Last in a series.

PADOVA, Italy — I have been posting from Italy all week, where I have been talking with leading European science journalists about science debates. Most of the world’s great challenges now revolve around science policy issues, yet we are paralyzed on many of them because of politics. Science debates bring policymakers together with science and the public, highlighting key issues and helping to break logjams.

Today I am on a train from Venice via Milan to Turin, where I’ll catch a flight home. The way runs through the lush green Veneto plain, fed by the Po River.  This area is full of historical significance, like the Rotunda that Jefferson copied for Montecello, or Verona of "Romeo and Juliet" fame. But I am stopping to see Padova, the oldest city in northern Italy and birthplace of the Enlightenment. 

A half mile south of the train station I find the crumbling ruins of a Roman amphitheater with a chapel built in its park-like center. Enrico Scrovegni bought the site in 1300 and built the chapel to save the soul of his dead father, Riginaldo, a loan shark that Dante conscribed to the seventh circle of hell in his bestseller "The Inferno." For insurance, Scrovegni hired the Florentine painter Giotto to do the chapel frescoes and — wow.  Giotto’s inspired work blew everyone away.  The frescoes are considered the birth of modern painting and culture, and the great Renaissance painters all stood on Giotto’s shoulders.

Seeds of freedom
The seeds of another kind of rebirth had already been planted a few blocks further south and some eighty years earlier. Feeling their way out of the thick fog of medieval superstition and dark-age religious dominance, a group of law students and professors from Bologna got together in Padova in 1222, seeking more academic freedom.

They started the world’s second university, the Palazzo Bo, or Ox Palace, in an old hotel of the same name. Over time, the Ox Palace became the center of free thought in Europe, with professors encouraging liberal explorations of ideas amid the conservative religious thought of the rest of Europe. Its motto was — and is — “Padova freedom is Universal freedom.” 

In 1678, the school graduated the first woman to receive a university diploma — Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, who earned the Doctor of Philosophy.

Entering the university I am struck by coats of arms from seven hundred years of famous graduates and rectors, painted or sculpted on the walls of the grand entrance and wrapping up and around the two-story courtyard. 

Upstairs on the East is the Sala dei Quaranta, an expansive, Hogwarts-style dining and lecture hall whose rich paneled walls are lined with hundreds more coats of arms and paintings that look like they may come to life at any moment.  It is one of the world’s great collections of heraldry. 

Copernicus spent time here, but the real glory days came later. In 1594, the world’s first medical theater opened here, an oval with six steep railed tiers where 200 students of art and science could lean over as they watched a human cadaver secretly dissected by candlelight. If church officials came knocking, the table could be flipped, dumping the body through a hole in the floor for swift removal to the canal, replacing it with an animal. 

Walking where Galileo walked
For me, though, the biggest thrill and the reason I came was to walk where the university’s most famous teacher walked, and to touch the wooden handrail of the raised podium where his hand also fell. Galileo Galilei, one of the founding scientists of the Enlightenment, taught at Padova from 1592 to 1610. The podium was built by his students so the SRO crowds that packed the Sala dei Quaranta could hear and see him speak, and begin to see the light of knowledge, instead of, to quote John Locke, “but faith or opinion.”

Since those early days, science has proven to be our most reliable method for creating knowledge. But new knowledge means we must refine our ethics and morality, and that is always political. It certainly was in 16^th century Padova, where science was risky and anti-authoritarian indeed.

This aspect is lost on many modern scientists, who seek to disavow association with science’s political dimensions — and as a result have ceded some measure of public definition of reality back to ideologues.

Galileo simply spoke about his observations through a better telescope that could show the planets more clearly. Shadows on Jupiter, he told students, confirm what Copernicus had already postulated — the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around. You can look for yourself, he told church officials. But they refused to look through his telescope.

Inherently political
Like many scientists, Galileo underestimated politics, and didn’t realize that the simple statement of an observable fact is a political act. It either affirms or denies the current power structure.

Consider this quote from Galileo’s 1633 indictment by the Roman Catholic Church, at the time the seat of world power:

1. The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.

2. The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal action, is also absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith.

Therefore..., invoking the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His Most Glorious Mother Mary, We pronounce this Our final sentence: We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo...have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture.

Why did the church go to such great lengths to discredit this solitary man? For the same reason we fight political battles today over issues like climate change, and right-wing U.S. senators seek to discredit scientists like Michael Mann, whose similarly iconic “hockey stick graph” charts the rise in average global temperatures.

Science sides with observation and measurement, not vested interests. Failing to acknowledge science’s inherently political nature leaves both science and America vulnerable to attack by anti-science thinking from both the right and left — thinking which has come to dominate American politics in the early 21^st Century — and leads to political rigidity and paralysis.

Modern-day call to defend science
Science has proved to be more powerful and beneficial to humans than anything previously developed. It has built up knowledge that has doubled our life spans, multiplied the productivity of our farms by more than thirty five times, freed untold millions from manual farm labor and a life that was, in the words of fifteenth-century writer Thomas Hobbes, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," a "war of every man against every man." It has given us tremendous insights into our place in the cosmos, into the inner workings of our own bodies, and into our capacity as human beings to exercise our highest aspirations of love, hope, creativity, curiosity, compassion, humility, courage and charity.

This good has come from the scientific process of questioning assumptions about the universe, dreaming up experiments that test those questions and, based on observations, incrementally building knowledge about nature that is independent of beliefs. A scientifically testable claim can be shown to be either probably true, or to be false, whether the claim is made by a king or a president, a pope, a congressman, or a common citizen. Because of this, science is anti-authoritarian, and a great equalizer of political power. 

I came to Italy to talk about science and politics — but as I leave Padova, I am struck by how each generation from Galileo’s to my own must defend science, democracy and freedom of thought, as a moral imperative.

In that regard, we could learn from the courage of those early Italians.

Shawn Lawrence Otto is co-founder and CEO of sciencedebate.org. He wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated movie "House of Sand and Fog" and won the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's award for best science screenplay for "Hubble." He also wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film "Dreams of a Dying Heart." He lives in Marine on St. Croix.