The Galileo Gambit (Vatican Secret Archive Thrillers)

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And it's weird to talk about science being wrong when it's clearly a *marketing* failure. Of course there was no need for a computer in the home in 1977, there was no *application* for the computer in the home then. The best was Nieman Marcus' kitchen computer (for keeping recipes and the household budget) that required a week's training and a huge sum of money. No one with that kind of money did their own cooking then, so why bother? (I was once gifted with a Nieman Marcus kitchen computer for keeping my recipes. It was just as useless now as then and I returned it.) We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.– Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere. - Thomas Edison, 1895

I would think airplanes were silly, dangerous toys too if they still had the failure rate of the very early days of aviation. There’s a reason that military pilots of the first world war were called “60 minute men”; that’s how long you lasted in the air, on average.

Likewise, if you are a former coal miner, like Malcolm Roberts, it is perhaps easier to accuse climate scientists of colluding to create a world government (whatever that is) than to accept the need to take coal out of our economy. To understand what was going on, we had training aids – a globe and a bunch of string. After a couple hours it starts to make sense. But on a flat earth, it wouldn’t. There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. - Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.– Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.Father Michael Dominic, prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives in Rome, is entrusted with the mission of transporting the original 17th-century trial documents of Galileo to Loyola Law School in Chicago. The stage is set for a modern historical moot courtroom trial of Galileo’s original heresy charges, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the legendary event. I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper. - Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in Gone With The Wind.