From the introduction: The Trial of Galileo examines one of humankind’s greatest intellectual confrontations. At the simplest level, the trial sought to resolve whether the Sun moved around a stationery Earth, or vice versa, a debate that originated among the ancient Greeks. Aristotle, however, transformed the geocentric model into a comprehensive cosmological system, incorporating motion physics, astronomy, and theories of matter. Whether his was the first scientific paradigm is open to dispute; its enduring impact on scientific thinking, however, is not.