It was as simple as that. But the two pages in which Galileo argues the point against Simplicius 23 are among the most obscure and incomprehensible in the book. He employs his usual tactics of refuting his opponent's thesis without proving his own; in this case not by sarcasm, but by confusing the issue. There can be no doubt that Galileo's theory of the tides was based on unconscious self-deception; but in the light of the above there can also be little doubt that the sunspot argument was a deliberate attempt to confuse and mislead. To represent the constant tilt of a rotating body as a new and inconceivable hypothesis, when every student since Pythagoras knew that this was the reason why summer followed winter; to obscure this simple issue by the novelty of curving sunspots, while making the complexities of Copernicus appear deceptively simple, was part of a deliberate strategy, based on Galileo's contempt for the intelligence of his contemporaries. We have seen that scholars have always been prone to manias and obsessions, and inclined to cheat about details; but impostures like Galileo's are rare in the annals of science.
