Galileo wasn't locked up for telling the truth (a truth that truthfully, he could not fully prove by himself). He was locked up for insulting his would-be benefactor - the new pope Urban VIII - in his seminal work. For that, he was only placed under house arrest with fairly loose terms.
I'm pretty sure spherical earth was common knowledge long before Copernicus. See: the experiment of Eratosthenes to calculate its circumference some 1800 years before.
Galileo wasn't locked up for telling the truth (a truth that truthfully, he could not fully prove by himself). He was locked up for insulting his would-be benefactor - the new pope Urban VIII - in his seminal work. For that, he was only placed under house arrest with fairly loose terms.
I'm pretty sure spherical earth was common knowledge long before Copernicus. See: the experiment of Eratosthenes to calculate its circumference some 1800 years before.