Galileo (Indigo Girls song)
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Galileo is a song by Emily Saliers, recorded and performed by the Indigo Girls. It was released in 1992 on Rites of Passage, the Indigo Girls' platinum-selling fourth studio album. It reached #10 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, the first song by the Indigo Girls to break the top ten.
The song's lyrics discuss reincarnation, partially through the lens of the story of Galileo Galilei, the 17th century physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution. The song's chorus describes Galileo as the "king of night vision, king of insight", referencing both the clarity of physical vision made possible through his modernizations of the telescope and his support of Copernicanism, which stated that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center of the universe. This new way of looking at humans' relationship with the universe was widely denounced and caused the Catholic Church to put Galileo on trial for heresy.
