Galileo

Palo Alto, California -- According to schoolbook an common-culture legend, the Vatican, in 1633, forced Galileo to renounce the theories which put the sun instead of the earth at the center of the universe, presumably because demoting mankind from the central position was contrary to scripture as the church interpreted it. In his moment of humiliation, Galileo is said to have turned aside and muttered, ''eppur se muove,'' which can be translated as ''nevertheless,''...

Earle Havens can almost hear their voices. Each time Havens steps inside the George Peabody Library, he senses the muted exclamations, the murmured back-and-forth of a conversation that's been going on now for more than two millennia. In one corner, there's a treatise from the third century B.C. in which Aristarchus of Samos estimated the distances between the sun, moon and earth. Across the room is an extremely rare unbound volume of Copernicus' "Revolution of the Celestial Spheres," in which the 15th-century astronomer advanced the then-heretical notion that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

ROME -- More than 350 years after the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo for teaching that the Earth moved around the sun, Pope John Paul II is poised to rectify one of the Inquisition's most infamous wrongs.With a formal statement at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences today, Vatican officials said the pope will formally close a 13-year investigation into the church's condemnation of Galileo in 1633.The condemnation, which forced the astronomer and physicist to recant his discoveries, led to Galileo's house arrest for eight years before his death in 1642 at the age of 77.The dispute between the church and Galileo has long stood as one of history's great emblems of conflict between reason and dogma, science and faith.

Did you know that Orioles radio play-by-play man Joe Angel was the quarterback at Galileo (Calif.) High, where he used to hand off to a running back named O.J. Simpson? Angel inherited a 12-game losing streak, which reached 21 before Galileo won a game. Maybe it took Angel that long to figure out he just needed to hand the ball to Simpson. Speaking of Orioles broadcasters, Buck Martinez was part of Toronto's No. 1 Web gem on ESPN. In 1985, Martinez's leg was broken and ankle dislocated on a home plate collision with the Seattle Mariners' Phil Bradley.

PASADENA, Calif. -- The latest attempt to free the stuck antenna on the Jupiter-bound Galileo spacecraft has failed, placing the $1.4 billion mission in jeopardy.Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here had hoped to use the coldness of space to chill and shrink part of the antenna, thus freeing three stuck ribs, but by yesterday morning it had become clear that the strategy had not worked."It's a disappointment," said project manager William O'Neil, but he said that the technique will be tried again in December when Galileo will be even farther from the sun -- and thus colder -- than it is now.The $3.7 million gold-plated antenna is designed to open like an inverted umbrella, and it must be fully opened for Galileo to send back the thousands of photographs and reams of scientific data it is to collect during a two-year tour of Jupiter and its moons beginning in 1995.

In its successful plunge into the crushing Jovian depths last month, a capsule from the Galileo spacecraft survived for 57 minutes to transmit a wealth of data from the first view inside the atmosphere of Jupiter or any of the giant gaseous planets.It was time enough to jolt scientists with surprises about the planet's clouds, winds, water and chemical composition and second thoughts about their own theories of planetary formation.Scientists reported yesterday that Jupiter appeared to have much less water than expected, clearer skies, less lightning but fierce atmospheric turbulence, winds that grow stronger at depths, and lower than expected levels of helium, neon and some heavy elements like carbon, oxygen and sulfur.

One of the finest and most disturbing scenes in Center Stage's production of Bertolt Brecht's "Galileo" takes place during a masked ball at a cardinal's home in Rome. Galileo has just been told that the Catholic Church wants him to abandon his heretical studies claiming the Earth revolves around the sun."Let us replace our masks," says one of the cardinals when the discussion is over. Then he notices, "Poor Galileo hasn't got one."In the restrictive 17th-century Italy of Brecht's play, the truth is often hidden, or suppressed, behind the vestments of the Church.

DALLAS -- The Galileo spacecraft just keeps going and going, despite a crippled antenna.Two years after the probe started exploring Jupiter and its moons, NASA has decided to extend the Galileo mission for another 24 months."

NEW YORK - Cendant Corp. agreed yesterday to acquire Galileo International Inc. for $3.5 billion in stock, cash and assumed debt to expand its travel reservation business. The franchiser of the Avis car-rental business and the Days Inn hotel chain will pay $33 in stock and cash for each Galileo share, a 16 percent premium to the share price on June 5, the day before the companies said they were in talks. Cendant also will assume about $600 million of the electronic travel reservation service's debt.

WASHINGTON - Farewell, Galileo. After eight years surveying Jupiter and its moons, NASA is giving its pioneering Galileo spacecraft an unusual but fitting send-off by steering it on a suicide course for the giant gas planet whose mysteries it helped unravel. The 2 1/2 -ton probe will plunge into the thick Jovian atmosphere today at 3:49 p.m. Eastern time, disintegrating moments later from the friction generated by its 108,000-mph free-fall. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who have planned Galileo's demise for more than two years, say the craft's fuel tanks are nearly dry and its radiation-fried electronics are faltering.

What is it about evolution? Over the centuries, there have been many scientific findings that have differed from religious beliefs, causing all sorts of controversy. But evidence accumulated and the faithful came around, agreeing with near-unanimity that the Earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa, or that people with mental illnesses were not possessed by demons. That has not happened with evolution. Though in the century and a half since the publication of The Origin of Species virtually every biologist has concluded that Darwin got it essentially right, many still refuse to agree.

IT MUST BE lonely out there, by Jupiter. For nearly eight years now, a plucky little spaceship that weighs no more than a small car has been doing its rounds in the lee of the largest planet. It took the craft six years before that just to get out there. Fourteen years of service altogether -- longer than a lot of Chevrolets manage -- without a tune-up, a valve job or even a refueling. Today it ends, as Galileo streaks toward a fiery death in the Jovian atmosphere, at a sprightly 108,000 miles an hour.

WASHINGTON - Farewell, Galileo. After eight years surveying Jupiter and its moons, NASA is giving its pioneering Galileo spacecraft an unusual but fitting send-off by steering it on a suicide course for the giant gas planet whose mysteries it helped unravel. The 2 1/2 -ton probe will plunge into the thick Jovian atmosphere today at 3:49 p.m. Eastern time, disintegrating moments later from the friction generated by its 108,000-mph free-fall. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who have planned Galileo's demise for more than two years, say the craft's fuel tanks are nearly dry and its radiation-fried electronics are faltering.

NEW YORK - Cendant Corp. agreed yesterday to acquire Galileo International Inc. for $3.5 billion in stock, cash and assumed debt to expand its travel reservation business. The franchiser of the Avis car-rental business and the Days Inn hotel chain will pay $33 in stock and cash for each Galileo share, a 16 percent premium to the share price on June 5, the day before the companies said they were in talks. Cendant also will assume about $600 million of the electronic travel reservation service's debt.

WASHINGTON -- John Mankins' government career can be traced through the drawings on his office wall: a rocket whizzing from an Earth-based slingshot into outer space, a glittering moon colony, a giant bug-like contraption fueling a spacecraft in interstellar darkness.Crazy ideas? Not to Mankins. In his job at NASA, he is paid to come up with concepts so far-out they sometimes only get laughed at. Consider him one of NASA's sci-fi guys."I try to be reasonably conservative with my ideas," Mankins says, looking as though he hasjust come through a brainstorm, with his rumpled hair and government ID dangling askew.

DALLAS -- The Galileo spacecraft just keeps going and going, despite a crippled antenna.Two years after the probe started exploring Jupiter and its moons, NASA has decided to extend the Galileo mission for another 24 months."

Audiences at Center Stage's production of Bertolt Brecht's "Galileo" will find something different in the program. For the first time, the theater is dedicating a production to an individual.That individual is Baltimorean T. Edward Hambleton, who produced the first American production of "Galileo" in 1947. The production starred Charles Laughton, who was also responsible for the English language version -- the one Center Stage is using."I don't think people have any idea of how large his career has been in the American theater," Center Stage artistic director Irene Lewis says of Hambleton, 85, who is regarded as a pioneer of off-Broadway theater.

A half-billion miles from Earth, a tiny spacecraft is racing toward a historic and fiery rendezvous with the planet Jupiter, now far beyond the sun in the daytime sky.About 5 p.m. Thursday, a 747-pound, bullet-shaped capsule packed with seven scientific instruments, a radio and a parachute will plunge into Jupiter's atmosphere. Accelerated by gravity, it will reach speeds faster than any man-made object has ever flown.Back on Earth, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Today in history: Feb. 13In 1542, the fifth wife of England's King Henry VIII, Catherine Howard, was executed for adultery.In 1633, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome for trial before the Inquisition.In 1635, the oldest public school in the United States, the Boston Public Latin School, was founded.In 1914, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, known as ASCAP, was founded in New York.In 1935, a jury in Flemington, N.J., found Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of first-degree murder in the kidnap-death of the infant son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh.

YOUR EDITORIAL of Oct. 26 asserts that Galileo was condemned because he refused to ''recant his teachings that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, as the church had taught.''This interpretation distorts the historical record by buying into (whether or not consciously) the modern notion that religion stands as a barrier to science and progress.The conventional interpretation, which parallels the ''Christopher-Columbus-challenging-the-Flat-Earth-Believers''story, is equally dramatic, compelling and historically inaccurate.