1 Galileo was sent to a Jesuit monastery to study medicine. But after four years he announced he’d found his calling: to be a monk. His father withdrew him—but not before Galileo joined the order, making him a defrocked priest for life.
2 Nicolaus Copernicus never wrote down his theories for fear it would jeopardize his day job working for the Catholic Church. For promoting Copernican theory, Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment, later reduced to house arrest.
3 A hundred years after he died, when his body was being moved for reburial, a fan snipped off the middle finger of his right hand as a memento. Galileo’s finger is now on display, erect, at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence.
