(Isaac Newton was born in the year that Galileo died. That was coincidence, but in hindsight it seemed to presage England’s rise to scientific preeminence and Italy’s long drift to mediocrity. What was not coincidence was that seventeenth-century England welcomed science, on the grounds that science supported religion, and thrived; and seventeenth-century Italy feared science, on the grounds that science undermined religion, and decayed.)
