Galileo was a great man, story is interesting. I just fail to understand why his admirers needed to take out his body parts from the grave. There are a lot of people i respect, but the last thing i would do is go up and take their body parts.
This is not sign of adoration , rather the opposite. I understand buying his manuscripts, even personal belongings. Not disassemble his body like a lego parts. Now it is done for DNA, in 1737 it was a weird thing to do.
In my opinion.

Originally posted by ZeroKnowledge
Galileo was a great man, story is interesting. I just fail to understand why his admirers needed to take out his body parts from the grave. There are a lot of people i respect, but the last thing i would do is go up and take their body parts.
This is not sign of adoration , rather the opposite. I understand buying his manuscripts, even personal belongings. Not disassemble his body like a lego parts. Now it is done for DNA, in 1737 it was a weird thing to do.
In my opinion.

I agree, I was going to add something like that!

I suppose it was done in the same vein as religious relics which were extremely common in the past.

I guess we'll never know why they did it!

I must be morbid as well because i gave you a S/F.I find the story fascinating also.

Originally posted by AgentX09
I must be morbid as well because i gave you a S/F.I find the story fascinating also.

Cheers!

Thank goodness, I had a horrible feeling I'd be the only one!

That finger belonged to the man who put forth the notion of gravity and the solar system, how cool is that??

Originally posted by ZeroKnowledge
Galileo was a great man, story is interesting. I just fail to understand why his admirers needed to take out his body parts from the grave.

Who knows why
Some grave diggers on a quest for knowledge dug the corpse of Nostradamus up and drank wine from the skull of Nostradamus's skull like it was a wine glass.

He did this because he believed he would gain all of Nostradamus's knowledge, Nostradamus predicted this event as well.

I suspect the reason they did this is because in Galileo's time, it was common to take the body parts of saints. There are many churches in Europe where some part of a saint - bones, whatever - are kept and venerated. I suppose the custom was carried out for Saint Galileo as well.

I can understand why someone would do this way back when they did. What I don't understand is why the museum is displaying these morbid relics. There is nothing educational about viewing the bones of a dead scientist. We learn nothing, other than it's OK to desecrate corpses.