On a clear night in November 1609, in Padua, Italy, a professor of mathematics at the local university hoisted a new instrument to his eye and pointed it toward the moon. His name was Galileo Galilei. He had looked skyward many times before, but those times it had only been with his naked eye. This time, with this new instrument -- a spyglass that one historian has called “the tube of long seeing” -- he was able to view the moon under magnification, and what he saw differed from what he’d seen unaided.

            He now noticed that the line dividing the light regions of the moon from the darker ones wasn’t a smooth, perfect arc as it appeared when viewed without the spyglass; it had a broken, serrated look. He saw that the dark parts of the moon weren’t uniformly dark either; there were tiny pinpoints of light within the blackness. He spent two hours that night looking through this tube, and he was able to discern mountains, valleys and seas on the moon. Over successive nights, he also began to distinguish some objects that had been assumed to be stars, but which under magnification, were not blazes of light, but planets.

            Galileo was not exactly the inventor of this instrument, which today we know as the telescope. By 1608, someone -- we don’t know who -- had come out with a primitive spyglass. But Galileo had spent several months improving it.

            This new tool for looking at the heavens was about to usher in a new way of thinking about the universe -- and about life itself. Viewing planets led to speculation tha

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