The crime of galileo

In 1608 Hans Lippershey, a spectacle maker in the Dutch town of Middelburg, invented the telescope. Within a few decades, telescopes had been introduced from Europe to China, to the Mughal Empire in India and to the Ottoman empire. All four civilizations were thus on an equal footing in terms of possessing this powerful new instrument with its latent power for observing the universe and deducing the laws of planetary motion.

There are few controlled experiments in history, but the historian of science Toby Huff has discovered one in the way that the telescope was received and used in the 17th century. The reactions of the four civilizations to this powerful new instrument bear on the very different kinds of society that each had developed.

In Europe the telescope was turned at once toward the heavens. Galileo, hearing a description of Lippershey’s device, immediately set to building telescopes of his own. He was first to observe the moons of Jupiter, and he used the fact of Jupiter’s satellites as empirical evidence in favor of Copernicus’s then disputed notion that the planets, including the Earth, were satellites of the sun. Galileo’s argument that the Earth revolved around the sun brought him into conflict with the church’s belief that the Earth cannot move. In 1633 he was forced to recant by the Inquisition and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. But Europe was not monolithic, and the Inquisition was powerless to suppress the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo in Protestant countries. What Galileo had started was carried forward by Kepler and Newton. The momentum of the Scientific Revolution scarcely faltered.

In the Muslim world, the telescope quickly reached the Mughal empire in India. One was presented in 1616 by the British ambassador to the court of the emperor Jahangir, and many more arrived a year later. The Mughals knew a lot about astronomy, but their interest in it was confined to matters of the calendar. A revised calendar was presented to the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1628, but the scholar who prepared it based it on the Ptolemaic system (which assumes that the sun revolves around an immobile Earth). Given this extensive familiarity with astronomy, Mughal scholars might have been expected to use the telescope to explore the heavens. But the designers of astronomical instruments in the Mughal Empire did not make telescopes, and the scholars created no demand for them. “In the end, no Mughal scholars undertook to use the telescope for astronomical purposes in the seventeenth century,” Huff
reports.4

The telescope fared no better in the other Islamic empire of the time. Telescopes had reached Istanbul by at least 1626 and were quickly incorporated into the Ottoman navy. But despite Muslim eminence in optics in the 14th century, scholars in the Ottoman Empire showed no particular interest in the telescope. They were content with the Ptolemaic view of the universe and made no effort to translate the works of Galileo, Copernicus or Kepler. “No new observatories were built, no improved telescopes were manufactured and no cosmological debates about what the telescope
revealed in the heavens have been reported,” Huff concludes.5

Outside of Europe, the most promising new users of the telescope were in China, whose government had a keen interest in astronomy. Moreover, there was an unusual but vigorous mechanism for pumping the new European astronomical discoveries into China in the form of the Jesuit mission there. The Jesuits figured they had a better chance of converting the Chinese to Christianity if they could show that European astronomy provided more accurate calculations of the celestial events in which the Chinese were interested. Through the Jesuits’ efforts, the Chinese certainly knew of the telescope by 1626, and the emperor probably received a telescope from Cardinal Borromeo of Milan as early as 1618. The Jesuits invested significant talent in their mission, which was founded by Matteo Ricci, a trained mathematician who also spoke Chinese. Ricci, who died in 1610, and his successors imported the latest European books on math and astronomy and diligently trained Chinese astronomers, who set about reforming the calendar. One of the Jesuits, Adam Schall von Bell, even became head of the Chinese Bureau of Mathematics and Astronomy.

The Jesuits and their Chinese followers several times arranged prediction challenges between themselves and Chinese astronomers following traditional methods, which the Jesuits always won. The Chinese knew, for instance, that there would be a solar eclipse on June 21, 1629, and the emperor asked both sides to submit the day before their predictions of its exact time and duration. The traditional astronomers predicted the eclipse would start at 10:30 AM and last for two hours. Instead it began at 11:30 AM and lasted two minutes, exactly as the Jesuits had calculated. But these computational victories did not solve the Jesuits’ problem.

The Chinese had little curiosity about astronomy itself. Rather, they were interested in divination, in forecasting propitious days for certain events, and astronomy was merely a means to this end. Thus the astronomical bureau was a small unit within the Ministry of Rites. The Jesuits doubted how far they should get into the business of astrological prediction, but their program of converting the Chinese through astronomical excellence compelled them to take the plunge anyway. This led them into confrontation with Chinese officials and to being denounced as foreigners who were interfering in Chinese affairs. In 1661, Schall and the other Jesuits were bound with thick iron chains and thrown into jail. Schall was sentenced to be executed by dismemberment, and only an earthquake that occurred the next day prompted his release.

The puzzle is that throughout this period the Chinese made no improvements on the telescope. Nor did they show any sustained interest in the ferment of European ideas about the theoretical structure of the universe, despite being plied by the Jesuits with the latest European research. Chinese astronomers had behind them a centuries-old tradition of astronomical observation. But it was embedded in a Chinese cosmological system that they were reluctant to abandon. Their latent xenophobia also supported resistance to new ideas.

“It is better to have no good astronomy than to have Westerners in China,” wrote the anti-Christian scholar Yang Guangxian.6

Both China and the Muslim world suffered from a “deficit of curiosity” about the natural world, Huff says, which he attributes to their educational systems. But the differences between European societies and the others went considerably beyond education and scientific curiosity. The reception of the telescope shows that by the early 17th century, fundamental differences had already emerged in the social behavior of the four civilizations and in the institutions that embodied it. European societies were innovative, outward looking, keen to develop and apply new knowledge, and sufficiently open and pluralistic to prevent the old order from suppressing the new. Those of China and the Islamic world were still entrammeled in traditional religious structures and too subservient to hierarchy to support freethinking and innovation.

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(...) Perhaps stranger to our sensibility than the Romans’ lack of scientific knowledge was their lack of curiosity.

The Roman code, widely honored from the republic through the Antonines, demanded that the Roman gentleman engage in public service, that he embody vigor and industriousness, that he shun lexus (self-indulgence) and inertia (idleness). But Romans despised learning for learning’s sake. A Roman gentleman might study philosophy so that he could learn how to live properly, die with dignity, and be stoically indifferent to the vagaries of fortune. But to study philosophy merely for the sake of knowledge was unseemly - a kind of inertia.20 Architecture was the one art to which a Roman gentleman might properly apply himself. It involved science and aesthetics, but to a clear and present purpose.

Otherwise, Romans disdained artists as much as they disdained scholars. As some earlier quotations from Petronius and Pliny indicated, Romans of the upper class often loved the art itself. They shared with our own time the rites and sensibilities of connoisseurship. Ancient Rome had art critics, historians, and collectors who spent vast sums on their Great Masters.

But Lucian, writing in the Antonine era, observes matter-of-factly that a sculptor was without prestige, “no more than a workman, doing hard physical labor ... obscure, earning a small wage, a man of low esteem, classed as worthless by public opinion, neither courted by friends, feared by enemies, nor envied by fellow citizens.”21 Even more startling are the words of Plutarch about Phidias, whose artistic works were regarded by the ancients with the awe that we accord Michelangelo’s: “No gifted young man upon seeing the Zeus of Phidias at Olympia ever wanted to be Phidias. For it does not necessarily follow that, if a work is delightful because of its gracefulness, the man who made it is worthy of our serious regard.”22

That the Romans could so reverently admire a work of art and so scorn the person who created it is perhaps part of the reason that the Romans left us so little of their own creation in the arts and sciences.There are the exceptions of Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and Ovid, plus a sprinkling of other fine Roman writers, the Stoics in philosophy, and a few major scientific achievements across the Mediterranean in Alexandria.

But taken as whole, the Roman world throughout its history, whether republic or empire, was a near intellectual void when it came to the arts and sciences. (...) Scientific, philosophic, and artistic progress did not come to an end when Rome fell, but, without much exaggeration, when Rome rose. (...)

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Naskra said:

All of the above goes to show two things:

1. The Galilean propaganda machine is still going strong after 500 years, telling us that G's self-inflicted legal troubles are somehow of great import to the History of Truth.

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Aside: The Crucial Role of Galileo.
There was none. Every discovery made by Galileo was made by someone else at pretty much the same time. Marius discovered the moons of Jupiter one day later. Scheiner made a detailed study of the sunspots earlier than Galileo. The phases of Venus were noted by Lembo and others. And so on. Even his more valuable work in mechanics duplicated the work of De Soto, Stevins, and others. Matters would have proceeded differently -- certainly with less fuss and feathers -- and some conclusions may have taken longer, or perhaps shorter times to achieve. The thing is, science does not depend upon any single individual. No one is "the father of" any particular theory or practice. As Newton observed, he stood upon the shoulders of giants -- a sentiment expressed by Bernard of Chartres back in the Early Middle Ages! Regarding heliocentrism, Galileo's biggest accomplishment was to get some folks so riled up that the conversation was inhibited for a short time in some quarters.

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jackelgull said:

I'll say this for Galileo- He's much more important as a "martyr" for science, than for anything he accomplished, in the same vein as if there's a king Arthur, the stories about him are more important than what the actual person did and accomplished.

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