long for heliocentrism to supplant geocentricism. The valid/sound distinction comes for us all.

Giordano Bruno comes to mind too. Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Cosmos reboot had an ill-considered segment about how Bruno was an early rationalist standing up to Church doctrine by arguing the sun was at the center of the solar system. I recall the imagery implying he had been martyred for science and exclaiming at the television. It certainly is remarkable how many of his positions now look like mundane science, for example the existence of other solar systems that could harbor life, but his arguments were from Hermeticism, and the bases for those claims were just as mystical as the Church's, perhaps even more so. The point being, it's easy to argue censoring and executing him was wrong, but there's more to being right than a list of conclusions that sound like other, well-argued conclusions