Aczel's book agrees that Galileo wasn't really setting out to be heretical as Bruno was - he just got hit by one of the swinging doors of history, when science got politicized as it hadn't been before. Servetus was the other celebrated example of someone who set out to be as offensive as possible.

As Aczel describes it, the consequences were sad. Italy went from being the pioneer mathematical nation in Europe to a scientifically irrelevant backwater. But no individual could have done anything to stop the historical process. It was a bit like the way science is getting politicized in Trump's America, except that the Jesuits were honest men committed to a fundamental mistake rather than a sleazy crime syndicate.

Islam had already been through the same disastrous process centuries before. The Christian world had no way of understanding the precedent.