Publication of Galileo's Starry Messenger in 1610, detailing startling observations with the newly invented telescope, sparked immediate furor among the astronomers and philosophers of the day. The discovery of the "Medicean stars" (the satellites of Jupiter) was pronounced a hoax, an optical illusion, a logical and theological impossibility. Stillman Drake, one of the world's foremost Galileo scholars, recreates in Telescopes, Tides, and...