back to article Did the Vatican suppress hidden 'Galileo Cryptogram'?

An Australian boffin says that the planet Neptune may have actually been discovered 234 years earlier than had been thought, by the famed Renaissance Italian astronomer and scientist Galileo Galilei - who was persecuted by the Inquisition for his "heretical" astronomy research. Professor David Jamieson of Melbourne Uni says that …

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  1. disgruntled yank

    soon to be a major motion picture

    I guess you could call it "The Neptune Adventure" and throw in a capsized ship.

  2. Dave Barnhart

    A MOvie

    Indiana Jones and the Cryptogram Conspiracy

  3. Julian I-Do-Stuff
    Headmaster

    Angles? No meds?

    Unrenowned pedant Julian qui fait choses, wrinkled his aesthetic nose: "17th century boffinry all-rounder, " he read - surely some mistake. A deliberate mistake. Obviously they meant "boffinous". A clue!

    [But I love the idea of a"hidden coded message" that is "yet to be discovered." A thousand years would not be too long to wait for another Dan Brown epic.]

  4. Chris Collins

    which one?

    We talking Zurer or Tatou? Zurer has a bit of a man face, I much prefer Amelie.

  5. TeeCee Gold badge
    Coat

    Other news.

    Isaac Newton discovered faster-than-light travel. Many of the pictures he appears in show him wearing a pleated cravat, which proves that he understood the concepts behind the folding of space required and the details are in an encrypted message yet to be discovered.

    Sacha Baron Cohen is actually a reincarnation of Queen Victoria. The Bruno character is obviously an illustration of his love for Price Albert and the proof is in an encrypted message yet to be discovered.

    Dan Brown is an artificial, vatgrown construct created from a fusion of the DNA of Galileo and the Antichrist. There's a teastain on page 24 of my copy of "The Da Vinci code" which proves it and a full description of the process used is in an encrypted message yet to be discovered.

    Bloody easy this. Do lecture tours pay well?

  6. Jonathan Richards 1
    Go

    Robert Hooke springs to mind

    In 1675, to fill in space, he wrote: ceiiinosssttuu.

    Obvious, when you think about it.

  7. Winkypop Silver badge
    Flame

    Melbourne Uni

    Probably smoking something...

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    Flying pigs?

    " that proof for this theory may lie within a hidden coded message yet to be discovered."

    So a coded message to prove his theory.

    There is also a coded message about flying pigs....

  9. Dave Walker
    Coat

    Pluto Can't Drink...

    Because he is a *Minor* planet. A true planet, but must watch enviously at his eight buddies the Terrestrials and Gassy's have a cold one on Friday night.

    And Saturn keeps leaving his ring on the bar. Trying to play single maybe?

  10. Geoff Mackenzie

    I found the message!

    I'll leave a coded message describing where it is. Hopefully someone finds it soon.

    hlfaksdjhfkas

    That's not it.

  11. Tom 7

    "while probing the Jovian moons"

    So here's a guy looking at Jupiters moons that look like stars that move and finds an object that looks like a star near Jupiters moons that moves and immediately jumps to the conclusion its another planet??

    Sorry mate Galileo wasnt some dumb astro prof in need of funding. He would have thought it was another jovian moon until he had some contrary EVIDENCE!

  12. John Savard

    As for Neptune

    Galileo's prediscovery observation of Neptune was noted some time back in an article by Stillman Drake in Scientific American, and a paper by Charles T. Kowal, discoverer of Chiron, in Nature. Also, the practise of establishing priority for a discovery by publishing an anagram of it before one was ready to reveal the discovery, after having more solidly confirmed it, was not simply a habit of Galileo's, but was a standard practise followed by a number of scientists in that era.

  13. Luther Blissett

    @Julian I-Do-Stuff

    > I love the idea of a"hidden coded message" that is "yet to be discovered."

    Me too. I especially love the idea of seeing the hidden fossil evidence yet to be discovered which proves, rather than insinuates, Darwinism. And finding a big black hole in space is also mind-warping. Were this to happen, some might even say they would be hidden coded messages from God! But the old time fossils are good enough for me.

  14. Joe Harrison
    Alien

    Cue spooky music

    According to this story Galileo was studying Jupiter when he made his accidental discovery of Neptune - both planets had to be in the exact same bit of sky otherwise he would not have noticed. A look at the ephemeris here does indeed show that Jupiter was conjunct Neptune in 1613 so that part of the the story would make sense.

    http://www.astro.com/swisseph/ae/1600/ae_1613.pdf

    Jupiter and Neptune have huge orbits so this conjunction is fairly rare but by staggering coincidence (or not) is also occurring today 10 July 2009

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    heh

    Galileo was even more of a genius than we thought. Not only did he discover Neptune, but he had the foresight to hide this knowledge from the Church. Why was that genius? Well, we've always been told that "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

    @Tom7:

    Uhh, Galileo would have recognized the difference between the motion of a star, a moon of Jupiter, and a planet.

    Paris, because she thinks she's a star as well, but she's just an orbiting body to stare at.

  16. Bill Fresher

    I don't understand

    Why can't stars move?

  17. Richard 102

    Stars do move

    But they are such distances that it takes a good bit of meticulous observation to measure it.

    As previously noted, it was noted some years ago that Galileo had observed Neptune during his observations of Jupiter's moons in 1613. This was tracked down because Neptune, discovered in 1846, will not have completed a full orbit since its discovery until late 2010/early 2011. Any question of Neptune's orbit being changed by a Planet X is fuzzy, because it's not so clear-cut how to determine how an orbit is being altered when you only have one orbit observed. When it was realized that Galileo might have observed it, the researchers went back to his notebook, and there it was! But it wasn't quite where it should have been. Galileo was a pretty careful observer, careful enough to denote where star-like Neptune would have been relative to the four large moons of Jupiter.

  18. anarchic-teapot

    @Bill Fresher

    It's something to do with their contracts tying them to their studios for a certain number of years, I think.

  19. Carlo Graziani

    Out Of Character

    Something seems wrong here. If Galileo did realize that he had discovered a new planet, it seems out of character not to announce the discovery, and name the planet after another Medici. This was his stock in trade, it's how he secured his patronage and increased his stipend. Each discovery he made he cannily traded in for enhanced prestige and economic security. Why he would break the pattern with a new planet --- which would not have altered the terms Copernican debate, since unlike the Jovian moons or the phases of Venus it could easily be accomodated in the Ptolemaic system --- is difficult to understand, to put it mildly.

  20. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    Re: Why can't stars move?

    They do, and its called "proper motion", but they are so much further away than planets that the change in (angular) position is almost imperceptible. Neptune is a few light hours away, but the nearest star is a few light years away, which is about 10000 times further.

  21. Joe Zeff
    FAIL

    Extraodinary claims

    Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, and this claim is extraordinary indeed. Not only did Galileo observe Neptune (not unreasonable) but he saw that it moved from day to day and realized that this meant that it was a planet, not a star. And what evidence do we have that he made the connection? "Yet to be discovered." In other words, NONE. No, my friends, this is nothing but an academic looking for attention by pulling the wool over the public's eyes. Move along, move along, nothing to see.

  22. Steve 18

    @ Bill

    Mainly it's because of the pins that hold them to the big black curtain.

  23. alberto ortiz

    What don't you understand?

    Stars do move. But since they are so far away, they might as well not in your life time. If you pay really close attention you might notice a slight deviation from its initial position but probably not something big enough to be noticed in just a couple of weeks.

    Albert

  24. Anonymous John

    @ I don't understand #

    They can and they do. But they are so far away that you can't tell without precise measurement over a long period of time.

    The planets are much nearest and orbit the sun. Fast enough that their positions in the sky change from day to day.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Bill Fresher

    Hello,

    Stars do move, just not as much as planets or moons do in our own solar system (relative to the Earth). If you look at a patch of sky through a telescope over a few nights and your pointed in the right direction, planets and the moons around those planets will change position. However, a star will not change position by nearly as much because it is much further away. You would need to observe stars for a longer period before they seem move because of the distance.

    Hope that helps.

  26. Kanhef

    @Jonathan Richards

    Not obvious to me... :(

    The Internet Anagram Server does find some nice possibilities, including "sinuous ice tits", "cutie sins, I oust", and "`tis I, Incestuous".

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @ Joe Zeff

    Absolutely.

    Until we have evidence that Galileo described Neptune as a planet, then the first person to observe *and recognise it as such* was Johann Galle in 1846. We still credit William Herschel with discovering Uranus even though it had been recorded in observations as far back at the late 17th Century, but always marked as a star.

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    @Luther Blissett

    "Me too. I especially love the idea of seeing the hidden fossil evidence yet to be discovered which proves, rather than insinuates, Darwinism."

    Darwinism? What be that? You mean evolution? It's been observed in the lab.

    I think you have a little shibboleth on the side of your mouth.

  29. Frumious Bandersnatch

    @Jonathan Richards

    uerily, I see...

    (ut tensio sic vis, for anyone who's bothered, Latin using the same letter for u and v)

  30. Downward

    @Jonathan Richards

    Coitus sin suite?

    Come one, tell us. There's no R, which means no Microscope, Saturn, rings, or celluar.

  31. Anonymous John

    @ Extraodinary claims

    Joe.

    Planet is from the Latin for "wandering star", and anything that didn't move was a fixed star.

    And the difference has ben known for thousands of years. We've been navigating by the stars for most if not all of recorded history. The night sky was known to everyone.

    Jf Galileo did know that Neptune moved (and this hasn't yet been proved), he would certainly have known what it meant.

  32. Graham Marsden
    FAIL

    LOBLOSCK!

    There's a cryptogram for you...

  33. Andus McCoatover

    William Herschel

    Think it was his sister, Caroline - comet-watcher-extroadinaire - that may have pushed him in the general direction.

    Oh, my two first-born kids have "Herschel" as a middle name. Got the drift?

    (OK, my last child's surname is Madetoja, but that's another story).

  34. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Another Vatican hit piece?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/fail_32.png After Lewis Page, the writer of this article finally graduates from high school and then goes to college to learn how to write an article, he may discover what anybody with an education can easily find with a little research...that the church has been operating its own astronomical observatories (after establishing the Gregorian Calendar in the 1500s), has never suppressed anybody (including Galileo) for discovering anything. Galileo, who was supported by the church was placed under house arrest for publishing the book of his discoveries, in Germany, after the church had asked him to publish it in parts... He was arrested for disobedience. Obedience is a concept almost impossible for the modern western mind to grasp, but it was the norm in Galileo's time.

  35. Emilio Desalvo

    The secret society...

    Could be the Mickey Mouse Club?

  36. Dr Patrick J R Harkin
    Alert

    YOU STUPID IDIOTS!

    You've just given Dan Brown a plot for another novel!

  37. Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
    Paris Hilton

    @Mike Richards

    I would like to point out that William Herschel has been nowhere near my anus.

    Paris, 'cos the Vatican wouldn't approve of her either (and 'cos I said 'anus' and Kanhef said 'ice tits'), should be a joke alert really.... :-)

  38. Richard Russell
    Badgers

    @Bill Fresher

    I fear your mentors have missed your point. Everything moves but your point, surely, was that stars don't appear to move while planets do.

    Why not? Because the movement you're probably thinking of here is the turning of the earth, which makes the whole caboodle out there seem to spin around us (or conversely, the caboodle spins around us making it appear that the earth revolves), but the stars, belonging as they do to the way yonder, have done nothing of significance in the meantime except shine their arses off and so appear in the same place every time we spin completely round, whereas the busy planets have in the meantime hurried on their busy way around the sun, just as we are doing, only you can't see that bit so easily.

    On second thoughts, just listen to your mentors.

  39. Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
    Coat

    @Bill Fresher

    The stars don't move because there are quite comfortable in their homes in Beverley Hills, except during the bush fires

    Paris, I've seen her move (well parts of her)

    On second thoughts, I'll just get my coat

  40. Stephen Gray

    All celestial objects are moving

    See Edwin Hubble

  41. Stephen Gray
    FAIL

    @ Another Vatican hit piece?

    "placed under house arrest for publishing the book of his discoveries, in Germany, after the church had asked him to publish it in parts.."

    You say this is not suppression, so what exactly is it?

  42. AlistairJ
    Happy

    Its terrible

    Langdon reached for the IBM compliant keyboard. He typed in his password. "I can't think of a snappy yet witty title" he said. Sophie stopped doing her warming up exercises. "But you are so clever and dashing and yet likable" she said. Suddenly a very evil looking man in a monk outfit appeared behind Langdon. He had a roll of duck tape [sic]. [remainder of chapter deleted for reasons of taste]

    Galileo, we salute you!

  43. Stevie

    Bah!

    I've been demanding a raise for years based on whole hidden applications I've written but have yet to be discovered by management or the user community. It's never worked. Perhaps now that a professor of clever science has legitimised the concept in print I'll actually see some dosh for my alledged hard work.

  44. Filmmaker
    Pint

    Another Vatican Hit Piece?

    Stephen... Excellent question...you're right, I wasn't clear. House arrest for disobedience and house arrest for discovery as paramount as 'the planets and sun don't revolve around the earth' are two different things. I wish I could remember who said, "Anything as big and old as the Catholic Church is bound to have a few warts." As has often been the case, those in authority over Galileo may have handled the situation badly, but this article perpetuates the oft repeated notion that the church's motivation was to keep the populace ignorant (thus controllable). If their intent was to suppress his discoveries, I'm sure they could have, and we wouldn't know the name Galileo. They knew about his discoveries and even helped him. The book had already been published, thus, no suppression. Again, house arrest was for disobedience.

  45. Jolyon Ralph
    Thumb Up

    I think I found it..

    This note was found recorded in handwriting in the margins of a first edition of 'Sidereus Nuncius':

    Pbby. V whfg sbhaq Arcghar

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