Historian of science whose books, including a biography of Galileo, helped to debunk several myths
John Heilbron, who has died aged 89, established the history of science as a professional discipline. By getting the history right, he sought to slay enduring myths created by his predecessors, some of which had become embedded in popular culture.
His book The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (1999) helped dispel the falsehood that science and religion exist in a state of perpetual warfare. A desire to fix the date of Easter was one of the things that led the Roman Catholic church to give more financial and social support to the science of astronomy than any other institution, for more than six centuries.
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