Not banned, placed on the Index until corrected.

The Times Higher Education has an article entitled Drugs ban is ‘scientific censorship’, says paper, which is concerned with the fact that the political ban on various recreational drugs hinders scientific research on those substances. The article and the paper it is reviewing make, what I think is, an important point and one that should be addressed but it also contains the following, in my opinion, unfortunate historical statement:

“The outlawing of psychoactive drugs amounts to the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo,” said Professor Nutt.

Why unfortunate? Well you see the Catholic Church never actually banned the works of Copernicus. First off there were no works, plural, but just one, his De revolutionibus. Secondly contrary to the widely held belief it was never banned by the Catholic Church or anybody else for that matter. Following the challenge to their authority by Galileo Galilei and Paolo Antonio Foscarini in interpreting holy scripture in 1615 and the Commission of Qualifiers judgment in 1616 that the proposition that ‘the sun is the centre of the world and completely devoid of local motion is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture’ De revolutionibus was not banned but placed on the Index until corrected.

Now this might seem like a case of splitting hairs, De revolutionibus was placed on the Index of forbidden books, total censorship end of the story. However this is far from being the case. The clue is in the addition ‘until corrected’. This meant that if those passages that stated that the heliocentric hypothesis was a fact were suitably modified back to being a hypothesis then the book would be removed from the Index.

What most people don’t realise is that this is exactly what happened. De revolutionibus was with surprisingly few minor alterations already removed from the Index in 1621 and any Catholic was free to study it in this modified form. In fact Galileo’s own personal copy with the modifications glued into place still exists.

Interesting in this context is that even this very mild censorship seems only to have been effective in Italy. The only surviving copies, which have been modified, are almost all in Italy. Outside of Italy nobody seems to have taken the Vatican’s censorship seriously not even in other Catholic countries.

A mind bogglingly stupid statement!

In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald the British “poster boy of pop science”^TM made the following series of statements:

“When you’ve got difficult economic times, you see governments saying, ‘Well, maybe we should cut back on this kind of blue-sky stuff.’ It’s just drivel. Imagine if that had happened in 1799 when the Royal Institute [sic] was being set up. Then, in the worst-case scenario, you don’t get electricity.” [my emphasis]

Let us take a brief look at a list of some of the prominent names associated with the evolution of the science of electricity between 1600 and 1900. This list is of course by no means exhaustive:

William Gilbert, Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray, Francis Hauksbee, John Desaguliers, C. F. du Fay, Abbé Nollet, Pieter van Musschenbroek, Benjamin Franklin, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta, Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampère, Michael Faraday, Georg Simon Ohm, James Clerk Maxwell, Galileo Ferraris, Oliver Heaviside, Charles Parsons, Joseph Swan, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Ernst Werner von Siemens and William Thomson.

Your quiz question for today, which of the men in this list were not involved with the Royal Institution?

Now some of you might accuse me of just being nasty to the “poster boy of pop science”^TM, as he was obviously referring to Michael Faraday who did work for the Royal Institution from 1813 (unlike any of the others) and who is normally credited with having invented the electric generator or more accurately discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction on which the generator is based. So is the “poster boy of pop science”^TM right after all?

Well, the question is, as always, given the general developments in electrical research at the beginning of the 1830s, might it not be possible that someone else would have discovered this principle and thus we would have had electricity with or without Faraday? Are we going to replace one dubious hypothetical with another one? Well, actually no! We just have to take a somewhat closer look at the history of electricity to discover that is exactly what happened.

Both the Italian Francesco Zantedeschi and the American Joseph Henry discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction before Faraday. Zantedeschi published his discovery, which however went unnoticed, while Henry first published when he realised that he had been beaten to the punch by Faraday. If this wasn’t enough to show that we would have had electricity if Faraday and the Royal Institution had never existed the Hungarian inventor Ányos István Jedlik actually invented a generator, superior to Faraday’s, several years before Faraday made his legendary discovery.

As I’ve said on several occasions in the past statements in the history of science and technology along the lines of if it hadn’t been for X we wouldn’t have Y are almost inevitably wrong and are on close inspection likely to leave their utterer looking pretty stupid.

Nicolaus was not a priest.

Erik Kwakkei (@erik_kwakkei) drew my attention to a rather nice short video from Prager University by Anthony Esolen of Providence College explaining that the Middle Ages were anything but Dark and should actually be called the bright ages. This is a very well done little piece managing to correct a whole series of myths in a very short time span. However I can’t resist taking a pot shot at his completely inaccurate description of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Esolen says:

Nicolaus Copernicus was, “a priest astronomer at a Polish university”.

The only part of this brief statement that is correct is that Copernicus was an astronomer.  However, it is important to point out that he was only ever an amateur astronomer; astronomy was his hobby so to speak. He never taught it at a university.

Copernicus started his undergraduate studies at the University of Kraków in Poland but left without taking a degree. He continued his studies a various universities in Northern Italy, where he studied law and medicine, not astronomy, completing his studies in 1503 with a doctorate in canon law from the University of Ferrara.

Already as a teenager Copernicus had been appointed a cannon canon of the Chapter of Frauenburg Cathedral in Warmia, where his Uncle Lucas Watzenrode was Prince Bishop. The cannons canons of the cathedral were the administration or government of Warmia.

After graduation Copernicus became private physician and secretary to his Uncle. Later he served the chapter in numerous administrative positions until his death in 1543, this being his profession and not astronomy.

Although attached to the cathedral all of his life Copernicus never took holy orders and was thus never a priest. The false claim that he was appears to have been put into the world by Galileo.

As always I find it disappointing that in an otherwise good video disposing of myths about the Middle Ages the one sentence about Copernicus should consist of false facts. A little bit of research, about five minute, could have avoided this piece of stupidity.

5 Brilliant Mathematicians – 4 Crappy Commentaries

I still tend to call myself a historian of mathematics although my historical interests have long since expanded to include a much wider field of science and technology, in fact I have recently been considering just calling myself a historian to avoid being pushed into a ghetto by those who don’t take the history of science seriously. Whatever, I have never lost my initial love for the history of mathematics and will automatically follow any link offering some of the same. So it was that I arrived on the Mother Nature Network and a blog post titled 5 brilliant mathematicians and their impact on the modern world. The author, Shea Gunther, had actually chosen 5 brilliant mathematicians with Isaac Newton, Carl Gauss, John von Neumann, Alan Turing and Benoit Mandelbrot and had even managed to avoid the temptation of calling them ‘the greatest’ or something similar. However a closer examination of his commentaries on his chosen subjects reveals some pretty dodgy not to say down right crappy claims, which I shall now correct in my usual restrained style.

He starts of fairly well on Newton with the following:

There aren’t many subjects that Newton didn’t have a huge impact in — he was one of the inventors of calculus, built the first reflecting telescope and helped establish the field of classical mechanics with his seminal work, “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.” He was the first to decompose white light into its constituent colors and gave us, the three laws of motion, now known as Newton’s laws.

But then blows it completely with his closing paragraph:

We would live in a very different world had Sir Isaac Newton not been born. Other scientists would probably have worked out most of his ideas eventually, but there is no telling how long it would have taken and how far behind we might have fallen from our current technological trajectory.

This is the type of hagiographical claim that fans of great scientists tend to make who have no real idea of the context in which their hero worked. Let’s examine step by step each of the achievements of Newton listed here and see if the claim made in this final paragraph actually holds up.

Ignoring the problems inherent in the claim that Newton invented calculus, which I’ve discussed here, the author acknowledges that Newton was only co-inventor together with Leibniz and although Newton almost certainly developed his system first it was Leibniz who published first and it was his system that spread throughout Europe and eventually the world so no changes here if Isaac had not been born.

Newton did indeed construct the first functioning reflecting telescope but as I explained here it was by no means the first. It would also be fifty years before John Hadley succeeded in repeating Newton’s feat and finally making the commercial production of reflecting telescopes viable. However Hadley also succeeded in making working models of James Gregory’s reflecting telescope, which actually predated Newton’s and it was the Gregorian that, principally in the hands of James Short, became the dominant model in the eighteenth century. Although to be fair one should mention that William Herschel made his discoveries with Newtonians. Once again our author’s claim fails to hold water.

Sticking with optics for the moment it is a little know and even less acknowledge fact that the Bohemian physicus and mathematician Jan Marek Marci (1595 – 1667) actually decomposed white light into its constituent colours before Newton. Remaining for a time with optics, James Gregory, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Christian Huygens and Robert Hooke were all on a level with Newton although none of them wrote such an influential book as Newton’s Optics on the subject. Now this was not all positive. Due to the influence won through the Principia, The Optics became all dominant preventing the introduction of the wave theory of light developed by Huygens and Hooke and even slowing down its acceptance in the nineteenth century when proposed by Fresnel and Young. If Newton hadn’t been born optics might even have developed and advance more quickly than it did.

This just leaves the field of classical mechanics Newton real scientific monument. Now, as I’ve pointed out several times before the three laws of motion were all borrowed by Newton from others and the inverse square law of gravity was general public property in the second half of the seventeenth century. Newton’s true genius lay in his mathematical combination of the various elements to create a whole. Now the question is how quickly might this synthesis come about had Newton never lived. Both Huygens and Leibniz had made substantial contribution to mechanics contemporaneously with Newton and the succeeding generation of French and Swiss-German mathematicians created a synthesis of Newton’s, Leibniz’s and Huygens’ work and it is this that is what we know as the field of classical mechanics. Without Newton’s undoubtedly massive contribution this synthesis might have taken a little longer to come into being but I don’t think the delay would have radically changed the world in which we live.

Like almost all great scientists Newton’s discoveries were of their time and he was only a fraction ahead of and sometimes even behind his rivals. His non-existence would probably not have had that much impact on the development of history.

Moving on to Gauss we will have other problems. Our author again makes a good start:

Isaac Newton is a hard act to follow, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Carl Gauss. If Newton is considered the greatest scientist of all time, Gauss could easily be called the greatest mathematician ever.

Very hyperbolic and hagiographic but if anybody could be called the greatest mathematician ever then Gauss would be a serious candidate. However in the next paragraph we go off the rails. The paragraph starts OK:

Carl Friedrich Gauss was born to a poor family in Germany in 1777 and quickly showed himself to be a brilliant mathematician. He published “Arithmetical Investigations,” a foundational textbook that laid out the tenets of number theory (the study of whole numbers).

So far so good but then our author demonstrates his lack of knowledge of the subject on a grand scale:

Without number theory, you could kiss computers goodbye. Computers operate, on a the most basic level, using just two digits — 1 and 0…

Here we have gone over to the binary number system, with which Gauss book on number theory has nothing to do, what so ever. In modern European mathematics the binary number system was first investigated in depth by Gottfried Leibniz in 1679 more than one hundred years before Gauss wrote his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, which as already stated has nothing on the subject. The use of the binary number system in computing is an application of the two valued symbolic logic of George Boole the 1 and 0 standing for true and false in programing and on and off in circuit design. All of which has nothing to do with Gauss. Gauss made so many epochal contributions to mathematics, physics, cartography, surveying and god knows what else so why credit him with something he didn’t do?

Moving on to John von Neumann we again have a case of credit being given where credit is not due but to be fair to our author, this time he is probably not to blame for this misattribution.  Our author ends his von Neumann description as follows:

Before his death in 1957, von Neumann made important discoveries in set theory, geometry, quantum mechanics, game theory, statistics, computer science and was a vital member of the Manhattan Project.

This paragraph is fine and if Shea Gunther had chosen to feature von Neumann’s invention of game theory or three valued quantum logic I would have said fine, praised the writer for his knowledge and moved on without comment. However instead our author dishes up one of the biggest myths in the history of the computer.

…he went on to design the architecture underlying nearly every single computer built on the planet today. Right now, whatever device or computer that you are reading this on, be it phone or computer, is cycling through a series of basic steps billions of times over each second; steps that allow it to do things like render Internet articles and play videos and music, steps that were first thought up by John von Neumann.

Now any standard computer is called a von Neumann machine in terms of its architecture because of a paper that von Neumann published in 1945, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. This paper described the architecture of the EDVAC one of the earliest stored memory computers but von Neumann was not responsible for the design, the team led by Eckert and Mauchly were. Von Neumann had merely described and analysed the architecture. His publication caused massive problems for the design team because the information now being in the public realm it meant that they were no longer able to patent their innovations. Also von Neumann’s name as author on the report meant that people, including our author, falsely believed that he had designed the EDVAC. Of historical interest is the fact that Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine in the nineteenth century already possessed von Neumann architecture!

Unsurprisingly we walk straight into another couple of history of the computer myths when we turn to Alan Turing.  We start with the Enigma story:

During World War II, Turing bent his brain to the problem of breaking Nazi crypto-code and was the one to finally unravel messages protected by the infamous Enigma machine.

There were various versions of the Enigma machine and various codes used by different branches of the German armed forces. The Polish Cipher Bureau were the first to break an Enigma code in 1932. Various other forms of the Enigma codes were broken by various teams at Bletchley Park without Turing. Turing was responsible for cracking the German Naval Enigma. The statement above denies credit to the Polish Cipher Bureau and the other 9000 workers in Bletchley Park for their contributions to encoding Enigma.

Besides helping to stop Nazi Germany from achieving world domination, Alan Turing was instrumental in the development of the modern day computer. His design for a so-called “Turing machine” remains central to how computers operate today.

I’ve lost count of how many times that I’ve seen variations on the claim in the above paragraph in the last eighteen months or so, all equally incorrect. What such comments demonstrate is that their authors actually have no idea what a Turing machine is or how it relates to computer design.

In 1936 Alan Turing, a mathematician, published a paper entitled On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. This was in fact one of four contemporaneous solutions offered to a problem in meta-mathematics first broached by David Hilbert, the Entscheidungsproblem. The other solutions, which needn’t concern us here, apart from the fact that Post’s solution is strongly similar to Turing’s, were from Kurt Gödel, Alonso Church and Emil Post. Entscheidung is the German for decision and the Entscheidungsproblem asks if for a given axiomatic system whether it is also possible with the help of an algorithm to decide if a given statement in that axiom system is true or false. The straightforward answer that all four men arrived at by different strategies is that it isn’t. There will always be undecidable statements within any sufficiently complex axiomatic system.

Turing’s solution to the Entscheidungsproblem is simple, elegant and ingenious. He hypothesised a very simple machine that was capable of reading a potentially infinite tape and following instruction encoded on that tape. Instruction that moved the tape either right or left or simply stopped the whole process. Through this analogy Turing was able to show that within an axiomatic system some problems would never be Entscheidbar or in English decidable. What Turing’s work does is, on a very abstract level, to delineate the maximum computability of any automated calculating system. Only much later, in the 1950s, after the invention of electronic computers a process in which Turing also played a role did it occur to people to describe the computational abilities of real computers with the expression ‘Turing machine’.  A Turing machine is not a design for a computer it is term used to described the capabilities of a computer.

To be quite open and honest I don’t know enough about Benoit Mandelbrot and fractals to be able to say whether our author at least got that one right, so I’m going to cut him some slack and assume that he did. If he didn’t I hope somebody who knows more about the subject that I will provide the necessary corrections in the comments.

All of the errors listed above are errors that could have been easily avoided if the author of the article had cared in anyway about historical accuracy and truth. However as is all to often the case in the history of science or in this case mathematics people are prepared to dish up a collection of half baked myths, misconceptions and not to put too fine a point on it crap and think they are performing some sort of public service in doing so. Sometimes I despair.

 

Cartographical Claptrap!

The AEON magazine website has a long essay[1] by Kurt Hollander simply titled Middle Earth that takes as its subject not the fantasy realm of J. R. R. Tolkien but the equator, the imaginary line marking the middle of the Earth’s sphere. Unfortunately this essay is severely marred by a series of errors, myths and falsities about the history of cartography and geodesy. I have selected some of the worst here for critical analysis and correction.

Our author gets off to a flying start with the biggest geodesic myth of them all:

Medieval Christian mapmakers, familiar only with a small corner of the planet, worked within strict horizons that were fixed by the Church’s interpretation of the Bible. Their Earth was flat.

My friend Darrin Hayton (@dhayton) has written several posts on the excellent PACHS blog over the years criticising the people who still insists on propagating the myth that the Europeans in the Middle Ages believed that the world was flat. Just once more for those that haven’t been listening, they didn’t. That the world was a sphere was probably first recognised by the Pythagoreans in the sixth century BCE and almost all educated people accepted this fact from at the latest the fourth century BCE up to the present.

First created in the 7th century, the Christian orbis terrarum (circle of the Earth) maps, known for visual reasons as ‘T-and-O’ maps, included only the northern hemisphere.

T and O maps actually have their roots in Greek geography and cartography and only display part of the northern hemisphere because that was all that their creators knew about.

The T represented the Mediterranean ocean, which divided the Earth’s three continents — Asia, Africa, and Europe — each of which was populated by the descendants of one of Noah’s three sons. Jerusalem usually appeared at the centre, on the Earth’s navel (ombilicum mundi), while Paradise (the Garden of Eden) was drawn to the east in Asia and situated at the top portion of the map. The O was the Ocean surrounding the three continents; beyond that was another ring of fire.

Given that the Greeks, the originators of the geography on which the T and O maps are based, lived in the Mediterranean Sea (not ocean!) they were of course well aware of the fact that it is not T shaped. The T on T and O maps actually represents in schematic form the Mediterranean and the Don and Nile rivers, as the dividing lines between the three known continents.

For the Catholic Church, the Equator marked the border of civilisation, beyond which no humans (at least, no followers of Christ) could exist. In The Divine Institutes (written between 303 and 311CE), the theologian Lactantius ridiculed the notion that there could be inhabitants in the antipodes ‘whose footsteps are higher than their heads’. Other authors scoffed at the idea of a place where the rain must fall up. In 748, Pope Zachary declared the idea that people could exist in the antipodes, on the ‘other side’ of the Christian world, heretical..

As has been pointed out by numerous people writing about the flat earth myth, Lactantius had almost no supporters of his theories.

This medieval argument was still rumbling on when Columbus first sailed southwest from Spain to the ‘Indies’ in 1492. Columbus, who had seen sub-Saharans in Portuguese ports in west Africa, disagreed with the Church: he claimed that the Torrid Zone was ‘not uninhabitable’.

Our author appears to be prejudiced against the Portuguese. Throughout the fifteenth century in a series of expeditions, started by Henry the Navigator (1394 – 1460), a succession of Portuguese explorers had been venturing further and further down the West African coast reaching the Gulf of Guinea, which lies on the equator, in 1460. These expeditions reached a climax in 1488, four years before Columbus set sail to the Indies, when Bartolomeu Dias rounded the tip of South Africa proving that one could reach the Indian Ocean by sea and pathing the way for Vasco de Gama’s 1497 voyage to India.

Although he never actually crossed the Equator, he did go beyond the borders of European maps when he inadvertently sailed to the Americas. To navigate, Columbus used, among others, the Imago Mundi (1410), a work of cosmography written by the 15th-century French theologian Pierre d’Ailly, which included one of the few T-and-O maps with north situated at the top.

The importance of Pierre d’Ailley’s Imago Mundi for Columbus lay not in the orientation of its T and O map but in the fact that d’Ailley severely underestimated the circumference of the globe thus making Columbus’ attempt to sail westward to the Indies seem more plausible than it in reality was.

Columbus’s eventual ‘discovery’ of America stretched the horizons of the European mind. The Equator was gradually reimagined: no longer the extreme limit of humanity, a geographical hell on Earth, it became simply the middle of the Earth.

In particular, Cobo has problems with the direction that mapmaking has taken. In 150AD, Ptolemy drew the first world map with north placed firmly at the top.

Earlier Greek geographers such as Eratosthenes, who also drew world maps, almost certainly also drew their maps with north at the top. Ptolemaeus is not the beginning but the culmination of Greek cartography.

This orientation has become the standard one for maps everywhere. The preeminence of north derives from the use of Polaris, also known as the North Star, as the guiding light for sailors.

This is a piece of pure fantasy on the part of out author. To quote Jerry Brotton from his excellent A History of the World in Twelve Maps, “Why north ultimately triumphed as the prime direction in the Western geographical tradition, especially considering its initial negative connotations for Christianity […], has never been fully explained. Later Greek maps and early medieval sailing charts, or portolans, were drawn using magnetic compasses, which probably established the navigational superiority of the north-south axis over an east-west one; but even so there is little reason why south could not have been adopted as the simplest point of cardinal orientation instead, and indeed Muslim mapmakers continued to draw maps with south at the top long after the adoption of the compass.”[2] I would add to this the fact that many European Renaissance maps also had south at the top.

Yet Polaris, or any other star for that matter, is not a fixed point. Because of the Sun and Moon’s gravitational attraction, the Earth actually moves like a wobbling top. This wobble, known to astronomers as the precession of the Equator, represents a cyclical shift in the Earth’s axis of rotation. It makes the stars seem to migrate across the sky at the rate of about one degree every 72 years. This gradual shift means that Polaris will eventually cease to be viewed as the North Star, and sailors will have to orient themselves by other means.

In 1569, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, the first to mass-produce Earth and star globes,

Geradus Mercator (1512 – 1594) was not the first to mass-produce Earth and star globes Johannes Schöner  (1477 – 1547) was.

devised a system for projecting the round Earth onto a flat sheet of paper.

Our author, probably unintentionally or at least I hope so, creates the impression that Mercator was the first to devise a map projection from the sphere onto a flat sheet of paper; he, of course, wasn’t. This achievement is usually credited to Eratosthenes in the third century BCE. Ptolemaeus’ Geographia (about 150 CE) outlines three different map projections.

His ‘new and augmented description of Earth corrected for the use of sailors’ made the Earth the same width at the Equator and the poles, thus distorting the size of the continents. Although Mercator created his projection (still used today in almost all world maps) for navigation purposes, his scheme led to a bloated sense of self for the northern countries, located at the top of the map, while diminishing the southern hemisphere’s sense of size and importance.

Our author is rather vague about how or why this distortion occurs. Because the distance between the parallels of longitude in the Mercator projection increases the further one moves from the equator, landmasses become distorted in area (larger than they are in reality) the further they are away from the equator. Because the major landmasses in the northern hemisphere are further removed from the equator than those in the southern hemisphere they take on an illusionary physical dominance.

Might I, not so politely, suggest to Mr Hollander that if he wishes to write about the history of cartography in the future that he indulges in some proper research of the subject before he puts finger to keyboard.

---

[1] I’m not sure whether I should thank or curse Richard Carter FCD (@friendsofdarwin) for drawing my attention to this essay. Whichever, he is to blame for the existence of this post.

[2] Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, Allen Lane, London, 2012, p. 11

The Phlogiston Theory is not equivalent to the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.

In recent days the Internet science community has got its collective nickers in a mighty twist. The disciples of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (AAH) have dared to hold an international congress in London and the, oh so irresponsible, press has wasted precious print and cyber space reporting on this frivolity. For those not in the know the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis claims that certain aspects of human evolution can only be explained by assuming that a group of anthropoids, the future humans, lived for a substantial period in water. My evolutionary theory expert friends assure me that this hypothesis is a festering heap of non-scientific nonsense, as was forcibly expressed by Henry Gee in this Guardian blog post. So far so good but a couple of science writers thought it would be a good idea to draw parallels between the AAH and one or other historical scientific theory with disastrous results.

The first of these was Ben Richmond writing on The Mother Board in his post How the Aquatic Ape Theory Keeps Floating On. Mr Richmond chose to equate the AAH with the Ptolemaic geocentric theory. He wrote:

But the aquatic apes theory is more like Ptolemaic models of the cosmos that Copernicus overthrew. These models of the solar system had to be ever more complex to keep the Earth in the middle and also account for the incongruous movement of the planets. In the end Copernicus’s moving the Sun to the center of the solar system simplified the model…

This paragraph is of course a complete myth that has absolutely nothing to do with what really happened in the sixteenth century. As this is a standard myth that gets repeated time and time again I shall briefly sketch, not for the first time, the true facts of the story.

The Ptolemaic models developed in the Middle Ages, first by Islamic astronomers and then, most recently before Copernicus, by Peuerbach actually became simpler not more complex. The Peuerbachian geocentric model in use as Copernicus published his De revolutionibus was actually simpler than Copernicus’ heliocentric model. The contemporary astronomers hoped that Copernicus’ model would at least deliver more accurate data on the positions of the heavenly bodies, the, at the time, principle function of mathematical astronomy but the Copernican system based on the same data as the Ptolemaic systems was just as inaccurate as its predecessors. Heliocentricity only “overthrew” geocentricity as Kepler developed his actually simpler and much more accurate elliptical astronomy in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

Ed Yong, notable science writer, chose a similar tactic and compared, in a tweet, the AAH not with geocentricity but with the phlogiston theory of eighteenth century chemistry.

Ed Yong tweeted:

After the recent shadow biosphere piece & this wk’s aquatic apes one, I look forward to the Obsever’s exposés on phlogiston & cold fusion

Rebecca Stewart praised his audacity in another tweet:

Phlogiston is sooo underrated!

Karen James crowned him a master tweeter for this piece of brilliance

That last tweet shows why ‪@edyong209 is considered a master tweeter. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised; tweeting is writing, after all.

This comparison is just as wrong as Richmond’s and casts a poor light on Ed Yong for having made the comparison. Yong’s tweet and those of his supporters imply, at least unintentionally, that AAH and the phlogiston theory are equivalent in their scientific status a complete fallacy. The AAH is a highly dubious hypothesis that does not according to Henry Gee, even agree with the know facts of evolution theory whereas the phlogiston theory was an important scientific research programme, which played an important role in the evolution of chemistry in the eighteenth century.

It is very easy from our standpoint in the twenty-first century to pour scorn on the theory of phlogiston, which viewed whiggishly, that is in comparison to our current knowledge of chemistry, can in some of its aspect appear more than somewhat ridiculous. However viewed within the context of the situation in which it was born the phlogiston theory made a great deal of sense.

Phlogiston arose at the end of the seventeenth century when the dominant theory of matter was still the four-element theory of the ancient Greeks. This had been supplemented by the tria prima concept of the Paracelcians. On top of the four Greek elements of earth, water, fire and air Paracelsus had added the principles of mercury, sulphur and salt. It is important to realise that these are principles involved in the composition of substances rather than substances themselves. In an analogy based on the combustion of a piece of wood Paracelsus compared the smoke to mercury, the flame to sulphur and the ash to salt. This analogy is important, as combustion alongside distillation was one of the two principle methods of chemical investigation available to alchemists in the Early Modern Period.

Whilst rejecting Paracelcian alchemy the German physician Johann Joachim Becher (1635 – 1682) borrowed the tria prima replacing the mercury, sulphur and salt with three forms of the element earth:

terra fluida or mercurious earth, which contributed fluidity, subtility, volatility and metallicity to substances.

terra pinguis or fatty earth, which produced oily, sulphureous and combustible properties.

terra  lapidea or vitreous earth, which was the principle of fusibilty.

Becher published this theory in his Physica Subterranea in 1667. For Becher his terra pinguis played an essential role in combustion.

Another German physician Georg Ernst Stahl (1659 – 1734) took up Becher’s theory, in 1718, renaming terra pinguis, phlogiston, from the Greek meaning inflammable, using this principle to explain both combustion and corrosion (rusting). Hypothesising that all inflammable materials contain phlogiston, which is consumed or used up during combustion. The important point is that the phlogiston theory as developed by Stahl readily explained the known facts of combustion.[1]

Working within the phlogiston research programme, in particular English chemists such as Joseph Black, Daniel Rutherford, Henry Cavendish, James Watt and Joseph Priestley isolated and discovered a whole range of elemental and compound gasses and furthered the evolution of chemistry over the next sixty or seventy years. In fact it was using the discoveries of the phlogistonists that Lavoisier and others were able to produce the synthesis that became known as modern chemistry. This dependence on the phlogistonists was so great that the great German nineteenth century chemist Justus Freiherr von Liebig stated in his third Familiar Letter on Chemistry: “He discovered no new body, no new property, no natural phenomenon previously unknown; but all the facts established by him were the necessary consequences of the labours of those who preceded him.”[2]

Supplanted by the Lavoisier’s synthesis phlogiston became an obsolete theory one that viewed from the new standpoint of the facts that it had discovered was no longer able to explain the available evidence a fate it was soon to share with Lavoisier’s own contribution to the evolution of chemistry.

Above I said that viewed whiggishly, that is in comparison to our current knowledge of chemistry, can in some of its aspect appear more than somewhat ridiculous. Interestingly the, now, Cambridge historian of chemistry Hasok Chang has written a brilliant paper titled We Have Never Been Whiggish (About Phlogiston)[3], in which he takes a new whiggish look at the phlogiston theory and its successor. I recommend this paper to anybody wishing to equate the phlogiston theory to the AAH.

Unfortunately it is common practice for people largely ignorant of the history of science to equate modern pieces of idiocy with obsolete theories from the evolution of science that having served their purpose and having been superseded by other theories are then considered as suitable subjects for ridicule. This is wrong, with a probability approaching certainty all of the scientific theories that we use today will someday themselves be superseded by better or more explanatory theories and become in their turn obsolete. This will not make them ridiculous but they will become part of a long chain of theories that have facilitated the evolution of science. Theories that no matter how strange they might appear to us from our privileged position of hindsight should be treated with the respect that they deserve for their important contribution to the advancement of knowledge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

[1] This very brief account of the origins of the phlogiston theory is largely taken from, William H. Brock, The Fontana History of Chemistry, Fontana Press, London, 1992, pp. 78-86.

[2] I owe this Liebig quote to regular Renaissance Mathematicus reader and commentator Arjen Dijksman (@materion) to whom I’m very grateful.

[3] Hasok Chang, We Have Never Been Whiggish (About Phlogiston), Centaurus, Vol. 51, 2009, pp. 239-264.

AAARRRGGGHHHHH……

Crunch, Crunch, Crunch, Crunch, Crunch,…

That’s the sound of me banging my head against a concrete wall to relieve the pain I suffered on reading the latest pearl of wisdom that world famous astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson imparted to his 1, 228, 112 adoring acolytes on Twitter.

Not that anybody asked, but the symbol “lb” for pound comes from an abbreviation of the constellation Libra, the scales. Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson)

This is the sort of comment, which if made by one of his students, my twitter friend @grummpyhistorian tweets with a hash tag such as #epicetymologicalfail.

The Latin word libra has two meanings it is both the Roman standard unit of weight (approx. 327g) as well as a balance or set of scales. It is the former that is the origin of the abbreviation lb for pound, the standard unit of weight in the imperial system, and the latter, which supplied the name of the constellation. It is of course also the former that is the origin of the £ symbol for the pound unit of money, originally a pound or libra of some precious metal. This, if my memory serves me correctly, however comes into English via the French word for pound, livre. Instead of lb we might have had pf as abbreviation for the pound from the German word Pfund.

As to the asterism it would appear that it was the Babylonian who first called it a balance as explained here by Ian Ridpath in his excellent book Star Tales:

Now there has been a lot of deriding and decrying of the humanities and their usefulness or lack there of in recent times but if Neil deGrasse Tyson had paid a little more attention to the humanities in his education he might not have put his foot straight into his mouth when he opened it. He could have saved me a lot of mental pain if he had a) learnt some Latin or b) read an etymological dictionary or c) consulted the much-maligned Wikipedia anyone of which would have prevented him from exposing himself as an ignoramus, a Latin term meaning, “we do not know”.

Gopnik, Galileo and Ed Yong: Galileo not admitting to being wrong.

Ed Yong (@edyong209) is a well-known and highly respected science writer. At regular intervals he posts lists of links on his website, Not Exactly Rocket Science, of science stories that he has found interesting, a sort of one-man blog carnival. On his links list for 20 April he included a link to Adam Gopnik’s BBC Point of View piece, which I recently criticised, with the following description.

Galileo was a great scientist because he wasn’t afraid to admit when he was wrong. If only more of us did the same.

Now in recent months we have had a series of talks and articles by such luminaries as Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, making similar claims for science and scientists in general. That is that scientists are characterised by their willingness to admit that they are wrong and to give up the theories they hold that have been proved to be defective. Such speeches have had historians of science all over the Intertubes banging their heads against the wall in collective displays of disbelief because even a cursory survey of the history of science would show that the exact opposite is true, scientists hang on to their cherished theories until the bitter end against all sorts of opposition and refuting evidence and Galileo is a prime example of such behaviour. For me this attitude, and it is not necessarily one that I condemn, was wonderfully summed up by Einstein when Eddington confirmed the General Theory of Relativity empirically. Asked by a reporter what he would have done if Eddington had refuted his theory Einstein is said to have replied then I would have said that Eddington’s measurement were wrong. A certain amount of tenacity is important in the early development of scientific theories, which are seldom born complete and perfect and are brought to their optimal condition through a process of criticism and modification to refute that criticism. Not giving up supposedly refuted theories is part and parcel of the scientific process but sometimes this tenacity can be and is misplaced and Galileo is one historical figure who delivers very good examples of a man who held onto wrong theories beyond the point of no return.

Galileo is well known as a supporter of Copernican heliocentricity and as one of the founders of the new mechanics but in both theories his adherence to an antiquated theory held him back an adherence that he maintained although he must have known that it was wrong. The antiquated theory that Galileo refused to abandon was the so-called Platonic axiom in astronomy. This metaphysical axiom says that the planets move with uniform motion in circles. Like Copernicus before him Galileo’s fidelity to this axiom meant the retention of the whole Ptolemaic apparatus of deferents and epicycles. Clinging to this axiom also meant that Galileo failed to formulate the principle of inertia properly as he believed, like a good Aristotelian, that only circular motion was natural motion. All well and good but why do I claim that he should have known better? The answer is Johannes Kepler.

Before Galileo had finished writing his Dialogo Kepler had already delivered his three laws of planetary motion thus completely refuting the Platonic axiom. Kepler’s laws were strict mathematical laws derived from Tycho Brahe’s empirical observations. Here was modern science in action if ever there was and Galileo ignored it clinging to the clearly refuted Greek orthodoxy, why? Faced with this seemingly inexplicable behaviour of their hero the Galileo fan club argue that Galileo could not accept Kepler’s bizarre Renaissance meta-physics and that is why he refused to accept Kepler’s work. This seems like a reasonable argument until one takes a closer look at the evidence. Kepler’s first two laws were delivered in his Astronomia Nova (1609) a book that contains none of his possibly off putting meta-physics. Also the clearest statement of his three laws and their application to a heliocentric system is in his Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae  (1617, 1620 & 1621) a textbook, which also is relatively free of anything that might have offended Galileo’s sensibilities.

I think that the answer is actually to be found in Galileo’s ego. Kepler’s work on the planetary orbits was a much better and more convincing argument for heliocentricity than anything Galileo had produced. In fact it was the Epitome Copernicanae combined with Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables that led to the acceptance of heliocentricity in the seventeenth century and not Galileo’s work.  If Galileo were to include Kepler’s work in his Dialogo then he would be merely the messenger and not the creator so he simply ignored it and stuck to the Platonic axiom that he knew to be wrong.

Galileo’s second case of refusing to admit that he was wrong is even more undignified. In 1618 a spectacularly bright comet was visible over Europe, which was of course carefully observed by nearly all the leading astronomers. One notable exception was Galileo who because of ill health had been unable to take part in the observations. By now Galileo was Northern Italy’s leading natural philosopher feted for his quick wit and his even quicker slicing tongue with which he took great pleasure in dicing his scientific opponents. Asked for his opinion on the nature of the new comet Galileo, who as already noted actually knew nothing about it, took the strange step of attacking the Jesuit astronomer Orazio Grassi who had carefully observed the comet and based on his observations had correctly calculated that the comet was a supra-lunar celestial body. Galileo now claimed that Grassi was wrong and presented what was in essence the out dated and discredited Aristotelian theory that comets were sub-lunar meteorological phenomena. This notorious dispute culminated in Galileo’s Il Saggiatore with its famous “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics” quote. Here is Galileo bizarrely lecturing Grassi that investigations of nature must be empirical and mathematical in a situation where Grassi’s investigations were just that and Galileo’s own were definitely not. Of course Galileo’s brilliant polemic crushed his poor hard done by opponent without Galileo’s claque noticing that Grassi was in the right and Galileo very much in the wrong something that the maestro almost certainly knew, however his ego would not let him admit it. He had to win the argument at all costs even if he was horribly wrong.

We now turn to the most notorious case of Galileo refusing to accept that he was wrong his theory of the tides. This was the crowing glory of Galileo’s argumentation for heliocentricity his only empirical evidence. This took up the whole of the fourth day of his Dialogo delivering the climax and was the only argument that he brought forward in 1615 when he was trying to head off a condemnation of Copernicus by the Inquisition. This was Galileo’s trump. Unfortunately it suffered from one glaring defect it was wrong. It was empirically, irrefutably, undeniably, indisputably wrong.

This theory of the tides was first formulated in about 1596 by Galileo and Paolo Sarpi in one of their intellectual sparring sessions. In fact it is not clear if the theory is from Galileo or Sarpi, 1596 being the date that Sarpi first recorded it in his scientific diary. Of itself it is actually quite an ingenious idea. If the earth is actually moving as stipulated in a heliocentric hypothesis then wouldn’t the water on the earths surface slop around like water in a bowl being carried by someone and might this not be the explanation for the tides? If this were the case it would indeed be a solid empirical argument in favour of heliocentricity. In fact John Heilbronn in his Galileo biography dates Galileo’s conversion to Copernicanism to 1596 and the formulation of this theory.

As already stated above this theory has a major problem it was empirically refuted. As formulated by Galileo/Sarpi there would only be one tide a day but as every coastal inhabitant knows there are two. There is also another problem for this theory there already existed a better theory to explain the tides, a theory that we now know to be true; they are caused by the moon. The correlation between the tides and the phases of the moon had already been observed in antiquity but as every scientist knows, or should know, correlation does not equal causation and there was no known explanation as to how the moon could cause the tides. Newton was not even a blip on the horizon at this time.

Now Gopnik argued in his two essay’s that Galileo stuck to his refuted theory of the tides because the much more rational alternative smacked too much of magic for him to accept it, action at a distance would prove a difficult point even for Newton. Gopnik has solid evidence for his claim this is exactly the argument that Galileo brings for rejecting the lunar tide theory in book four of his Dialogo. So Gopnik is right? I don’t think he is. I think Galileo is being deceptive.

Galileo is convinced that his theory of the tides can deliver the empirical proof he so desperately needs for heliocentricity. If it were true then it would indeed the only such proof he has to offer. All the other arguments he marshals in his masterpiece are suggestive that heliocentricity might be a viable alternative but none of them is a proof or anything remotely like it. He needs his theory of the tides. He spent thirty years trying to cure its very obvious defect and failed but he is still not prepared to abandon it. Now as already pointed out there existed a much better empirically based explanation for the tides the lunar theory, one that for example Kepler backed. It of course lacked an explanatory mechanism but one could set up a research programme based on the concept of attractive forces, an idea that Kepler was already playing with, to find that mechanism, which is of course exactly what Newton did. If however Galileo accepted the greater plausibility of the lunar tide theory then his only “proof” of heliocentricity was down the drain so we look for a reason to reject it. In doing so he of course rejected the possibility of following Kepler down the path of considering forces controlling the solar system; a path that interestingly Galileo’s pupil Borelli took.

To summarise I don’t think that Galileo rejected the lunar tide theory because he thought it was magical. I think he rejected the lunar tide theory because it posed a serious threat to his own mechanical tide theory the only supposed proof that he had for a geocentric astronomy and having rejected it he looked around for an excuse to justify his rejection. There are lots of other examples of contemporary natural philosophers and astronomers employing the same tactic, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and Galileo himself but to detail them here would make an already long post even longer. I shall save them for another post on another occasion.

As we have seen far from being unafraid to admit that he was wrong on three separate and highly significant occasion, significant for the evolution of science that is, not only did Galileo refuse to admit that he was wrong although he knew that he was but he actually did his best to bamboozle people into believing that he was right.

Isaac Newton: The Last Lone Genius?

The Friday before last, with much advanced publicity, the BBC broadcast a new documentary film biography of Isaac Newton with the title The Last Magician. This phrase is part of a famous quote by John Maynard Keynes, “not the first scientist but the last magician”, describing his feeling upon reading the Newtonian alchemical manuscripts that he acquired at the auction of the Portsmouth family Newton papers in 1936.  This of course together with the advanced advertising for the programme signalled that we were due for a fresh dose of “did you know that Newton was a secret alchemist?” A phenomenon that Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt has blogged on informatively in the past.

Based on quotes from Newton’s own writings and correspondence as well of those of his contemporaries the programme was in its basics factually correct. As usual for BBC historical documentaries it was well-produced and excellently filmed and thus pleasant to watch. The basic structure was the direct quotes being spoken by actors in costume and commented upon by five more or less experts. These were the historians of science Rob Iliffe head of the Newton Papers editing project and a genuine Newton expert, Patricia Fara author of an excellent book on the changing image of Newton down the centuries and Lisa Jardine expert on Renaissance history of science, as well as popular science writer James Gleick author of a competent popular Newton biography and astrophysicist turned novelist Stuart Clark.

Given all of these preconditions it should have been an excellent hours entertainment for a historian of science like myself, unfortunately it turned out to be a major disappointment for two reasons. The programme deliberately created two principle impressions that were and are fundamentally wrong.

The first of these turned up in the pre-programme publicity but also featured prominently fairly early in the documentary in what seems at first glance to be a fairly harmless statement:

By the age of 21, he had rejected 2,000 years of scientific orthodoxy…

This brief phrase contains two claims one implicit and one explicit. The implicit claim is how wonderful Newton was to take such a bold step when he was only 21 years old. Anyone who has spent anytime at all looking at the history of mathematics knows that mathematicians tend to be very precocious. Pascal wrote the paper that gained him entry to the top flight of seventeenth century mathematics at the age of sixteen. In the nineteenth century the teenage William Rowan Hamilton was trotted out in public like a circus pony to display his brilliance. The stories are legion and there is absolutely nothing unusual in Newton intellectual development it’s par for the course for a highly talented mathematician.

As Becky put it very succinctly in a tweet what they are actually saying here is that there had been no science since Aristotle, which is of course complete rubbish. The scientific orthodoxy of the day, which was by the way on the verge of disappearing, of which more shortly, came into being in the thirteenth century when Albertus Magnus and his pupil Thomas Aquinas created a synthesis of Catholic theology and Aristotle’s philosophy with the addition of Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy. This synthesis is known as Scholastic or Aristotelian physics or natural philosophy. However as Edward Grant, one of the leading experts on medieval science, points out Aristotelian philosophy is not Aristotle’s philosophy. It is also important to note that Aristotelian philosophy was never carved in stone but in fact changed and developed continuously over the next four hundred years. Examples of major changes are the work of the Oxford Calculatores and the Paris Physicists in the fourteenth century. The Aristotelian physics of the fifteenth century is a very different beast to that of the thirteenth century. The geocentric astronomy produced in the middle of the fifteenth century by Peuerbach and Regiomontanus differed substantially from that of the first Ptolemaic translations of the twelfth century.

Added to all this change and development the first seeds of what would become modern science began to poke their slender stems out of the substrate of scientific innovation around the beginning of the fifteenth century. By 1661 when Newton went up to university Keplerian heliocentric astronomy had become the new orthodoxy and Aristotelian physics was being pushed out by the new physics developed by mathematicians such as Tartaglia and Benedetti in the sixteenth century and Stevin, Galileo, Borelli, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens and others in the seventeenth. One should bear in mind that the Leopoldina, the Accademia del Cimento, the Royal Society and the Acadédemie des Sciences all institutions dedicated to the propagation and development of the new science were founded in 1652, 1657, 1660 and 1666 respectively. The young Newton did not like some Carrollian hero draw his Vorpal Blade to slay the Jabberwock of ancient Greek science but like any bright young academic would do jumped on the band wagon of modern science that was speeding full speed ahead into the future.

We now turn to what I see as the most serious failing of the documentary expressed in the question posed in the title of this post. For the best part of an hour the documentary banged on about Newton’s solitude, his isolation his lone path to the secrets of nature. We were presented with the ultimate lone genius of the history of science. It went so far that the only other contemporary researchers mentioned by name were Descartes in passing and Hooke purely in a negative light. The way that the programme was structured created a totally false impression of Newton’s scientific endeavours.

We actually know very little about Newton’s time as a student though it is safe to say that he was more the type to curl up in front of the fire with a good book on a Friday evening than to go to the latest rave at which ever student hostelry was in that term. As a fellow we know that he communicated and worked together with other scholars such as Isaac Barrow so to talk of total solitude as the documentary did is wrong. After he emerged from obscurity at the beginning of the 1670s with his reflecting telescope and his famous paper on the phenomenon of colours he was in no way isolated. Even if Cambridge was somewhat off the beaten track in those days Newton corresponded with other scholars in Britain and also abroad as can easily be seen in his voluminous correspondence as edited by Turnbull. He was also often visited by other mathematical scholars such as Halley or John Collins. When he left Cambridge to go to London he became positively gregarious. Maintaining a town house with his niece Catherine Barton, a renowned social beauty, as his housekeeper where he received and entertained visitors. At the Royal Mint, which he attended daily, he was surrounded by a large staff. After 1703 he presided over the weekly meetings of the Royal Society and on other evenings surrounded by his acolytes he held court in one or other of the then fashionable London coffee bars.

More important for me was the totally false impression created by the documentary of Newton’s mathematical and scientific work. Anyone being introduced to Newton for the first time would come away with the impression that he revolutionised mathematics, physics and astronomy in a superhuman solo endeavour completely isolated from the rest of the late seventeenth century intellectual world.

We got presented with Newton in 1666 creating a completely new branch of mathematics, he only actually started it then and it took a number of years to develop. At no point was any other mathematician mentioned. The fact that Newton either, directly or indirectly, knew of and built on the previous work in this field of Kepler, Cavalieri, Fermat, Pascal, Descartes, van Schooten, Barrow and others was quietly swept under the carpet. Even worse no mention what so ever of Leibniz who independently developed the same mathematics almost at the same time from the same sources. This of course led eventually to the most notorious priority dispute in the history of science involving many of the leading mathematicians of Europe.

The same thing occurred with the presentation of his work in optics, no mention of Kepler, Schiener, Descartes, Grimaldi, Gregory, Hooke, Huygens or anybody for that matter. Isaac apparently did it all alone in isolation.

This form of presentation continued with his greatest work the Principia. We got each of the famous laws of motion presented individually but no hint of the fact that the first was taken from Beeckman by way of Descartes, the second from Huygens and the third from his readings in alchemy. We were told that he derived the law of gravity from his three laws but no mention was made of the fact that the concept of the law of gravity was common, much discussed intellectual property in academic circles at the time. No mention of the contributions made to the substance of the Principia by the work of Kepler, Galileo, Cassini, Halley and above all Flamsteed. We had the strange spectacle of Hooke famous accusation of Newton having stolen his law of gravity and plagiarised him delivered in a passionate speech to the Royal Society in 1660 but no mention what so ever that Hooke’s accusation had more than a little substance. Hooke and Newton had corresponded on the subject in the early 1680s and Hooke had already formulated a concept of universal gravity before Newton. This correspondence was with certainty one of the spurs that led Newton to write the Principia although Hook’s claims as to the extent of his contribution are wildly exaggerated.

Isaac Newton did not live and work in an intellectual vacuum as was very strongly implied either deliberately or accidently through bad scripting by this documentary. He was part of a strong multi-faceted scientific community who supplied both the scaffolding and a significant part of substance of Newton’s life work in mathematics, physics and astronomy. He was in no way a lone genius but a highly significant cog in a large intellectual endeavour.

There was a time some decades back when some historians of science went so far as to decry the Principia as purely a work of synthesis with only a very small original contribution from Newton. This view was shown to be exaggerated and invalid and has been dropped but the opposite point of view implied by this documentary of the Principia as being alone the work of Newton’s genius is even more false.

Before I close there are a couple of small points from the film that I think should be mentioned. As is all too often the case we had the tired old statement that after Newton became President of the Royal Society he produced no more original scientific work. This was as always made without explicit comment but with a strong implicit negative aura. Dear people, when Isaac Newton became President of the Royal Society in 1703 he was already sixty years old. He had written and published two of the most important major scientific works in the history of mankind, his Principia and his Optics, as well as vast quantities of, largely unpublished, absolutely world-class mathematics, which he did however circulate in manuscript amongst his acolytes. What more did you expect him to do (FFS)?

I noted four major scientific/historical errors during the film, a fairly low quota; there may have been others. We of course get introduced to Newton’s reflecting telescope, the invention that first made him known to the world at large, but then we get informed that this instrument played a major role in marine navigation in the eighteenth century. Now whilst it is true that the reflecting telescope, mostly Gregorian’s and not Newtonian’s, had become the instrument of choice for astronomers by the middle of the eighteenth century they were for several good reasons not used for navigation on ships. Firstly reflecting telescopes whilst in principle smaller than refracting ones don’t telescope and so are more massive and cumbersome than the classical marine telescope. Secondly until the nineteenth century reflecting telescopes had metal mirrors made of so-called speculum metal an alloy that unfortunately was very susceptible to corrosion necessitating regular re-polishing. The salt-water atmosphere of sea voyages would have been very adverse for such mirrors requiring almost daily re-polishing and thus completely impractical.

The next error I spotted was a real howler. A voice over informed the viewer that, “for centuries light was considered the purest form of energy in the universe.” Really? Although etymologically derived from an ancient Greek word the physics concept of energy was first appeared in the nineteenth century, as did the recognition that light is a form of energy. Nuff said.

Moving along the historical time scale in the opposite direction voice over informed us the Newton’s Principia made possible the accurate prediction of comets and eclipses. Now the former is indeed true although the credit should properly go to Halley who first showed that some comets were periodical and obeyed Newton’s law of gravity. The latter is however again a real history of science howler. The Babylonians could accurately predict lunar eclipses in about the fifth century BCE and the ability to accurately predict solar eclipses was also developed in antiquity. No need to wait for Newton.

My final error is the one that as a historian of science causes me the most concern. Whilst discussing Newton’s alchemy voice over stated correctly Newton’s alchemical belief that light and matter are both products of some as yet undiscovered primal alchemical substance. The claim was immediately made that Newton had anticipated Einstein’s famous E = MC²! This claim being, to my surprise, repeated by Rob Iliffe an excellent historian of science. Now I’m not a big fan of the Kuhn/Feyerabend principle of the incommensurability of scientific theories. This says that one can’t compare scientific theories because the definitions of the concepts that they contain differ and are thus not comparable. Newton’s concept of force is not Maxwell’s concept of force for example. However I think that here we have a genuine case of incommensurability. The metaphysical concepts behind Newton’s alchemical theory and the metaphysical concepts behind Einstein’ theory of relativity are in no way comparable. It is not even comparing apples with oranges; it’s comparing apples with bicycles!

On the whole I think what was superficially a very good and certainly an excellently produced documentary failed miserably as a piece of history of science for the reasons that I have outlined above. Maybe I’m being too harsh but on the whole I don’t think so. For me the very strong emphasis of the biography of Newton as some sort of lone genius whether intended or an accidental product of ill considered scripting made this documentary next to worthless as a contribution to popular history of science.

 

 

Help! I’ve just been savaged by a toothless American bulldog.

I really think that the BBC is trying to piss me off this week. First they dish up the total disaster that was Great Lives “Galileo” on Radio 4. Then they present a highly questionable documentary on Isaac Newton on BBC 4, which, have no fear gentle readers, I will deal with in a later post. Finally Adam Gopnik abuses his position as one of the rotating cast of speakers on Radio 4’s Point of View to insult the critics of his highly dubious New Yorker Galileo essay. Add to this Radio 1’s totally wrong and highly cowardly refusal to play Ding Dong The Witch is Dead followed by some maverick BBC reporters making life very difficult for all student field trips to non democratic countries in the future and I could fall out of love with the Corporation that had nourished my soul since I first started to become aware of sound.

Mr Gopnik! Adam Gopnik chose this Sunday to answer those people who had possessed the infernal cheek to criticise his god given words on the great Galileo Galilei. Did he do so by engaging with his critics? Maybe he did so by producing some evidence to back up those of his utterances that had been deemed false by his detractors. Wrong on both counts. Our internationally renowned wordsmith resorted to the lowest form of riposte, the argumentum ad hominem.

I am conceited enough to thing that I personally was, at least, one of the targets at which his insults were launched, because of my criticism of his previous misrepresentation of John Dee, and having both heard the original broadcast and read the transcript of his talk all I can say is that I feel that I have been savaged by a toothless, arthritic American bulldog that is stone deaf and suffers from cataracts. It doesn’t really hurt and one feels slightly embarrassed at having to bat the poor demented creature away but its drool, which as all dog owners know if very slimy and gooey, is difficult to get out of one’s clothes.

So how does Mr Gopnik go about insulting his critics? He doesn’t do it directly but hides it behind even more waffle about Galileo, which only compounds his errors from the original article.

He starts of his talk with the following world-weary complaint of the plagued author:

When you write for a living, over time you learn that certain subjects will get set responses. You’re resigned to getting the responses before you write the story.

[…]

…you will get many letters and emails from what we call the cracked (and I think you call the barking)…

[…]

The oddest response, though, is if you write making an obvious point about an historical period or historical figure, you will get lots of letters and emails insisting that the obvious thing about the guy or his time is completely wrong.

By now you should be getting the drift, it is inconceivable that Mr Gopnik is wrong about anything, he obviously has god like powers and is omniscient, so it follows that his critics are not just wrong they are barking mad.

Now just in case you think that our god like author is only talking about those who are genuinely cracked he makes very clear that he isn’t:

Now these letters and emails come more often from the half-bright, some of them professional academics, than from the fully bonkers or barking.

You can tell the half-bright from the barking because the barking don’t know how little they know, while the half-bright know enough to think that they know a lot, but don’t know enough to know what part of what they know is actually worth knowing.

We now finally arrive at the grounds for our sterling authors woes his essay on Galileo. This time he choses to base his story around the myth of Galileo throwing balls off the Tower of Pisa. He sort of half admits that it might not be true. It’s actually a complete load of rubbish. However he doesn’t think that that matters because “it’s a legend that points towards the truth”. This shows that Gopnik neither understands Galileo nor physics. The story is a load of rubbish because it wouldn’t produce a result that confirms the laws of fall, it would instead confirm Aristotle’s view, which Galileo knew full well and which is why he would never had tried it. Galileo was not stupid.

Gopnik now goes into hagiographic modus:

In 1632 Galileo wrote a great book – his Dialogue On Two World Systems. It’s one of the best books ever written because it’s essentially a record of a temperament, of a kind of impatience and irritability that leads men to drop things from towers and see what happens when they fall.

The Dialogo is indeed a fine piece of polemic carefully constructed to cover the yawning gaps in the science that it contained. In those parts where Galileo sticks to his undoubted strengths as an experimental scientist it is about men who design carefully thought out, skilfully constructed and studiously carried out experiments and not about impatient and irritable idiots who throw things off towers.

Having led us away from his lament about the crackpots who make his life so difficult he now returns to stick the knife in to those barking critics who dared to contradict the master.

In that essay I wrote about Galileo I compared him to John Dee, the famous English magician, alchemist and astrologer, who was one of his contemporaries who was also a consultant to Queen Elizabeth I, and who read everything there was to read in his time and knew everything there was to know in the esoterica of his time – but didn’t know what was worth knowing.

Notice how he carefully avoids crediting Dee with being a Renaissance mathematicus, which he indubitably was, and one of the leading mathematical practitioners in Europe in the third quarter of the 16^th century. Also notice the subtle piece of invention at the end, “but didn’t know what was worth knowing”. This is a claim of Gopnik’s own creation and is in no way backed up by the historical facts about Dee.

He knew a lot about Copernicus, for instance, but he also spent half his life trying to talk to angels and have demons intervene to help him turn lead into gold.

Here we have a lovely example of rhetorical bait-and-switch. Dee might have known a lot about Copernicus but that knowledge was worthless because he talked to angels. In fact Dee and his group, Thomas Digges, John Feild (sic), Robert Recorde, Gemma Frisius etc, played an important and highly significant role in the propagation and dissemination of the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis, something that Gopnik with his black and white vision of the history of science is apparently incapable of understanding. Or more probably he can’t acknowledge because to do so he would have to admit that he is wrong and as we already know he can’t be wrong because he’s omniscient.

Now Mr Gopnik descends to the level of sneering condescension a sure sign that he has run out of real arguments and has to rely on argumentum ad hominem:

Well, it turns out that John Dee the magician and astrologer has his admirers – indeed his web pages and his fan clubs and his chatboard, just like Harry or Liam or Justin – and they took up the cause of the old alchemist with me. How dare you knock John, his fans, some of them half-bright, some of them just a little, well, barking, insisted. Wasn’t he a formidably erudite man particularly on just those subjects – stars and orbits and falling objects – that Galileo cared about too? Why shut him out of the scientific creed.

The only sentence worth noting in this gratuitous piece of slime is the final question, “Why shut him out of the scientific creed?” Gropnik’s answer is illuminating as it displays his total ignorance of the history of science:

Well, that was the point I was making. And it seems to me worth making again – and then again and then again. It just can’t be made too often.

The scientific revolution wasn’t an extension in erudition. It involved instead what we might call a second-order attitude to erudition – and if that sounds fancy, it just means the human practice of calling bull on an idea which you think is full of it, and being unafraid to do so.

Dee was a learned man – too learned a man, in fact, in whose head all kinds of stuff lodged, some obviously silly and some in retrospect sane, but impacted together like trash in a dump heap. Above all, his work is filled with supernatural explanations – with angels and demons and astrological spells.

There are two salient points to be made here “the scientific revolution […] means […] calling bull on an idea which you think is full of it, and being unafraid to do so”. Ignoring for the moment the fact that the majority of historians of science no longer believe in a thing called the scientific revolution Gopnik’s characterisation of what happened to science in the seventeenth century is totally and fundamentally wrong. Modern science emerged throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from an incredible jumble of rational, semi-rational, moderately weird and totally bat-shit insane ideas, concepts and theories. I would suggest that Mr Gopnik should avoid the works of Johannes Kepler who contributed considerably more to the development of modern science than Galileo (and yes I’m prepared at anytime to defend that claim). Kepler’s contributions to science emerged in a pot pourri of Renaissance ideas and theories that at times make even Dee’s conversations with angels seem almost rational. I shall come to Newton’s alchemy in a minute.

We return to Dr Dee:

Dee was a learned man – too learned a man, in fact, in whose head all kinds of stuff lodged, some obviously silly and some in retrospect sane, but impacted together like trash in a dump heap. Above all, his work is filled with supernatural explanations – with angels and demons and astrological spells.

Again we catch Gopnik making things up. Dee’s work was in no way, “impacted together like trash in a dump heap.” I challenge Mr Gopnik to search Dee’s mathematical writings on cartography, navigation and astronomy for the angels and demons. I will personally buy him a pint of his favourite beverage for every single one he finds. I know that I won’t actually have to open my wallet because unlike Mr Gopnik I have studied John Dee’s mathematical work and I know what I’m talking about.

Galileo, emphatically did not believe in magic. Galileo has no time for supernatural explanations of any kind – indeed, when he goes wrong, as he did when he rejected the idea that the Moon causes the tides, it’s because he resists the right explanation because it just sounds too strange or magical.[1]

I suggest that Mr Gopnik never reads Galileo’s Il Saggiatore, the polemic pamphlet containing his famous quote about the book of nature. Here he would find his hero vehemently defending the completely irrational Aristotelian theory of comets against the reasonably correct theory of Grassi based on observation just to score rhetorical points, a low point in the writings of the Tuscan polymath. This is just one example of several; Galileo was by no means as rational and scientific as Gopnik would wish him to be.

History has taught us that science didn’t just happen in a burst. Alchemy and astrology evolved slowly and over time into chemistry and astronomy.

Wow! Gopnik actually got something right for a change.

Galileo even made a buck in his youth by casting horoscopes for rich people.

You can almost hear the subtext screaming “But he didn’t believe in it, not my Galileo!” Just for the record Galileo was a professional teacher and practitioner of astrology and all of the available evidence suggests very strongly that he also believed in it.

There were no bright lines. Indeed sometimes science slipped back into astrology and alchemy and superstition and the occult. It’s well-known that Isaac Newton spent a lifetime searching for the Philosopher’s Stone.

Again Gopnik either doesn’t know what he is talking about or he is being deliberately misleading. Galileo in no way marks the end of astrology or alchemy as mainstream branches of knowledge in the seventeenth century so what we have is not a case of slipping back. Astrology first lost its academic and scientific status around 1660 and alchemy went on being acceptable, albeit in a strange secretive manner, into the beginnings of the eighteenth century. In fact I once wrote a short piece about the alchemical correspondence between Newton, Boyle and Locke. As I pointed out in another post on the entanglement of science and pseudo-science Newton’s very serious study of alchemy played a very significant role in the development of his universal theory of gravity. But that of course cannot be because as Gopnik informs us alchemy is bull and that has nothing to do with real science.

The closing paragraphs of Gopnik’s piece are a pathetic pleading for his version of science against the esoteric of the cracked and barking. It is straight out of the neo-positivist’s handbook of nineteenth century rationalism which I cannot be bothered to waste you time dismantling

Mr Gopnik if people criticise what you have written about the history of Renaissance science you might do well to open your ears and listen to what they have to say. If you did so then you might just learn something. However instead of listening you decided to insult your critics and to make stuff up to justify the false claims you made in the first place. If you are going to pontificate about the history of science in the Early Modern Period then might I suggest that you go away and learn something about it first before you start shouting your mouth off. Even better why don’t you write something about art instead? I’ve head that’s a subject that you might actually know something about.

---

[1] I was planning on tackling Galileo’s claims on his reasons for rejecting a lunar tides theory in this post but as it is already far too long and still growing I think I’ll save that for a separate one.