The legacy of Galileo shone like a brilliant star throughout the Fifth World Skeptics Congress, Oct. 8–10, 2004, and appropriately so, for it was held in Abano Terme, Italy, just outside of Padua (Padova), where Galileo taught from 1592 until 1610, wrote The Starry Messenger, and discovered the moons of Jupiter. Other revolutionary figures in the history of science likewise had Padua connections. Among them were Nicolaus Copernicus, who studied there, and Andreas Vesalius, who took his medical degree there before publishing his revelations about human anatomy in 1543. That was the same year that Copernicus published, on his deathbed, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, the book that cast aside the notion of an Earth-centered universe. Thus began the conflict between religious belief and scientific discovery that led to Galileo’s epic tribulations with the Catholic church and that echoes down through the ages to this day. The conference theme was “Solving Mysteries.” Throughout, speakers touted the unique abilities of the methods of scientific and skeptical inquiry in finding solutions to mysteries that otherwise remain the domain of opinion and speculation.

The three-day conference, which had a sold-out attendance of nearly 500 (the capacity of the comfortable modern conference center’s theater, surrounded by hotels and restaurants), was cosponsored by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and its Italian counterpart group, CICAP (pronounced “chee-cap”). CICAP numbers among its members some of Italy’s leading scientists, scholars, and investigators, many of whom were in evidence as conference participants. Galileo himself was the subject of an entire evening of special events the first night of the conference, while a slightly more recent hero of skepticism, the conjuror and investigator James Randi, was feted the second night (see side stories). Randi also gave a talk earlier that day on “difficult, innocent, and impossible applicants” for his $1 million challenge to psychic claimants.

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