Its always remarkable to me to think about Descartes and Galileo being contemporaries: so we know how the former reacted when the latter was imprisoned:
“I inquired in Leiden and Amsterdam whether Galileo’s World System was available, … I was told that it had indeed been published but that all the copies had immediately been burnt at Rome, and that Galileo had been convicted and fined. I was so astonished at this that I almost decided to burn all my papers … .”
