The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

by Arthur Koestler

Harriot seems to have been the first to observe them, but Fabricius was the first to publish, and Scheiner the second. Harriot, Fabricius, and Scheiner neither knew of the others’ parallel discovery, nor did they raise any particular claim to priority. Thus Galileo’s claim was untenable, firstly because Fabricius and Scheiner had been first to publish the discovery, and secondly because he could name no witnesses, or correspondents, to prove it – yet we remember how careful he was to protect his priority claims on previous occasions, by immediately sending out messages in anagram form. But Galileo had come to regard telescopic discoveries as his exclusive monopoly – as he himself stated on a later occasion: You cannot help it, Mr Sarsi, that it was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else. This is the truth which neither malice nor envy can suppress.7 By his specious priority claim over the sunspots, followed by disguised attacks on Father Scheiner, Galileo had made the first enemy among the Jesuit astronomers, and started the fatal process which in the end would turn the Order against him.