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HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

If you ask people to name the greatest scientist of all time, many answer Galileo and in the popular presentations of the history of science, Galileo is portrayed as a one-man revolution, an intellectual superhero who dragged science kicking and screaming into the modern era. But historian of science Thony Christie writes at Aeon that Galileo’s vast reputation, and the hyperbolic accolades that go with it, are not justified by the real history [aeon.co]. According to Christie Galileo achieved considerable fame in his lifetime, but in the 17th century his reputation rested firmly on his telescopic discoveries. But Galileo did not stand alone, as he is often presented [scientificamerican.com]. Rather, as with the telescopic discoveries, Galileo was part of a sizable community all working on the same problems [scientus.org]. Galileo was not the only telescopic astronomical observer at the time, and all the discoveries he made were made independently and contemporaneously by others in Britain, Germany, even Italy.

It is often claimed that Galileo is one of the giants on whose shoulders Newton stood, but he plays a rather minor role in Newton’s masterwork, Principia Mathematica (1687). By the 18th century, Galileo was slipping into obscurity outside of Italy. Then he experienced a remarkable resurrection largely because of his persecution by the Catholic Church [wikipedia.org]. John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White wrote passionately about religion as an obstacle to the forces of progress, and advanced a self-congratulatory thesis in which Western civilization had steadily emerged from the ignorance of the Dark Ages to the modern age of Enlightenment. To fit into this narrative, Galileo was presented as a solitary hero defending Copernicanism against the ignorance and prejudice of the Church [wikipedia.org]. "Galileo is regularly credited as the inventor of the scientific method, the first to apply mathematics to science, the discoverer of the first mathematical law of science, and on and on," says Christie. "Take off the superhero garb placed on him by his later biographers, and it is clear that Galileo wasn’t the father of anything. He didn’t invent the scientific method [explorable.com]. He wasn’t the first to apply mathematics to science, nor did he discover the first mathematical law of science."

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