Associate Professor Ruth Barton of The University of Auckland
When Galileo turned his telescope to the stars he saw spots on the sun, mountains on the moon, and moons about Jupiter. The moons of Jupiter, he wrote, proved the glory of the Medici name (and this gained him the position of mathematician and philosopher at the Medici court), but did they prove the Copernican theory that the Earth moved in circles around the Sun as Galileo claimed? (Recorded in Hamilton)