Strano В— gives you an idea of how hard it must have been for Galileo to be Galileo. A brief audience with the telescope В— under the stern gaze of Dr. Scholars do not know when Galileo built this particular telescope, or what he saw with it, but it still has its original optics. That is, until this week, when Giorgio Strano, curator at the Institute and Museum of the History of Science there, escorted this humble tube to the Franklin Institute. Neither have ever been out of Florence since GalileoвЂ™s time. Only two of the dozens of telescopes Galileo built survive. And his tangle with the church became the template for the war between science and religion that persists to this day. His discoveries propelled astronomers on a course toward discovering signs of the Big Bang and a shadowy modern cosmos suffused with dark energy and dark matter. Thus did Galileo, one of historyвЂ™s great troublemakers, come to America.Д«y turning spyglasses like this to the sky 400 years ago and seeing mountains on the Moon and satellites whirling around Jupiter in contravention of the Earth-centered cosmology of Aristotle, Ptolemy and the Bible that had reigned for a thousand years, Galileo changed the world. The tubeвЂ™s focal length is вЂњpiedi 3,вЂќ the inscription said, three feet. PHILADELPHIA В— It looked like the kind of toy telescope a child might have made with scissors and tape В— a lumpy, mottled tube about as long as a golf club and barely wider in girth, the color of 400-year-old cardboard, burning with age.Д«ut near one knobby end was a bit of writing that sent Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer of the Franklin Institute here, into rapture.

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