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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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.

Yes. The idea that he was a martyr for science, and was burned because his ideas contradicted the dogmas of an evil obscurantist Church, is popular in Protestant countries -- but seems to be incorrect.  According to a SciAm article I read many years ago, the Church was upset because he was a popular figure in European courts, and was using his astronomical ideas to justify the thesis that the Pope should not meddle in local politics.

For instance, he argued that God would not have created whole planets only to leave them deserted.  Therefore, the planets must be inhabited by people, too, But then those people too would have needed redemption from their Original Sins.  Therefore Jesus must have appeared on them too, as He did here on Earth.  Therefore each of those planets must have its own Church.  And therefore its own Pope.  And therefore there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of multiple Popes...

Or, imagine a sphere  in a dark room with only one candle.  If the candle is too close of the sphere, it will illuminate only a small area.  As the candle is pulled away, the portion that is illuminated becomes bigger and bigger.  Eventually, if the candle is far enough, the whole sphere will be in its light. [Yes, I know.]  Likewise, the farther the Pope keeps from worldly affairs, the more effective he will be at his sacred mission of spreading the Light of Christianity all over the world...

Gaillieo's use of Biblical evidence [...] was the crux of his trial

Here again, the popular story seems to be rather incorrect.  He did indeed venture into theological disputes to argue that the heliocentric view did not contradict the Bible; and that may have contributed to his troubles.  

But another major reason was that he was all thumbs at politics and psychology, and ended up offending many powerful people in the Church (probably including the Pope, who had  been his personal friend when he was still a Cardinal) by implying that they were idiots for not believing heliocentrism and his discoveries.  Among those people were the astronomers of the Vatican Observatory, until then considered the best in the world.  

One of Galileo's books has a dialogue between three people about various things, including the cosmos; and the character who tries to defend the wrong popular ideas, including geocentrism, is called Simplicius -- "simpleton". 

And another contributing factor apparently was the Church still remembering Giordano Bruno and his use of astronomy to justify rebellion against the Church's political power. 

the analysis that the tides were caused by the oceans sloshing during the Earth's transit

That is a great example, but maybe not of what was intended.

Some obscure monk had published a pamphlet in which he argued that the tides were caused by attraction by the Moon.  Some 50 years before Newton's Principia. 

Galileo wrote a scathing rebuttal where he dismissed the idea as preposterous, and instead proposed his own idea that the tides were caused by the rotation of the Earth, "like water sloshes in the tank barges that take drinking water to Venice when they make a turn"...

All the best, --stolfi