"And yet it moves" — the words Galileo probably never said

In 1610 Galileo turned a telescope to the night sky and saw what no one had seen: moons circling Jupiter, mountains on the Moon, the phases of Venus. Each discovery made it harder to believe that everything revolved around the Earth.

In 1632 he published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which made the case for a Sun-centred universe a little too convincingly. The following year the Roman Inquisition found him "vehemently suspected of heresy".

Aged 69, he knelt and formally renounced the idea that the Earth moves. Legend says that as he rose he muttered "Eppur si muove" — "and yet it moves". The line first appears in print more than a century later, and historians doubt he ever said it aloud.

His real defiance was the work he kept doing. Under house arrest at his villa in Arcetri, going blind, he wrote Two New Sciences, laying foundations for the physics of motion. The manuscript was smuggled out and published in Leiden in 1638.

Galileo died in 1642, still a prisoner. In 1992 Pope John Paul II formally acknowledged the errors of the theologians who condemned him. The Earth had kept moving the whole time.