Poem for Galileo by Antnio Gedeo An attempt to translate from the original in Portuguese by Antnio Dinis Lopes.

Dedicated to those who trust enced by many manifestations annot make the difference in y human activity is prone to nguage is human.) their own minds in absolute and to those who, influ of what C.P.Snow identified as traditional culture, c between bad science and science, forgetting that an be qualified as "bad". (A truly human adjective? La

The context of the following text is a hard right dictatorship backed up by the church. Interestingly enough, many of Galileo's theories are now proven to be incorrect. Unfortunately, yet naturally, due to his natural life-span, and ours, Galileo d idn't live enough to witness his own errors. Errors which nevertheless gave way to (more errors?) theories such as Einstein's relativity. To have a scientific m ind seems therefore to be open continuously to reformulate our own opinions. Let the text begin.

I am looking at your portrait, my old man of Pisa, that portrait of yours who everybody knows, in which your fair head awakens and blooms over a modest piece of cloth. That portrait in the Gallery of the Offices of your old Florence. (No, no, Galileo! I did not say Holly Office. I said Gallery of the Offices.) That portrait in the Gallery of the Offices in ornate Florence.

Do you remember? The Vecchio bridge, the Loggia, the Piazza della Signoria I know I know The sweet banks of the Arno river at the lacklustre hours of melancholy. How I long for those, Galileo Galilei!

Look. Do you know? There in Florence a right hand finger of yours is kept in a reliquary. Word of honour that it is!

How the world goes around! Perhaps there are even people thinking that you have entered the calendar.

I would like to thank you, Galileo, for the brightness of the things you gave me. I, and how many millions of men like me who were enlightened by you, I was going to swear what a nonsense, Galileo!

and I would swear betting my own head without the least hesitation that the bodies fall the faster the heavier they are.

For is it not evident, Galileo? Who believes that a bolder falls as fast as a shirt button or as a beach pebble? Such was the intelligence that God gave us.

I was now recalling, Galileo, that scene in which you were sitting on a stool and had before you a bar of learned men, rigid, wearing toga and hood, looking at you severely. They were all preaching you, that how it was possible that a man of your age and of your condition had become a menace to Humanity

and to Civilization. You, embarrassed and culpable, bit your lips in silence, and examined, full of piety, the impenetrable faces of that line of wise men.

Your eyes used to the observation of satellites and of stars descended from their heights and landed, like bewildered birds I almost can seem them

on the pregnant faces of those most reverend creatures. And you kept saying yes to all, yes sir, that all was exactly as their highnesses desired, and you would say that the Sun was squared and the Moon pentagonal and that the stars danced and sang hymns to the universal harmony at midnight. And you avowed that you would never repeat, not even to yourself, in the own intimacy of your thoughts, free and calm, those abominable heresies you taught and described for the eternal damnation of your soul. O Galileo! Your learned judges, great lords of this tiny world, hardly know that as they were, stiff on their armchairs, were running and rolling through space at thirty kilometres per second. You were the one who knew, Galileo Galilei.

Hence your merciful eyes, hence your heart filled with compassion, compassion for those men who do not need to suffer, fortunate men whom God freed from searching for the truth.

Hence, stoically, meekly, your resistance to all tortures, to all anguishes, to all hindrances, while they, from the height of their inaccessible heights, came falling down, falling, falling, falling, always falling, and always, uninterruptedly, in the direct reason of the square of the times.