The tides are slowly stealing rotational energy from Earth and giving it to the Moon, lengthening our days while pushing the Moon about 3.8 centimetres farther away each year — a transaction scientist

What Galileo dismissed as childish nonsense turned out to reshape our entire planet—a gravitational dance so subtle yet relentless that it's literally slowing Earth's spin and remaking the Moon's orbit one laser measurement at a time.

“Despite his open and acute mind, he nevertheless lent his ear and his consent to the moon’s dominion over the waters, to occult properties, and to such puerilities.” That’s Galileo Galilei, in 1632, dismissing a rival astronomer named Johannes Kepler for suggesting something Galileo considered childish nonsense: that the moon reaches across empty space and physically drags the ocean around. Galileo had his own theory, that tides were just Earth’s oceans sloshing around like water in a moving bowl. He went to his grave convinced of it.