THE ASCENT OF MAN

 JACOB BROWNOWSKI

MACDONALD FUTURA PUBLISHERS                        1973

PART VI

 

Chapter 6: The Starry Messenger

• The first science in the modern sense that grew in the Mediterranean civilization was astronomy, the science that guides us through the cycle of the seasons. All settled cultures have a calendar to guide their plans.
• The Mayans had a system of arithmetic which was far ahead of Europe. In the year AD 776, 16 mathematicians came to the sacred city of Copan to resolve the drift between their profane and sacred calendars
• Without astronomy it is really not possible to find your way over great distances, or even to have a theory about the shape of the earth and the land and sea on it.
• Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.
• Even so primitive a culture as Easter Island made one tremendous invention, the carving of huge and uniform statues. There is nothing like them in the world, and people ask, as usual, all kinds of marginal and faintly irrelevant questions about them.
• Why were they made like this? How were they transported? How did they get to the places that they are at?
• But that is not the significant problem. Stonehenge and Avebury, of a much earlier stone civilization, were much more difficult to put up.
• When the Dutch discovered this island on Easter Sunday in 1722, they said that it had the makings of an earthly paradise. But it did not.
• An earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition, like a caged animal going round and round, and making always the same thing.
• These frozen faces mark a civilization which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge. That is the failure of the New World cultures, dying in their own symbolic Ice Age.
• More than 100 years before Christopher Columbus set sail, the Old World had been able to make a superb clockwork of the starry heavens. It was made by Giovanni de Dondi in Padua in about 1350. It took him 16 years.
• For at least 20 years of his life, Copernicus devoted himself to the modern proposition that nature must be simple. Why were the paths of the planets so complicated? Because we look at them from the place we happen to be standing, the earth. Why not look at them from another place and put the sun at the center of the universe?
• The coming of the Renaissance as a single rush – in religion, art, literature, music, and mathematical science – was a head-on collision with the medieval system as a whole.
• Two great men were born in the year 1564; one was William Shakespeare and the other was Galileo, the creator of the modern scientific method. He turned the Flemish invention of the telescope into an instrument of navigation and of research. He built the apparatus, did the experiment, and published the results between September 1609 and march 1610.
• The news was sensational but not altogether welcome, because what Galileo saw in the sky, and revealed to everyone who was willing to look, was that the Ptolemaic heaven simply would not work.
• Copernicus’s powerful guess had been right, and now stood open and revealed. And like many more recent scientific results, that did not at all please the prejudice of the establishment of his day.

Galileo thought that all he had to do was to show that Copernicus was right, and everybody would listen. That was his first mistake: the mistake of being naïve about people’s motives which scientists make all the time. He also thought that his reputation was now large enough for him to be able to go back to his native Florence, leave the rather dreary teaching at Padua which had become burdensome to him, and leave the protection of this essentially anti-clerical, safe Republic of Venice. That was his second and, in the end, fatal mistake.

• The successes of the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century had caused the Roman Catholic Church to mount a fierce Counter-Revolution. The reaction against Luther was in full cry; the struggle in Europe was for authority.
• In 1618 the Thirty Years War began. In 1622 Rome created the institution for the propagation of the faith from which we still derive the word propaganda.
• Catholics and Protestants were embattled in what we should now call a cold war in which, if Galileo had only known it, no quarter was given to a great man or small.
• The judgment was very simple on both sides: whoever is not for us is – a heretic. The church was a great temporal power and in that bitter time it was fighting a political crusade in which all means were justified by the ends – the ethics of a police state.
• For 20 years Galileo moved along a path that led to his condemnation; the division between him and those in authority was absolute. They believed that faith should dominate; and Galileo believed that truth should persuade.
• The trial was in 1633. and the first remarkable thing is that the documents begin – when? In 1611, at the moment of Galileo’s triumph in Venice, in Florence, and in Rome secret information was being laid against Galileo before the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
• Galileo optimistically came to Rome in 1624, and had six long talks in the gardens with the newly elected Pope. He hoped that the intellectual Pope would withdraw, or at least by-pass, the prohibition of 1616 of the world picture of Copernicus.
• So Galileo went on believing that the Pope was on his side, within the limits set by his office, until it came to the testing time. And then he turned out to be most profoundly mistaken.
• Their views had really been intellectually irreconcilable from the beginning. So, on 12 April 1633, Galileo was brought into this room, sat at this table, and answered the questions from the Inquisitor.
• The verdict was reached at a meeting of the Congregation of the Holy Office over which the Pope presided, which laid down absolutely what was to be done.
• Galileo was to retract and be shown the instruments of torture. Galileo was confined for the rest of his life in his villa under house arrest. Nothing was to be published.
• The forbidden doctrine was not to be discussed. Galileo was not even to talk to Protestants. The result was silence among Catholic scientists everywhere from then on.
• Galileo’s greatest contemporary, René Descartes, stopped publishing in France and finally went to Sweden.
• Galileo made up his mind to do one thing. He was going to write the book that the trial had interrupted: the book on the New Sciences.
• He finished it in 1636, that is, three years after the trial, an old man of 72. Of course he could not get it published, until finally some Protestants in Leyden in the Netherlands printed it two years later.
• From now on the Scientific Revolution moved to Northern Europe. Galileo died in 1642, still a prisoner in his house.
• On Christmas Day of the same year, in England, Isaac Newton was born.

 

Chapter 7: The Majestic Clockwork