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Galileo’s prosecution by the Church for promoting the heliocentric theory – that the Sun sits at the centre of the Solar System encircled by the Earth and other planets – is usually portrayed as a landmark battle in the war between religion and science, the moment when Galileo becomes science’s first great martyr.

However, when revisiting the story during our research for our book The For­bidden Universe, we realised that the trad­itional explanations of the Church’s determin­ation to get Galileo just don’t add up. Applying the shameless CGI of hindsight, science historians transmuted him into a modern rationalist-materialist born out of time, persecuted by superstitious – in other words cretinous – men whose intell­ects, if one could dignify them with the term, were stuck in the Middle Ages.