A couple of weeks back, another Renaissance Mathematicus friend, David Hop, drew my attention once again to the same Rogan/Tyson interview, this time a longer section in which NdGT extemporises about the space telescope, Hubble, and Antoni Leeuwenhoek before he reaches the section I dissected back in May last year. As to be expected Motor-Mouth-Tyson spews out a non-stop stream of pure drivel, which truly demands the attention of the HIST_SCI HULK:
NdGT: Why do you think the Hubble Telescope…the mirror issues notwithstanding, which were ultimately fixed when, it was first launched…Why was it so successful? Version of the Hubble telescope previously launched by the military, looking down. The model for that telescope had already been conceived and built and was operating. Then we said we want one of those OK but that’s not public that this is going on. The telescope gets designed has the benefit of previous versions of it having been used successfully but looking down. We look up, this the perennial two way street astronomy in the old days and in modern times astrophysics.
One doesn’t need to be a fucking rocket scientist to recognise that a military spy satellite, looking down, is technically, optically, functionally, conceptionally different to a space telescope, looking up. But is there any truth in Tyson’s stream of verbal garbage? Now neither Hulky nor I are experts on the Hubble Telescope, it wasn’t built in the seventeenth century, but Wikipedia has good articles on the history of Hubble and on the history of military spy satellites too. Tyson could have taken the time to read them before opening his mouth. But what the hell, why ruin a good story with facts? Neil, “who cares about facts”, Tyson obviously didn’t bother.
The Hubble Space Telescope as seen from the departing Space Shuttle Atlantis, flying STS-125, HST Servicing Mission 4. Source: Wikimedia Commons
To save you having to turn to Wikipedia, a brief synopsis. We start with the military as Motor-Mouth-Tyson thinks they started the ball rolling and NASA jumped on the bus having seen that it works.
The United States Army Ballistic Missile Agency launched the first American satellite, Explorer I, for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on January 31, 1958. The information sent back from its radiation detector led to the discovery of the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts.
Wikipedia
Note the date!
The theoretical idea goes back a bit further:
Herman Potočnik explored the idea of using orbiting spacecraft for detailed peaceful and military observation of the ground in his 1928 book, The Problem of Space Travel. He described how the special conditions of space could be useful for scientific experiments. The book described geostationary satellites (first put forward by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) and discussed communication between them and the ground using radio, but fell short of the idea of using satellites for mass broadcasting and as telecommunications relays.
Wikipedia
Note once again both civil and military!
Turning to space telescopes and Hubble:
In 1923, Hermann Oberth—considered a father of modern rocketry, along with Robert H. Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky—published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (“The Rocket into Planetary Space”), which mentioned how a telescope could be propelled into Earth orbit by a rocket.
Wikipedia
So not exactly a recent idea!
The history of the Hubble Space Telescope can be traced to 1946, to astronomer Lyman Spitzer’s paper “Astronomical advantages of an extra-terrestrial observatory.”
Wikipedia
Note the date, twelve years before that first military launch of a satellite looking down!
Spitzer devoted much of his career to pushing for the development of a space telescope. In 1962, a report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recommended development of a space telescope as part of the space program, and in 1965, Spitzer was appointed as head of a committee given the task of defining scientific objectives for a large space telescope.
Wikipedia
Liman Spitzer Source: Wikimedia Commons
Also crucial was the work of Nancy Grace Roman, the “Mother of Hubble”. Well before it became an officialNASA approved, she became the program scientist, setting up the steering committee in charge of making astronomer needs feasible to implement and writing testimony to Congress throughout the 1970s to advocate continued funding of the telescope. Her work as project scientist helped set the standards for NASA’s operation of large scientific projects.
Space-based astronomy had begun on a very small scale following World War II, as scientists made use of developments that had taken place in rocket technology. The first ultraviolet spectrum of the Sun was obtained in 1946, and NASA launched the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) to obtain UV, X-ray, and gamma-ray spectra in 1962. An orbiting solar telescope was launched in 1962 by the United Kingdom as part of the Ariel programme, and in 1966 NASA launched the first Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO) mission. OAO-1’s battery failed after three days, terminating the mission. It was followed by Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2(OAO-2), which carried out ultraviolet observations of stars and galaxies from its launch in 1968 until 1972, well beyond its original planned lifetime of one year.
Wikipedia
I could go on, but I think that is enough to show that the Hubble Space Telescope was definitively not a case of the civil space programme copying an idea from the military space programme and that Motor-Mouth-Tyson is, as per usual, spreading high grade bovine manure.
NdGT: The invention of the telescope [babble between Tyson and Rogan] Galileo perfects the telescope He learns that the telescope has just been invented in the Netherlands the Dutch were opticians, so they invented the telescope and the microscope within a couple of years of one another This transforms science.
The Dutch were opticians! So what? So were people all over Europe. Funnily enough the man credited with having invented the telescope, Hans Lipperhey, lived in Middelburg in the Netherlands but was actually a German. The invention of the telescope and/or microscope had nothing to do with nationality.
Rogan: Why did they invent the eyeglass the reading glass?
NdGT: The reading glass was earlier than that, but I don’t know when, The real advance was putting two lenses in line with one another. Trivial in modern times but that was a huge conceptual leap and what you would accomplish [sic] and in so doing depending on how you curve them and how you grind the shape of those lenses you would get a microscope or a telescope. And we’re off to the races!
It you are going to pontificate about the history of optics and the invention of the telescope and the microscope, you really should know when eyeglasses were invented, as one of the central questions, in that history, is why did it take so long from the invention of eyeglasses, around 1260, to the invention of the telescope in 1608? The accepted thesis in answer to this question is contained in Rolf Willach’s magisterial Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope: A Life of Influence and Exile (American Philosophical Society, 2008). Willach argues convincingly that it was not putting two lenses in line with one another that led to the telescope, several people had done that without creating a telescope, but masking or stopping down the lens. The shape or form of a hand ground lens becomes more inaccurate the further one goes from the middle. These inaccuracies in the outer areas of the lens cause a distorted image, no problem in eyeglasses where one looks through the centre of the lens, but a major problem in the attempt to create a telescope. Lipperhey was probably the first to mask or stop down the lens so that only the central, correctly ground, portion of the lens gets used to create the image.
I could write a whole book about Motor-Mouth-Tyson, “depending on how you curve them and how you grind the shape of those lenses you would get a microscope or a telescope.” Let’s just say an explanation it is somewhat wanting in more ways than one.
NdGT: That’s basically the birth of modern science as we think of it and conduct it. Because you say to yourself, my senses I don’t trust them to be the full record of what’s going on in front of me.
That the telescope and the microscope extended human perception and added new layers of empiricism to the study of nature is beyond discussion but to call it the birth of modern science is typical Motor-Mouth-Tyson hyperbole.
NdGT: You pull out a microscope, oh my gosh, Leeuwenhoek , the microscope guy, he got a drop of pond water, puts it under his microscope, just to think to do this, it’s just water, why do you think that’s something interesting to do? He said, I wonder, he was curious and puts it under and sees little, what he described as animalcules happily aswimming.
Rogan: Animalcules!
NdGT: Animalcules, these are like the amoebas and paramecia. So, he writes to…he reports on this to the scientific authorities, and they don’t believe him. They say Van Leeuwenhoek, we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter. Why would anyone believe this that there’s entire creatures, an entire universe of creatures thriving in a drop of pond water. And so, the way science works, one report does not make it true, you need verification. They sent people to the Netherlands to verify his results and there it was the birth of microscopy and then they look at everything. Cells you know, they need vocabulary to describe what you are seeing.
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Portrait by Jan Verkolje, after 1680 Source Wikimedia Commons
Leeuwenhoek now gets the Motor-Mouth-Tyson stir some half facts with a portion of liquidbovine manure and splatter the result over the listener treatment. Leeuwenhoek did not put his drop of pond water under his microscope because that is not how his single lens microscopes worked. Wait a minute didn’t our narrator just explain that to make a microscope you need to put two lenses in line with one another? If you are building a compound microscope you do indeed need at least two lenses and often more, but Leeuwenhoek is famous for the fact that he used single lens microscopes of his own special design.
A replica of a microscope by Van Leeuwenhoek Source: Wikimedia Commons
The small spherical lens is embedded in a metal plate and the specimen to be viewed in placed on the spike behind the lens and the whole apparatus is held up to the light. At the time Leeuwenhoek examined pond water with his microscope, microscopists were examining anything and everything with their microscopes, so nothing very special in this act. “He reports on this to the scientific authorities” sounds like something out of a dystopian novel by Kafka or Orwell. At the time he was corresponding with the Royal Society in London, basically, at the time, a private gentleman’s club for those interested in natural philosophy, who were publishing the results of Leeuwenhoek’s microscopic investigation in the Philosophical Transactions.
The letter with the animalcules, a term coined by Henry Oldenburg Secretary of the Royal Society, when translating from Leeuwenhoek’ original colloquial Dutch was sent in 1676 and was by no means his first letter.
.. this was for me, among all the marvels that I have discovered in nature, the most marvellous, and I must say that, for me, up to now there has been no greater pleasure in my eye as these sights of so many thousands of living creatures in a small drop of water, moving through each other, each special creature having its special motion.
Leeuwenhoeks animalcules letter to Oldenburg
The prominent Dutch physician Reinier de Graaf made Oldenburg aware of Leeuwenhoek’s investigations in a letter from 1673:
That it may be the more evident to you that the humanities and science are not yet banished among us by the clash of arms, I am writing to tell you that a certain most ingenious person here, named Leewenhoek [sic], has devised microscopes which far surpass those which we have hitherto seen, manufactured by Eustacio Divini and others. The enclosed letter from him, wherein he describes certain things which he has observed more accurately than previous authors, will afford you a sample of his work: and if it please you, and you would test the skill of this most diligent man and give him encouragement, then pray send him a letter containing your suggestions, and proposing to him more difficult problems of the same kind.
Oldenburg followed de Graaf’s suggestion and from then on the Royal Society regularly published Leeuwenhoek’s letters with his latest investigations until his death in 1723.
Motor-Mouth-Tyson’ comment, “They say Van Leeuwenhoek, we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter” is a piss poor joke and has no place in an account of the history of science. Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of single cell organisms did indeed cause some consternation because the Royal Society’s resident microscopists, Robert Hooke and Nehemiah Grew where initially unable to replicate his observations, their microscopes were not powerful enough. Later Hooke would succeed but in the meantime the Royal Society was justifiably sceptical. The situation was not improved by Leeuwenhoek’s refusal to explain his methods out of fear of being plagiarised.
Tyson is quite correct that scientific results have to be verified, usually by replication. Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, which Tyson introduces in the part of the interview that I dissected last time, were also initially met with scepticism, particularly as people were unable to replicate them. Something Tyson doesn’t mention. They were only accepted after the Jesuit astronomers of the Collegio Romano had finally succeed in replicating them.
The Royal Society did indeed send a delegation to control Leeuwenhoek’s results. This was not in anyway exceptional in the seventeenth century where personal testimony from reliable witnesses was a common form of verification. When the Royal Society doubted the accuracy of Johannes Hevelius’ astronomical observations, because he refused to use telescopic sights on his instruments, they sent Edmond Halley to Danzig to investigate the matter. The measuring of atmospheric pressure using a primitive barometer by Pascal’s brother in law, Florin Périer, was witnessed and confirmed by Minim Fathers from a local friary. Here we have an interesting aspect of personal witness verification, church officials, rather than natural philosophers, were regarded as the most reliable and trustworthy witnesses. The delegation that went to visit Leeuwenhoek to investigate his animalcules’ reports was led by Alexander Petrie, minister to the English Reformed Church in Delft; Benedict Haan, at that time Lutheran minister at Delft; and Henrik Cordes, then Lutheran minister at the Hague. The visit was for Leeuwenhoek a success and his observations were fully acknowledged by the Royal Society.
NdGT: … and there it was the birth of microscopy and then they look at everything. Cells you know, they need vocabulary to describe what you are seeing.
As I pointed out in an earlier post this was not the birth of microscopy, although Leeuwenhoek took it to a new level. Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680), Robert Hooke (1635–1703, and Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) were all prominent microscopist contemporaries of Leuwenhoek, who all started their investigations and also published some of their results before Leeuwenhoek began his investigations. The were also not to first and these scholars, particularly Robert Hooke, had already been looking at everything. Ironically, Motor-Mouth-Tyson’s example “cells” had already been discovered by Hooke. His Micrographia (1665) contains a microscopic image of the cells in cork. Hooke coined the term because he thought they looked like the monk’s cells in monasteries.
Robert Hooke’s microscopic image of cork displaying the cell structure Source: Wikimedia Commons
NdGT That was the journey down small then the journey went big, and Galileo perfects the telescope…
This is where the section of the interview that we dissected back in May last year begins. Motor-Mouth-Tyson is slowly becoming the HISTSCI_HULKS favourite punch bag although the man is so dumb, it’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. On a serious note, NdGT is wildly successful all over the Internet and almost everything he spews forth, and there’s an awful lot fit, about the history of science is either highly inaccurate or simply false and unfortunately his adoring fans don’t know better. Equally unfortunate is the fact that he simply ignores the criticisms of those who know better.
I don’t remember ever coming across half a paragraph of just nineteen lines that manages to cram in so many history of science and technology myths, errors, and falsehoods as the one that I recently read whilst soaking in a hot bath. A truly monumental cluster fuck!
The offending object is on page 131 of David B. Teplow’s The Philosophy and Practice ofScience[1], which I will be reviewing in the not to distant future and which is much better than the handful of lines dumped on here and which I will almost certainly be recommending but for now the cluster fuck.
Revolutionary advance in science have been achieved through a number of mechanisms. Optics is a good example. Simple, but keen and thoughtful, observation of the worlds at a magnification of 1x, combined with logic, enabled Aristotle to lay the foundation for all of science and for Copernicus to propose a heliocentric solar system.
The statement about Aristotle laying the foundation for all science is definitely questionable given his rejection of mathematics but I’ll let it pass. Copernicus proposal of a heliocentric solar system was not in anyway based on observation but on rethinking elements of the existing geocentric system.
Copernicus’ heliocentric model from Andreas Cellarius’ Atlas Coelestis 1660
Galileo’s construction of the first telescope’s allowed him to observe the world at ≈30x and to confirm Copernicus’s theory of a heliocentric heavens.
Galileo by no means constructed the first telescopes. Apart from being preceded by the various inventors of the telescope such as Hans Lipperhey and Jacob Adriaenszoon, by the time he learnt about telescopes they were on sale all over Europe. The Venetian Senate was truly pissed off when they discovered this after giving Galileo a massive pay rise for presenting them with a telescope, having thought it was something very special. Galileo was also definitely preceded as a telescopic astronomical observer by Thomas Harriot and probably by Simon Marius. If I could get my hands on the idiot, who first perpetrated the myth that Galileo’s observations confirmed Copernicus’s theory of a heliocentric heavens, I would shove a Galilean telescope up his fundamental orifice. Galileo knew that nothing that he had observed confirmed Copernicus’s theory and he never claimed that he had. It would be 1725 before James Bradley produced the first telescopic observation that confirmed part of the heliocentric theory, when he observed stellar aberration.
Galileo’s “cannocchiali” telescopes at the Museo Galileo, Florence via Wikimedia Commons
It [optics] also enabled van Leeuwenhoek to study the microscopic world, at ≈250x, and in the process discover “animalcules” (from the Latin for “tiny animal”; animalculum) – including bacteria, protozoa, and spermatozoa – thus becoming the first microscopist and microbiologist.
Van Leeuwenhoek is a very long way from being the first microscopist. It’s actually difficult to establish who first began using microscopes as scientific instruments. Galileo knew of the microscope and almost certainly discovered the principle, as probably did many others, when looking through a Galilean or Dutch telescope ( one convex, one concave lens) the wrong way it, when it functions as a microscope, but he did make any systematic microscopic studies. The Dutch engineer, inventor, (al)chemist, optician, and showman Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel (1571–1631) was constructing and giving public demonstrations with Keplerian microscopes (two convex lenses) by about 1620. Galileo built a compound microscope in 1624, which he presented to Prince Federico Cesi founder of the Acccademia dei Lincei.
Anthonie van Leeuwenhek Portrait by Jan Verkolje, after 1680 Source: Wikimedia Commons
The first illustrations made with a microscope are attributed to Francesco Stelluti on a pamphlet published by the Acccademia dei Lincei to celebrate the election of Maffeo Barberini as Pope in 1623. The bees were the Barberini family emblem. Stelluti published further microscopic studies of bees in a Tuscan translation of an obscure Latin poem in 1630.
Stelluti Bees1630
In 1644 Giovanni Battista Odierna published a pamphlet of his microscopic studies of the fly’s eye, his L’Occhio della mosca and in 1656 Pierre Borel published a collection a collection of a hundred miscellaneous microscope observations, his Observationum microscopicarum canturia.
The Italian biologist Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) observed capillary structures in frog’s lungs with a microscope in 1661 putting him ahead of van Leeuwenhoek as microbiologist.
With the help of the newly invented microscope, Marcello Malpighi (A) (1628–1694) solidified Harvey’s concepts and was the first man ever to describe the pulmonary capillaries and alveoli (B). Source:
Given his propensity to vehemently claim priority on every aspect of his research in his polymathic career, Robert Hooke would almost certainly be enraged by our authors claim, as his magnificent and ground-breaking microscopic study the Micrographia was published in 1665, eight years before van Leeuwenhoek’ first letter was published by the Royal Society. Hooke would probably also claim priority as the first microbiologist for his study of and naming of biological cells.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The claims that van Leeuwenhoek was the first microscopist and microbiologist are total bullshit and display a level of ignorance and/or laziness, on Teplow’s part, who either didn’t bother to check his facts or to do the bloody research.
Electron and atomic force microscopes now allow scientists to see objects at magnifications up to ≈107x, opening up an immense sub-cellular world in which even individual atoms can be visualized. These instrumental advances expanded the observable universe, and the amount of information to which one has access, many orders of magnitude.
Nothing to complain about here.
The best example of a recent revolution in scientific method comes from computer science, a field that for all intents and purposes, did not even exist until the twentieth century.
Nor here, but the pain starts again in the very next sentence.
The development of mechanical computers (the “difference and analytical engines”) and arbitrary, user-defined programs (“weav[ing] algebraic patterns”) by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, respectively, followed by the conception and development of electronic computers by John van [sic] Neumann and Alan Turing ushered us into the current “information age.”
Oh boy! Babbage’s Differential Engine, a special purpose computer designed to calculate and print error free mathematical tables using the method of differences was never realised, beyond a small working model, which he had his engineer Joseph Clement (1779–1844) construct in 1832, before the project was abandoned. The Analytical Engine, conceived as a grandiose multipurpose computer never got off the drawing board.
Portion of Charles Babbage’s calculating machine (Difference Engine No.1), built by Joseph Clement, London, 1832. Science Museum London
Although she described the concept of arbitrary, user-defined programs in her notes to her translation of Luigi Menabrea’s Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage (1842), the concept is from Babbage and not Lovelace. The full quote from Lovelace’s notes is “we may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
The idea of a machine that could transcend number, as the Analytical Engine had transcended addition and had been generalized to other operations, had been in Babbage’s thoughts for some years. In a letter to Mary Somerville written 12 July 1836, he spoke of having “a kind of vision of a developing machine.” This was only twelve days after he had taken the decision to adopt punched card as input to the Analytical Engine, and two days after he mused in his notebook.
This day I had for the first time a general but very indistinct conception of the possibility of making an engine work out algebraic developments – I mean without any reference to the value of the letters. My notion is that as the cards (Jacquards) of the calc. engine direct a series of operations and then recommence with the first, so it might be possible to cause the same cards to punch others equivalent to any given number of repetitions. But these hole[s] might perhaps be small pieces of formulae previously made by the first cards and possibly some mode might be found for arranging such detached parts according to powers of nine numbers and of collecting similar ones [the entry breaks off here].
What he was groping for here was some means of bypassing or replacing the columns of numbers that are ordinarily the objects to be operated on, so that he could operate on symbols instead.[2]
Note that this is eight years before Ada translated the Menabrea article. Note also, whereas Ada drops the suggestion in a simple, highly quotable, poetic bon mot, Babbage was acutely aware of the problems involved in actually achieving this aim. As I’ve sodding well said a hundred bleeding times, before accrediting anything to Countess Lovelace see what Babbage has said on the subject in his correspondence and unpublished papers.
One should also note that there was no continuity or influence between Babbage’s schemes and the invention of the computer in the twentieth century. It was only with hindsight that historians began to praise Babbage as a pioneer of the computer age.
Neither Alan Turing nor John von Neumann conceived or developed the effing computer! Vannevar Bush (differential analyser, 1927), Konrad Zuse (Z2 1940, Z3 1941), Vincent Atanasoff & Clifford Berry (ABC, 1942), Howard Aiken (Harvard Mark I, 1944), Tommy Flowers (Colossus, 1943–45), and John Mauchly & J. Presper Eckert (ENIAC, 1945) did conceive and develop computers.
In 1936 Alan Turing published a meta-mathematical paper, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, which after other people had developed computers provided a succinct way of categorising the computing capabilities of a computing machine.
During WWII Turing, together with Gordon Welchman, developed the Bombe from the Polish Bomba, an electro-mechanical device used to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages. The Bombe was designed and constructed by Harold Keen. After WWII, Turing worked on the design of the Automatic Computer Engine (ACE), which he presented in 1945. The ACE was never built.
Beginning in 1944, ENIAC inventors, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, designed the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) the machine being finally delivered in 1949. Brought in as a consultant, John von Neumann wrote a description of the EDVAC, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, which was published in 1945 and led to Mauchley and Eckert being denied a patent for EDVAC.
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC Source: Wikimedia Commons
This totally lazy and factually incorrect Turing and von Neuman invented the computer that has become established in popular history of technology gets on my fucking wick. Teplow’s paragraph that I have dissected above is a glowing example of lazy, cliché filled, badly researched history of science and technology that should not be being published by a major academic publisher in 2023.
[1] David B. Teplow, The Philosophy and Practice ofScience, CUP, 2023
[2] Dorothy Stein, Ada: A Life and a Legacy, The MIT Press, 1985. pp. 102–103
Springer is one of the world’s largest academic publishers with a vast catalogue of science and history of science publications. One might think that when Springer publishes a history of science book, for which they charge the princely sum of €246.09, that they would at least employ fact checkers before publishing; one would obviously be wrong!
I was searching the Internet for something else when I stumbled across Neil English’s Chronicling the Golden Age of Astronomy: A History of Visual Observing from Harriot to Moore (Historical & Cultural Astronomy), Springer, (2018), which contains a chapter, TheCheckered Career of Simon Marius (pp. 29–33).
Engraved image of Simon Marius (1573-1624), from his book Mundus Iovialis, 1614 Source: Houghton Library via Wikimedia Commons
All of this being the case, I was naturally very interested in a publication about Marius that I hadn’t come across before and eagerly read the abstract. My inner HIST_SCI HULK immediately screamed, WHAT THE FUCK! I managed to acquire a pdf of the offending object and passed it on to my friend and colleague the HIST_SCI HULK to review for your delectation:
We start with that oh so provocative abstract, actually the first paragraph of the essay:
N.E: The phenomenal success of Galileo Galilei with the telescope spread like wildfire across the nation-states of Europe, with the result that nearly every astronomer was keen to get his or her hands on such an instrument to make new discoveries in the starry heavens. One of the earliest “wannabees” was the German astronomer Simon Marius.
Any historian, who had truly researched the history of astronomical telescopic observation would know that Simon Marius was very definitely not one of English’s “wannabees” swimming in the wake of Galileo’s “phenomenal success” but had acquired a telescope and begun astronomical telescopic observation well before Galileo went public with his own observations. There is even the possibility that he, like Thomas Harriot, began observing earlier than Galileo. I don’t really think that English could have made a worse start to his essay, but he continues as he started, badly!
Neil English is obviously only a wannabee historian!
N.E: Born Simon Mayr (later Latinized to Marius) on January 10, 1573, in Gunzenhausen in the region of the Markgrafschaft of Ansbach (Bavaria, south Germany), where his father served as mayor of the city in 1576. From 1586 to 1601, he studied on and off at the Markgrafschaft’s Lutheran academy at Heilsbronn. And it was during his studies here, beginning around 1594, that he became interested in embarking on a career in astronomy and meteorology.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Markgrafschaft of Ansbach was in Franconia and not Bavaria. Even today it is still in Franconia, which only became part of Bavaria in 1806! Marius was a pupil of the Fürstenschule (its correct name)* in Heilsbronn continuously, not on and off, from 1586 to 1601. Here with his “on and off,” I think, our wannabee historian is just making shit up because there is nothing in the sources to this effect.
*Lutheran academy would imply that the school was educating young men for the Church, whereas the Fürstenschule was educating young men to work on the margravial court.
N.E: In 1596 Marius wrote a tract on the comet that appeared in the sky that year, and in 1599 he published a set of astronomical tables. The quality of his researches resulted in his appointment as court mathematician of the Markgrafschaft of Ansbach in 1601.
That should, of course, be research and not researches but who am I to copyedit our wannabee historian’s text. Marius was first appointed Court Mathematicus (not mathematician, there’s a difference) in Ansbach in 1606, not in 1601.
N.E: One of his first acts as the Markgrafschaft’s mathematician was to travel to Prague to learn of Tycho Brahe’s observational techniques and to gain familiarity with his instruments. Unfortunately, Brahe died that same year, and Marius’ stay in Prague lasted only 4 months. But he did meet David Fabricius there, who helped consolidate his interest in the science of the heavens.
When Marius travelled to Prague he was not yet margravial mathematicus (see above). Although he didn’t meet him, Tycho was still very much alive during his visit and its length had nothing whatsoever to do with Tycho’s death. His interest in the science of the heavens was already consolidated before he went to Prague, which is exactly why he went there.
Our wannabee historian is making a real mess of this.
N.E: After this, he sojourned to Padua to study at the university there, where he quickly became politically active in the student association calling itself the “German Nation,” acting as its chairman from 1604 to 1605.
Our wannabee historian obviously has no idea what a Natio at a medieval university was and what its function was particularly at the University of Padua. Medieval universities were originally founded as corporations or guilds, Universitas was the medieval Latin for corporation or society derived from whole or entire. These corporations were either of students or of teachers. When it was founded Padua was a universitas of students. All students on matriculation were assigned to a Natio or Nation according to their place of origin or their mother tongue.
Student nations or simply nations (Latin: natio meaning “being born”) are regional corporations of students at a university. Once widespread across Europe in medieval times […] Students in the University of Padua were divided into 22 nations, which referred to the different territories ruled by the Republic of Venice, to the biggest states of Italy, and to the main states of Europe. Nations were: German (also called Alemannian), Bohemian, Hungarian, Provençal, Burgundian, Spanish, Polish, English, Scottish, Venetian, Overseas (Venetian Greek Islands), Lombard (East Lombardy and West Veneto), Trevisan (North and East Veneto), Friulian, Dalmatian, Milanese, Roman, Sicilian, Anconitan, Tuscan, Piedmontese and Genoan. (Wikipedia)
The Natio played an active role in the administration of the university and Marius played an active role in the administration of the German Nation. If English had used the term university politics I probably wouldn’t have commented but “politically active” has too many varying connotations for the context.
The management of the Nations business was carried out by two councillors, who were elected annually like the procurators. They were responsible for the most important university affairs, such as elections of the chancellors or appointments. […] From July 28th 1604, they were replaced by Caspar Hofmann and Simon Marius. Marius stayed in office until his departure in July 1605.[1]
N.E: In 1602 Marius extended his tutelage to Baldessar Capra, a wealthy student from Milan, in mathematics and astronomy, but there is also evidence that he supplemented his income by practicing medicine.
There is no evidence that Marius supplemented his income by practicing medicine, rather he matriculated to study medicine which he did from 1601 to 1605, but which our wannabee historian doesn’t appear to know.
Our wannabee historian hasn’t done his fucking research properly, has he?
N.E: Capra and Marius both observed the nova of 1604 together, and with Marius’s help Capra published a book on the new ‘guest’ star. In 1607 Capra published under his own name Galileo’s instruction manual on the sector, which was circulated in the form of a manuscript, and which led to Capra’s expulsion from the university. It appears that Marius played an important role in this plagiarism, but he had returned to his native land in 1605 and so temporarily escaped vilification. In Italy, however, Marius’s reputation was tarnished by this fraud, and by certain other questionable practices as head of the German Nation.
Galileo supplement his income by manufacturing a brass sector, or military compass. He earned more money by selling an instruction manual for the instrument and giving lessons in its use to the purchasers. The manual was initially in manuscript but in 1607 he had a limited number printed. It was, however, not published but distributed privately. Capra obtained a copy translated it into Latin, the original was in Italian, and published it in his own name. Galileo hauled him before the university authorities, where he was expelled from the university and his book was confiscated.
As noted Marius returned to Franconia in July 1605 and there is absolutely no evidence that he was involved in this plagiarism, although Capra named him in the pamphlet as his maths teacher.
The authorities confiscated his book and threw him out of the university. That did not satisfy Galileo, who published a brief, brutal rebuttal of the goat (la capra) who had got his goat.[2]
No accusation was made against Marius by Galileo in his anti-Capra diatribe in 1607.
In the middle of April 1605, Marius occupied another important position in the Nation. He became librarian. […] When Marius left Padua, Christian Rosian became the librarian. At his farewell the Nation unanimously decided to give Marius a small monetary gift for his loyal service.[3]
Questionable practices? Our wannabee historian is making shit up again!
N.E: Upon his return from Italy, Marius settled in the city of Ansbach and accepted the post of court mathematician, marrying Felicitas Lauer, the daughter of his publisher.
Didn’t our wannabee historian say that Marius was “appointment as court mathematician of the Markgrafschaftof Ansbach in 1601.” Now he’s saying it was when he returned from Padua, was Marius a quantum time traveller?
N.E: In 1609 he published the first German translation (from the original Greek) of the first six books of Euclid’s Elements.
More sloppy research from our wannabee historian. Marius’ translation was published in 1610 not 1609 and it was not the first German translation, that honour goes to Wilhelm Holtzman (Guilielmus Xylander), who published Die Sechs Ersten Bücher Euclidis in Basel in 1562.
N.E: But Marius’ most memorable (and controversial) research involved the telescope. In the fall of 1608, at the Frankfurt Fair, Marius met an artillery officer who tried to sell him a spyglass. Intrigued, the two set about reproducing the device by using spectacle lenses, but it was not until at least a year later that Marius obtained instruments good enough for astronomical observations.
Given how well documented this episode in the history of the telescope is, I find it fascinating how badly our wannabee historian mangles the facts here; it can only be described as a cluster fuck!
Simon Marius was not at the autumn Fair in Frankfurt in 1608. The officer, a general, who was there was the splendidly named Johan Philipp Fuchs von Bimbach, who was not in the artillery, but was at the time Privy Councillor to Joachim Ernst Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, Simon Marius’ employer.
Hans Philipp Fuchs von Bimbach Source: Wikimedia Commons
He was in the situation not the seller but the potential purchaser. The potential seller was an otherwise anonymous Belgica (then the Latin for a Netherlander), who claimed to be the inventor. The telescope he was offering to Fuchs von Bimbach had a broken lens and the two couldn’t agree on a price. Returning to Ansbach, Fuchs von Bimbach told Marius what he had seen and the two tried to construct a telescope using spectacle lenses and although, they understood the principle they failed. They tried to get better lenses made in Nürnberg, then a major centre for the manufacture of cheap spectacles but that was also not successful. Eventually Fuchs von Bimbach imported a finished telescope from the Netherlands, and they began observing in summer 1609. Later they bought lenses from Venice and constructed a better telescope.
N.E: In 1614 Marius published the fruits of his research on Jupiter in a book entitled Mundus Iovialis anno M.DC.IX Detectus Ope Perspicilli Belgici (“The Jovian World, discovered in 1609 by means of the Dutch Telescope”), in which he claimed that he had observed Jupiter’s moons beginning as early as the end of November 1609 and furthermore had begun recording his observations on December 29. That said, Marius had adopted the Julian calendar and so the date corresponded to January 8, 1610, on the Gregorian calendar.
Since Marius did not publish any observations, as Galileo had done in his Sidereus Nuncius, it is impossible to verify Marius’s claim. His reputation was, however, not the highest.
Actually, wannabee historian, it’s the other way round:
Unlike Galileo, however, Marius provided detailed tables of his observations, part of what helped clear him to the Dutch panel. And on the cover of the Mundo Iovialis, Marius sketched the objects in orbit, a contrast to Galileo’s sketch using asterisks and the letter O, making what Pasachoff says was “arguably the first image of the orbits.”[4]
There are no observations in the Sidereus Nuncius but there are tables of observation in Mundus Iovialis.
In 1614, Marius had a perfectly good reputation, so why is the wannabee historian claiming that it wasn’t? He’s sort of justifying Galileo’s anti-Marius tirade in The Assayer (Il Saggiatore) from 1623. Before we take at look at this one should note that The Assayer was published nine years after Mundus Iovialis and sixteen years after the Capra plagiarism affair.
Like a lot of others our wannabee historian takes The Assayer seriously, appearing to think that what Galileo spouts in this evil piece of polemic must be true. It’s Galileo, it’s Holy Writ! People gush over what a brilliant a piece of polemic The Assayer is, what they ignore is that it’s in reality a stinking turd of a text. The Assayer was one text in a heated exchange between Galileo and the Jesuit, mathematician, and astronomer Orazio Grassi (1583–1654) on the nature of comets. What most people overlook or simple refuse to acknowledge is that in this dispute Galileo was horribly, utterly, and totally wrong. Grassi argued on the basis of observations and mathematical calculations that the three comets of 1618 were supralunar, Galileo, surprisingly, argued that they were merely sublunar optical effects. Surprisingly, because by 1618 virtually the whole of the astronomical community had long ago accepted that comets were indeed supralunar, and Aristotle was wrong on this. Despite being provably wrong, Galileo maintained his strange position including it in his Dialogo in 1632. Not content with arguing falsely against Grassi’s scientific viewpoint, Galileo poured a ton of vicious abuse on his head. Having built up steam Galileo also launched a vicious attack on the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650) with whom he had had a dispute over sunspots a decade before. Covering him in a torrent of abuse he also falsely accused Scheiner of having plagiarised his work on sunspots. This turned out to be more than somewhat ironical as Galileo would go on to plagiarise Scheiner on the topic in his Dialogo. This is the context in which one has to view Galileo’s attack on his third victim in The Assayer, Simon Marius:
Of such usurpers I might name not a few, but I shall pass them over now in silence, as it is customary for first offenses to receive less severe punishment than subsequent ones. But I shall not remain silent any longer about a second offender who has tried too audaciously to do me the very same thing which he did many years ago by appropriating the invention of my geometric compass, despite the fact that I had many years previously shown it and dis- cussed it before a large number of gentlemen and had finally made it public in print. May I be pardoned this if, against my nature, my habit, and my present intentions – I show resentment and cry out, perhaps with too much bitterness, about a thing which I have kept to myself these many years. I speak of Simon Marius of Gunzenhausen; he it was in Padua, where I resided at the time, who set forth in Latin the use of the said compass of mine and, appropriating it to himself, had one of his pupils print this under his name. Forthwith, per- haps to escape punishment, he departed immediately for his native land, leaving his pupil in the lurch as the saying goes; and against the latter, in the absence of Simon Marius, I was obliged to proceed in the manner which is set forth in the Defence which I then wrote and published.
This is quite extraordinary, firstly there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Marius wrote the said plagiarism published by Capra and Galileo raised no such charge in 1607 when he prosecuted Capra. As noted above Marius left Padua in July 1605 two years before Capra published his stolen text and there is not record of Marius and Capra having any contact whatsoever after his departure. It is patently obvious that Galileo is making shit up! Does our wannabee historian even question Galileo’s unfounded and obviously spurious accusation? Does he hell he simple prints it without comment leading any reader not aware of the true facts in the belief that Galileo’s accusation is true!
Galileo now ramps up his accusations claiming that Marius had plagiarised his SidereusNuncius in his Mundus Iovialis, going so far as to claim that Marius had never even observed Jupiter and its moons:.
Four years after the publication of my Sidereal Messenger, this same fellow, desiring as usual to ornament himself with the labours of others) did not blush to make him- self the author of the things I had discovered and printed in that work. Publishing under the title of The Jovian World, he had the temerity to claim that he had observed the Medicean planets which revolve about Jupiter before I had done so. But because it rarely happens that truth allows herself to be suppressed by falsehood, you may see how he himself, through his carelessness and lack of understanding, gives me in that very work of his the means of convicting him by irrefutable testimony and revealing unmistakably his error, showing not only that he did not observe the said stars before me but even that he did not certainly see them until two years afterwards; and I say moreover that it may be affirmed very probably that he never observed them at all.
After making an argument about the inclinations of the orbits of the satellites to the ecliptic, Galileo turned his attention to the date on which Marius claimed to have discovered the satellites:
Next, notice the craft with which he tries to show himself prior to me. I wrote in my Sidereal Messenger of making my first observation on the seventh of January, 1610, continuing then with others on the succeeding nights. Along comes Marius, and, appropriating my very observations, he prints in the title page of his book and again in the opening part of his work that he had already made his observations in the year 1609, trying to give people the idea that he was first. Now the earliest observation that he produces as made by him is the second one made by me; yet he announces it as made in the year 1609. What he neglects to mention to the reader is that since he is outside our church and has not accepted the Gregorian calendar, the seventh day of January of 1610 for us Catholics is the same as the twenty-eighth day of December of 1609 for those heretics. So much for the priority of his pretended observations.
Once again we have a strange timelapse in Galileo’s outraged response to the publication of Mundus Iovialis, this time of nine years. Galileo had been informed of its publication by two separate people already in 1614. He had already discussed it in his correspondence in that year. If he truly believed that Marius had plagiarised him why didn’t he respond, after all following the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius he had become the most famous astronomer in Europe and was also now mathematicus and philosophicus at the Medici Court in Florence. He could have crushed Marius, the insignificant court mathematicus in Ansbach like a flea. Vindictively crushing his perceived opponent was his favourite pastime in those years. It’s even what he was paid to do, as after diner entertainment in Florence as court philosophicus. So, why did he wait nine years?
Galileo’s claim his carelessness and lack of understanding, gives me inthat very work of his the means of convicting him by irrefutable testimony and revealing unmistakably his error is, of course, pompous bluster.
As to Galileo’s notice the craft with which he tries to show himself prior to me. In his MundusIovialis Marius wrote:
This is the exact truth … In recounting all this, I am not to be understood as wishing to lessen Galileo’s reputation, or to snatch from him the discovery of these Jovian stars among his countrymen in Italy – far from it. My object rather is, that it may be understood that these stars were not shown to me by any mortal in any way, but were discovered and observed by me, by my own investigation, in Germany, almost at the very time, or slightly before it, at which Galileo first saw them in Italy. The credit, therefore, of the first discovery of these stars in Italy is deservedly assigned to Galileo and remains his.
Mundus Ioviales Prickard/Van Helden p. 6
Marius states that his first observation of the moons as moons was on 29 December by the Julian calenda, that’s 8 January by the Gregorian calendar, whereas Galileo’s was on the 7 January, so just one day later, more than justifying his almost at the same time. He also states that he had already been observing them for some days previously, assuming that they were stars, so his earlier is perhaps also valid. What is certain is that he is not trying to claim priority over Galileo by using the Julian calendar to date his observations. Anybody interested in astronomy at the time, who might have read both the Sidereus Nuncius and the Mundus Iovialis would have been well aware that the two astronomers, given their locations and religious affiliations, would be using two different calendars. In fact, many astrologers at the time, and Galileo and Marius were both astrologers, issued their writing calendars and prognostica with two parallel date columns one for Gregorian, newstyle, dates and one for Julian, old style, dates. Marius didn’t need to tell his readers, they already knew.
N.E: Nevertheless, at the behest of Johannes Kepler, Marius named the moons after the lovers of Zeus (the Greek equivalent of Jupiter): Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Galileo, predictably enough, steadfastly refused to accept Marius’ names and instead invented the numbering scheme that is still used today, alongside proper moon names. In accordance with this scheme, the Galilean satellites were assigned numbers based on their proximity to their parent planet and increase with distance. Hence, the moons of Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto were designated as Jupiter I, II, III and IV, respectively.
If our wannabee historian had bothered to read Mundus Iovialis he would know that it was a suggestion of Kepler’s not a behest and was only one of four suggestions made by Marius in his Mundus Iovialis. I’ve written about this before, so quoting myself:
In the Mundus Iovialis Marius makes several naming suggestions. His first suggestion was, like Galileo, to just number the moons I to IV, a system that was actually used by astronomers. His second suggestion follows Galileo in that he wishes to name them after his employer/patron the Margrave of Ansbach’s family and call them the Brandenberger Stars. Marius’ third suggestion is more than somewhat bizarre as he suggests naming them in analogy to the solar system planets, so the moon with the smallest orbit would be the Jupiter Mercury, the next the Jupiter Venus, the third the Jupiter Jupiter and the fourth the Jupiter Saturn. His argument for leaving out Jupiter Mars is too long to include here. As I said bizarre. It is with Marius’ fourth suggestion that we finally arrive at Zeus’ lovers. After talking about Jupiter’s reputation for a bit on the side and describing his most notorious affairs Marius wrote the following:
In Europa, Ganimedes puer, atque Calisto,
Lascivo nimium perplacuere Jovi.
Io, Europa, the young Ganymede and Calisto
appealed all too much to the lascivious Jove
In the next paragraph Marius goes on to explain that the idea for using these names for the moons was suggested to him by Johannes Kepler when the two of them met at the Imperial Parliament in Regensburg in October 1613. He then names Kepler as co-godfather of these four stars. Marius closes his list of suggestions by saying that the whole thing should not be taken too seriously, and everybody is free to adopt or reject his suggestions as they see fit.
Please note the final sentence.
Nobody really used the names Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto before the twentieth century, so claiming that Galileo, predictably enough, steadfastly refused to accept Marius’ names is really a piece of bullshit from our wannabee historian.
N.E: In retrospect, Galileo probably went a bit overboard in these accusations, in much the same way as he had countered his critics within the Catholic Church, for it appears certain that Marius was independently observing Jupiter’s moons by December 1610.
A bit overboard? It’s like describing a drugged-up berserker in full battle rage as a bit over excited.
N.E: Mundus Lovialis (sic) does, however, contain a telescopic discovery the priority of which has never been disputed: On December 15, 1612, Marius was the first to observe the Andromeda Nebula, which could not be resolved into stars, describing it as a “flame seen through horn.” Apparently, Marius was not aware that this object had been seen previously by medieval Persian astronomers and described by Al Sufi as early as 964 a. d.
The comment about al-Sufi is quite frankly bizarre, to quote Wikipedia:
The Andromeda Galaxy has been visible to the naked eye, given dark skies, throughout history; as such, it cannot be said to have been “discovered” by any one individual [my emphasis]. Around the year 964 CE,the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahmen al-Sufi was the first to formally describe the Andromeda Galaxy. He referred to it in his Book of Fixed Stars as a “nebulous smear” or “small cloud”.
Star charts of that period labelled it as the Little Cloud. In 1612, the German astronomer Simon Marius gave an early description of the Andromeda Galaxy based on telescopic observations.
N.E: Marius’ telescope showed that even the distant stars appeared as disks, and he interpreted them as such; a notion that persisted for much of the 17th century. Indeed, it was only after a proper theory of diffraction was formulated that these ideas were firmly put to rest. Nonetheless, Marius used this as evidence that the stars were not as far away as would have been required to bolster the Copernican worldview.
Our wannabee historian should read more Chris Graney.[5] The “big star” argument, as it is known originates with Tycho Brahe, who estimated the diameter of stars based on his naked-eye observations. He argued that if the stars were so far away that they displayed no stellar parallax, as required by the Copernican world system, then they must literally unbelievably immense. Marius’ correct observation of the solid star discs in his telescope supported Tycho’s big star argument and was accepted throughout the seventeenth century.
This argument based on star sizes was what Christiaan Huygens called Brahe’s “principal argument” against the heliocentric system.[6]
That the solid disc that Marius saw was an artefact produced by the optics of the telescope, now known as an Airy Disc, was unknown not only to Marius but to all other users of the telescope at the time. It was first dismissed as an illusion by Edmond Halley at the end of the century. Interestingly, Galileo also observed the Airy discs with his telescopes but, knowing that they lent support to the Tychonic system, deliberately didn’t publish the information.
I think the best way to describe what follow as “our wannabee historian has jumped the shark!”
N.E: From several remarks in his works, it appears that Marius was a militant Lutheran. He kept up his correspondence with David Fabricius and Kepler’s former teacher, Michael Maestlin, both of whom were self-proclaimed Lutherans. Furthermore, Marius even defended Tycho Brahe’s Lutheran world system on scriptural as well as astronomical and physical grounds.
By the time Marius was born, Lutheran Protestantism was an established religion, and he was born and brought up in a Lutheran area; Nürnberg, just down the road from Gunzenhausen, was the very first Lutheran city state. Unlike Kepler or Newton there is nothing in his work to suggest that he was particularly religious let alone militant. I hope David Fabricius and Michael Mästlin were Lutherans, although I don’t know what self-proclaimed is supposed to mean, as the former was a village pastor and the latter professor in Tübingen, a Lutheran university.
To described Tycho’s world system as Lutheran is a joke. Yes, Tycho was Lutheran, as was the whole of Denmark at that time, but his world system is in no way denominational. Would our wannabee historian call the Copernican system Catholic, just because Copernicus was a Catholic cathedral canon? What about Kepler? He was also a Lutheran, who had even worked with Tycho, but he propagated a heliocentric system! Maybe our wannabee historian is not aware that the Catholic Church in the early seventeenth century condemned Copernicus’ heliocentric system and the Jesuits adopted Tycho’s geo-heliocentric system as their official view of the cosmos around 1620, making it de facto the official position of the Catholic Church on cosmology. After all it’s a little-known episode in the history of astronomy!
N.E: It is interesting to note that while Marius was undoubtedly an observer of the most important astronomical discoveries of the early 17th century, he opposed the heliocentric view of the cosmos and favoured the Tychonic system.
There is a light disparaging undertone to all of our wannabee historian’s comments about Marius supporting the Tychonic system. He appears either not to know, or perhaps even worse refuses to accept, that in the early seventeenth century the available empirical evidence was clearly in favour of a Tychonic or semi-Tychonic system over a heliocentric one, and that is why the majority of astronomer, and not just Marius, supported one. Support of a heliocentric system, at that time, was an act of faith.
N.E: Perhaps it was Marius’ staunch belief in this system over that of the Copernican counterpoint that gave him pause to accept the reality of the eclipsing satellite phenomenon with Jupiter.
On the subject of Jupiter eclipsing its moons, what Marius actually writes is:
That when near Jupiter something similar happens to them, so that they not only appear smaller, but as seems probable are actually obscured or eclipsed, is clear from the following consideration. Jupiter is not a transparent body, any more than Venus or Mercury; therefore throws a shadow on the side turned away from the Sun. How far such a shadow extends, and whether all four pass into it and are eclipsed once in each revolution, I will now show in as few words as may be.
[There now follow extensive careful considerations and calculations, which I will spare my readers]
Therefore all four Jovian bodies are within the shadow of Jupiter at the beginning of their movement, and are eclipsed.[7]
None of his consideration or calculation have anything whatsoever to do with his acceptance of a Tychonic system or his rejection of the Copernican one.
Neil English does get some of Marius’s life and work right, which I haven’t included in this overlong review of his highly dubious essay. He does, however, end on a positive note, emphasising that Martius was not the villain that Galileo presented him as in The Assayer.
N.E: To this day, Marius’ work is overshadowed by the accusation of plagiarism, even though it was demonstrated by a jury convened in the Netherlands in the early 1900s that he had, in fact, conducted much of his research entirely independently of others. In more recent times, Simon Marius was honoured by the astronomical community by the naming of a lunar crater after him in 1935, the 41-km-diameter Marius Crater. And in 1979 a region on Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede, was named Marius Regio. In 2014, asteroid (7984) Marius was named in his honour, discovered on September 29, 1980, by Czech astronomer Zdenka Vavrova at the Kiel Observatory, and provisionally designated 1980 SM.
This doesn’t, however, excuse the badly researched garbage that precedes it.
Neil English’s article is four and a quarter-pages long and the quarter would fit easily into the large gap on the title page between title and text, so actually only four pages long has a grand total of 2071 words [this blog post has 5500 words!] For this extremely short collection of errors, false statements, and at times total hogwash Springer in their wisdom demand, for a pdf, the princely sum of €29,95. The abysmal quality of English’s Marius essay raises, for me, the question as to whether the other essays in his book are also as badly researched? If they are then the €249.09 for the entire book can only be described as a brazen rip off!
[1] Hans Gaab, Concerning the Biography of Simon Marius (1573–1626) in Hans Gaab & Pierre Leich eds., Simon Marius and His Research, Springer, 2018 pp. 91–92.
[4] Nola Taylor Redd, Who really discovered Jupiter’s four large moons?, Astronomy Magazine, December 15, 2016, quoting Jay Pasachoff.
[5] Christopher M. Graney, An Astronomer Too Excellent: Simon Marius, the Telescope, and the Problem of the Stars During the Copernican Revolution, in Hans Gaab & Pierre Leich eds., Simon Marius and His Research, Springer, 2018 pp. 239–247
[7] The World of Jupiter, English Translation of Mundus Iovialis, Arthur Octavius Prickard and Albert Van Helden, in Hans Gaab & Pierre Leich eds., Simon Marius and His Research, Springer, 2018 pp. 153 quoted passages p. 26 & p. 29
One of the most persistent myths, that keeps recurring in the history of science, is that there is some sort of fundament conflict or even a mutual incompatibility between science and religion. In the last couple of decades, the debate over these claims has not just reached boiling point but has violently boiled over enveloping the participants in clouds of scolding steam, following the emergence of the professed gnu-atheists with the so-called Four Horsemen–Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett–driving their unholy hordes into the fray. Some of the utterances uttered by these deniers of the faith have been so mind bogglingly stupid that it hurts.
Dawkins and some of his sycophants have even gone so far as to claim that it is basically impossible to be a good scientist if you believe in a god. The historian of science cringes when confronted by such inanities. Just to take one quick example out of my own area of interest, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boole, and Isaac Newton, who have all been hailed as founding fathers of modern science, were all deeply religious. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to describe Isaac Newton as fanatically religious. I have actually been told by combative atheists when confronted with Isaac Newton’s deep religiosity that he could have achieved so much more in science if he hadn’t wasted his time and effort on Bible studies. This comes from people who have not even contributed 0.01% to the development of science that Newton did.
I should clearly state my own position on religion, before I continue with this blog post. As I have said often in the past on the Internet, I am the life-long atheist son of an atheist father and an agnostic mother. However, as my father, who was an archaeologist, historian, and anthropologist, explained to me in a discussion, when I was still a teenager, if you wish to understand this world and its history, you have to understand the influence that the religions have had on that history. Valuable advice that I have taken to heart as a historian of science. I continue to find it deeply ironical that I spend quite a lot of time and energy defending the contributions of deeply religious individuals and groups, such as the Jesuits, to the evolution of the sciences against the rages of ‘convinced atheists,’ who claim that such believers only blocked scientific progress.
All of the above is just a prologue, setting the stage, for a review of a comparatively new contribution to the ongoing debate, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Religion andScience by Nicolas Spencer.[1]
I had no idea who Nicholas Spencer is and where exactly he is coming from in this debate, so I offer my readers this potted CV from the website of Theos, which describes itself so, Theos stimulates the debate about the place of religion in society, challenging and changing ideas through research, commentary and events.
Nick is Senior Fellow at Theos. He is the author of a number of books and reports, including Magisteria: the entangled histories of science and religion (Oneworld, 2023), The Political Samaritan: how power hijacked a parable (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Evolution of the West (SPCK, 2016) and Atheists: The Origin of the Species (Bloomsbury, 2014). He is host of the podcast Reading Our Times. Outside of Theos, Nick is Visiting Research Fellow at the Faiths and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London and a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion. He tweets @theosnick
Spencer’s Magisteria is an episodic, chronological survey of the changing relationship between science and religion throughout Western history from the Ancient Greeks down to AI, debunking the standard myths, Hypatia and Galileo for example, on route.
Some readers will probably recognise the title from the NOMA hypothesis of the palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002). NOMA is non-overlapping magisterial, this was Gould’s suggested solution to the supposed conflict, claiming that science and religion each represent different areas of inquiry, facts vs values, so there is a difference between the “nets”over which they have “a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority”, and the two domains do not overlap. For fairly obvious reasons Gould’s solution didn’t float. Spencer devote quite a lot of space to it in the appropriate section of his book.
Spencer’s book is in general an excellent, comprehensive introduction to a complex and much discussed, or better said, disputed topic. He clears away the accumulated dead wood and by carefully researched factual presentation shows that there is no monolithic explanation of the relationship between science and religion and certainly no fundamental conflict or war as it has been called. In fact, he demonstrates quite clearly based on the actual historical facts that the final combination in my multiple title offer, a cuddle muddle of numerous variations, is the correct assessment of that relationship.
On the whole reading through the book, I got the impression that Spencer was more at home, more attuned with, the life and social sciences–biology, sociology, anthropology– than with so-called exact sciences–mathematics, physics, astronomy. The sections on the former seemed to me to be deeper and with more understanding than the latter. An impression that was underlined by some bizarre errors that my pedantic alter ego simply could not ignore, all of which were related to the exact science. Maybe there are similar errors by the life and social science essays that due to my comparative lack of knowledge in these fields escaped my attention, but I don’t think this was the case.
Despite these errors, which I will highlight shortly, I heartily recommend Magisteria to anyone and everyone with an interest in the topic be it professional, semi-professional or simply curiosity.
The book is divided into four parts the first of which with the title, Science and ReligionBefore Science and Religion, has five subsections, the first of which The Nature of NaturalPhilosophy: Science and Religion in the Ancient World, opens with one of the two most famous clashes between science and religion, Hypatia.
Spencer does an excellent job of dispensing with the myths but here delivers up his first major questionable statement in the exact sciences, when he writes, Hypatia was by all accounts, a fine astronomer and a first rank mathematician… and…her father [Theon], an equally formidable mathematician…. I have already dealt with this in a separate post and won’t repeat myself here. However, I will add the judgement of G. J. Toomer, the leading expert on Ptolemy’s Almagest, which Theon edited and wrote a commentary on:
Theon was a competent mathematician for his time, but completely unoriginal. He typifies the scholastic of later antiquity who was content to expound recognized classics in his field without ever attempting to go beyond them.
The rest of this chapter is a good brief summary of the relationship between natural philosophy and Christianity down the John Philoponus in the sixth century, revealing it to be multifaceted. He does, however, having declared, correctly, that astrology was a science, devotes some space to the Holy Fathers rejection of it. It seems that Spencer has something against astrology as he only mentions it couple of more times in his book, each times negatively. Interestingly having featured the Holy Fathers rejection of astrology he makes no mention of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, who were responsible for establishing Aristotle as Catholic science in the Middle Ages, having re-established and legitimised astrology within the Catholic Church.
Staying on the same topic, in the third chapter, Ambiguous and Argumentative: Science andJudaism, Spencer mentions that the prophet Isaiah warned his people against consulting astrologers. The term that is translated as astrologers in the King James Bible is, in fact, viewers of the heavens and as Isaiah is here thundering against the Babylonians in the eight or seven century BCE, he is referencing Babylonian omen astrology which is a very different beast to what we now understand under the term astrology. Later Spencer, quite rightly, introduces the twelfth century Jewish scholar, Maimonides, and amongst other things writes, “he was to be remembered, however, but as a scholar and prolific author, witing on logic, astronomy, astrology (which he dismissed) and medicine. At the end of the chapter, he briefly introduces Gersonides, Levi ben Gerson (1288–1344), and writes, “And yet in spite of his tough-minded scientific approach, Gersonides was unlike Maimonides, a firm believer in astrology, which he credited with a determinism over human affairs.” A clear anti-astrology value judgement on Spencer’ part. However, that is not the reason I have emphasised these quotes, later in his book in the Early Modern Period, when nearly all tough-minded scientists, such as Kepler and Galileo, were practicing astrologers and astrology played a very central role in the relations between science and religion, Spencer makes absolutely no mention of it whatsoever.
Sticking with astrology, going back a chapter we have, A Fragile Balance: Science and Islam, on the whole a reasonably done debunking of various myths, Spencer delivers up a gob-smacking false statement with relation to astrology. He writes, “In astronomy, through accurate instruments, precise and repeated observations and a willingness to disentangle the subject from astrology…!” Astrology lay at the heart of Islamic astronomy and was one of the principal reasons for their engagement with the subject. We are talking here about the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate, which basically created the climate in which Islamic science grew and flourished. The Abbasids commissioned not just one but two horoscopes from leading astrologers to determine the most opportune moment to lay the foundation stones of their new capital, Baghdad. Spencer gives no reference for his strange and totally false statement but a few pages on he does reference Dimitri Gutas’ excellent Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ’Abbāsid Society. I must ask if Spencer actually read it, because in his book Gutas emphasises the central role that astrology played in Islamic science and in particular the lead role it played in the ’Abbāsid determination to appropriate Greek science.
Chapters four, Science in Christendom, and five, 1543 and All That are on the whole good with one small exception. Concerning Osiander’s ad lectorum in De revolutionibus, Spencer writes, “Rheticus arranged the publication of De revolutionibus with Osiander…” This is simply wrong. There was no contact on this topic between Rheticus and Osiander. Rheticus was ordered to take up his new position as professor in Leipzig by Melanchthon, making it impossible for him to see the manuscript through the press. Johannes Petreius, the printer publisher, appointed Osiander, with whom he already had a working relationship, to edit the manuscript.
Chapter six deals with Galileo Galilei and is on the whole done reasonably well except where he writes on the final page, “But Galileo’s work continued to draw less attention than his life. Newton praised him in his Principia Mathematica, but his own mathematics and astronomy clearly surpassed those of the man on whose shoulders he stood.” Spencer is here perpetuating a widely spread myth. Galileo and his work hardly feature in Principia at all, there are no shoulders being stood on here and Newton doesn’t praise him anywhere in the book. In half a dozen places where he utilises the parabola law of projectile motion or the law of fall, Newton acknowledges, in a couple of words, that the theorems are from Galileo and otherwise doesn’t acknowledge him in anyway whatsoever.
In Chapter eight, The Perils of Perfect Harmony, Spencer, unfortunately, delivers up the Newton Annus mirabilis myth without actually using the term, he writes:
“Newton had emerged from the Aristotelian shadow in which Cambridge still lay within a few years of his arrival in 1661, and by 1664 he was reading and critiquing Descartes. He spent the following two years back at home in Woolsthorpe, after Cambridge closed on account of plague. It turned out to be a rather profitable sabbatical. Having effectively taught himself mathematics, he invented calculus (or ‘the method of series and fluxions’), the way of calculating continuous change by means of summing infinitesimal differences; split out the constituent elements of white light; made initial associations of planetary motion with terrestrial gravity; and nearly blinded himself by conducting experiments with a bodkin in his eye.”
Almost all of this is ahistorical hogwash as I have systematically analysed in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat myself here. Spencer’s “nearly blinded himself” is a wonderful flourish but unfortunately has no basis in fact. At least he correctly says bodkin, which is flat and blunt, as opposed to many of the shock horror brigade, who incorrectly say needle, which is pointed and sharp.
Chapter twelve is titled, Globalisation, and fairly logically starts with the seventeenth-century mission to China, where they used their superior astronomical knowledge to gain access to the highest levels of Chinese society in order to try and convert the Chinese to Christianity. Here Spencer drops a clangour. He writes:
The accuracy of the Jesuits’ science was impressive, despite the fact that, with only a few exceptions, the missionaries propounded Tycho Brahe’s geo-heliocentric model, the Copernican one being, of course, banned. It soon became clear to them that the Chinese calendar needed correction. The court was, at first, resistant to outside intervention in this, so vital to the performance of Chinese rites and the authority of the emperor was the calendar.
A couple of minor details, firstly the Tychonic geo-heliocentric model was, at that time, the one best supported by the available empirical evidence, so yes that was the one the Jesuits used. The Copernican model was not banned, one could use it hypothetically, which many Catholic astronomers did, but could not state that it represented realty. Interestingly the Jesuits did introduce the Copernican heliocentric system into China. More importantly, it did not become clear to the Jesuits that the Chinese calendar needed correction. As Spencer says, calendar reforms were a central element of Chinese imperial court culture. There was a calendar reform carried out by Imperial Bureau of Astronomy whenever a new emperor was enthroned in order to be able to make accurate astrological prognostications. The Jesuits merely claimed that they could do it better than the Chinese astronomers.
Chapter fifteen is titled, Entangled and Uncertain, and deals with the new physics and astronomy in the early twentieth century. Dealing with Einstein and his theories of relativity there are several “minor” errors. We start off with an obvious attempt to be politically correct, Spencer writes:
Prepared to doubt Newton’s authority (at least in extreme conditions), Einstein and his wife Mileva Marić combined Maxwell’s equations with the idea that the speed of light was a constant irrespective of the speed of any observer, to argue that the absolute and uniform nature of space and time inherent in Newton’s mechanics was not entirely accurate.
The claim that Mileva Marić somehow co-authored the special theory of relativity, which was propagated several years ago, has been thoroughly debunked. Also, Maxwell’s equations, if true and it was assumed that they were, had already shown that Newton’s physics couldn’t be correct, and Einstein provided the solution to this contradiction.
Moving on, Spencer writes:
Over the following decade, Einstein applied these ideas to gravity to form his theory of general relativity, which fused and mathematically described the three dimension of space and one of time. The theory made predictions about an anomaly within the orbit of Mercury, and when these were confirmed by Eddington’s observations in May 1919 [my emphasis], both theory and theorist achieved global fame.
The first time I read the emphasised sentence above I thought I had somehow misread and went back and read it a second time, but it really does say what it says. The anomaly in the orbit of Mercury existed in Newton’s theory of gravity and was well known. To quote Wikipedia, quoting Abraham Pais, “Einstein showed in 1915 how his theory explained the anomalous perihelion advance of the planet Mercury without any arbitrary parameters (“fudge factors.”). Beyond this general relativity predicted that sufficiently large bodies would deflect or bend light. Newtonian gravity does too, but the degree of bending is significantly different in the two theories. In 1919, Arthur Eddington led an expedition to the island of Príncipe off the west coast of Africa to observe the solar eclipse of 19 May. His observations showed that the Sun bent starlight to a degree consistent with Einstein’s theory and not that of Newton.
Having done my usually hatchet job pointing out the errors that I spotted in Spencer’s book I will now briefly mention three of the nineteen chapters that most impressed me personally, not because there are intrinsically better than the others, apart from the errors mentioned above the quality of his explanations is consistently high, but because I learnt something new.
The first two are related and are connected to the reception of Darwin and evolution, which is apparently one of Spencer’s areas of expertise, to judge from his other publications. The topic is, of course, a central one in the whole religion contra science debate. In chapter eleven, The Balance, Spencer delivers a sober up to date account of the infamous 1860 Oxford debate on evolution during which Samuel Wilberforce is said to have clashed with Thomas Huxley. I say said to, because as Spencer points out there was, in earlier accounts, very little direct evidence of what was actually said.
Chapter fourteen, The Trial of the Century, is devoted to the equally infamous Scopes trial in Drayton, Tennessee in 1925. I’m quite happy to admit that all I knew about this episode in the history of the reception of the theory of evolution was that it was about the ban on teaching the theory in schools. I was not even aware that it was the defenders of evolution who provoked the trial. Spencer delivers a clear and very detailed account of the whole episode and of the fall out. A superb piece of contextual history of science writing.
I grew up during the era of the “space race.” I was five years old when, to the horror of the Americans, the USSR launched Sputnik I, the very first artificial Earth satellite, on 4 October 1957. One of my earliest memories was being woken up by my mother and taken out onto our front lawn to view this marvel of technology. I was seventeen when the Apollo Lunar Module, Eagle, landed on the Moon on 20 July 1969 and Neil Armstrong took that first historic step onto the lunar surface. I never knew until I read Spencer’s seventeenth chapter, Storming the Heavens, that the early years of that superpower technological rivalry also had a powerful religious element–atheist Marxist Soviet technology vs In God We Trust American technology–delivered in the form of a propaganda war. For me this was a truly fascinating story that somehow, I had earlier missed although I lived through it.
The book has endnotes that basically only references the sources used for each chapter. There is no separate bibliography but a comprehensive further reading guide for the introduction and each of the four main sections of the book. For the areas that I know well, mostly excellent lists but I did baulk at his recommending Jim al-Khalili’s Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science, which is in my opinion not a good book. I also found it strange that he recommended Walter Isaacson’s questionable Einstein: His Life and Universe rather than Abraham Pais’ far superior Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. The book closes with an extensive index. Each chapter features a grayscale frontispiece related to the content of the chapter, a couple of which I have reproduced above.
Despite my negative comments above on selected statements in the book, it is very well written, very accessible and a stimulating and highly informative read, which I once again recommend to anybody and everybody with an interest in the subject.
[1] Nicolas Spencer, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Religion and Science, Oneworld Publications, London, 2023.
That was my buddy the HISTSCI_HULK expostulating whilst he was indulging in his annoying habit of peering over my shoulder whilst I’m reading.
She never was! That’s simply wrong!
Hulky was getting his nickers in a twist about the following claim:
Hypatia was by all accounts, a fine astronomer and a first rank mathematician…[1]
He bleedin’ weren’t either! Exploded Hulky as he read further on:
…her father, an equally formidable mathematician…
Hulky is, of course, totally correct. Hypatia’s father was Theon of Alexandria and although such judgements are to a large extent subjective, in the normal run of things nobody would classify Theon as a formidable mathematician or Hypatia a fine astronomer and a first rank mathematician.
We start with Theon from whom Hypatia appears to have learnt and inherited everything. Theon was the head of a (note, not ‘the’) Neoplatonic school in Alexandria where he taught philosophy, mathematics and astronomy. The latter two being part of a basic Neoplatonic curriculum. Here Theon is a teacher of astronomy and mathematics not in any way a formidable mathematician.
Theon is most well known in the history of mathematics as the editor and commentator of an edition of the Euclid’s Elements. In fact, the only known Greek edition until a different one was found in the nineteenth century. He also produced commentaries on Euclid’s Data, his Optics and Ptolemaios’ Mathēmatikē Syntaxis. All of these are works of elucidation for students and it is more correct to call Theon a textbook editor.
Theon of Alexandria is best known for having edited the existing text of Euclid’s Elements, shown here in a ninth-century manuscript Vatican Library via Wikimedia Commons
Turing to Hypatia, she appears to have studied under her father and then went on to take over his position as head of his school, also teaching Neoplatonic philosophy with astronomy and mathematics as subsidiaries. Once again, a teacher not a fine astronomer and a first rank mathematician. Unlike Theon there are no known surviving publications by Hypatia.
The Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopaedia of the ancient Mediterranean world list three mathematical works for her, which it states have all been lost. The Suda credits her with commentaries on the Conic Sections of the third-century BCE Apollonius of Perga, the “Astronomical Table” and the Arithemica of the second- and third-century CE Diophantus of Alexandria. Alan Cameron, however, argues convincingly that she in fact edited the surviving text of Ptolemaeus’ Handy Tables, (the second item on the Suda list) normally attributed to her father Theon as well as a large part of the text of the Almagest her father used for his commentary. Only six of the thirteen books of Apollonius’ Conic Sections exist in Greek; historians argue that the additional four books that exist in Arabic are from Hypatia, a plausible assumption[2]. So once again, what we have is that Hypatia was like her father a textbook editor.
The MacTutor article on Theon contains the following judgement:
Theon was a competent but unoriginal mathematician.
Although we have no direct evidence in her case, the same can almost certainly be said about his daughter, Hypatia. Both of them are Neoplatonic philosophy teachers, a philosophical direction that includes a basic amount of astronomy and mathematics. They both produced textbooks for students by editing existing standard texts and adding commentaries to aid understanding. There is absolutely no evidence that their mathematical competence went beyond this pedagogical level.
Because they both feature fairly prominently in the history of mathematics, people, and unfortunately, not just the quoted author make the lazy, unfounded assumptions that they are “a fine astronomer and a first rank mathematician” and “an equally formidable mathematician.” Assumptions that have absolutely no foundation in the known historical facts. Theon is famous because of his edition of Euclid’s Elements and Hypatia because she was brutally murdered, and not for their mathematical abilities.
I will, however, add, as a sort of footnote, that textbook authors and editors play a very important role in the history of a scientific discipline, a role that unfortunately, all too often, simply gets ignored in the standard accounts of the history of science.
[1] I’m not going to mention the source on this occasion because the assumption made here turns up time and again and has somehow become gospel. I will however be reviewing the book in question in due course.
[2] This paragraph is borrowed from an early blog post about Hypatia that I wrote.
Old Hulky[2] was thinking of taking time off for the summer and retiring to an ice floe[3] in the North Atlantic for a couple of weeks to escape the heat wave, when Neil deGrasse Tyson has to go and publish a piece of history of astronomy inanity that would have to look hard to find its equal and now he’s on the rampage–stomp, stomp, stomp…
If you know anything about the history of astronomy read the following and weep:
‘For thousands of years, humans reasonably assumed the Moon to be a flat disk of light that waxed and waned – until the 17th century, when Galileo dared turn his freshly perfected telescope skyward, revealing a textured sphere with jagged mountains drenched in sunlight and sloping valleys cloaked in shadow. From that moment onward, the heavens and all the celestial objects therein became worlds…’ [4]
Hulky thinks that NdGT must be a male of the species Bos taurus because he can pack so much bovine manure into just one paragraph of sixty-four words!
For thousands of years, humans reasonably assumed the Moon to be a flat disk of light that waxed and waned – until the 17th century…
Hulky: I think he’s just making shit up!
I’m afraid I have to agree with my combative friend. I have spent half a lifetime studying and researching the European history of astronomy and have never come across a theory about the Moon from anybody that even halfway resembles the piece of ahistorical verbal garbage that NdGT spews out in the sentence above. Let us briefly look at the lunar theories held and developed by the Ancient Greeks that were dominant in European thought up to the Early Modern Period.
Starting with the Pre-Socratics, apparently Anaximander really did think that the Moon was a flat disc but both Thales and Parmenides claimed it was a sphere. Anaxagoras thought that both the Sun and the Moon were big stones, and that moonlight was in fact reflected sunlight. However, as I have stated in the past I view claims about the beliefs of the Pre-Socratics, which are based on hearsay often hundreds of years after they lived, very sceptically, so I’ll turn to more reliable sources. For Aristotle, all seven planets (asteres planētai, wandering stars)–Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn–were perfect unblemished spheres, made of aether, the fifth element or quintessence. Generally, in Aristotelian cosmology, which dominated thought in Europe from the twelfth down to the seventeenth century, the Moon is illuminated with Sun light, a model that is used to explain both the phases of the Moon and eclipses. Although there existed a debate as to whether the Moon had its own light.
Maybe, NdGT doesn’t like philosophers and prefers astronomers. In his Mathēmatikē Syntaxis, written around 150 CE, Ptolemaeus, whose astronomy dominated in Europe, again from the twelfth down to the seventeenth century, we can read the following in Book IV:
For the distance between the sphere [my emphasis] of the moon and the centre of the earth…[5]
Or Book V
The ratios of the volumes of the bodies are immediately derivable from the ratios of the diameters of sun, moon and earth.[6]
Both quotes leave no doubt that for Ptolemaeus the Moon was a sphere.
…when Galileo dared turn his freshly perfected telescope skyward…
When I was young there was a widely spread myth that Galileo invented the telescope. It has in the meantime largely disappeared, although it still crops up from time to time. It would appear that it has been replaced with the equally mythical claim that Galileo perfected the telescope. This is the second time that NdGT has recently made this claim.
Hulky: He obviously believes that if you repeat a myth often enough then the suckers will believe it
Galileo succeeded in raising the magnification of the telescope originally launched by Hans Lipperhey in Middelburg in 1608, as did Thomas Harriot, Simon Marius, and Antonio Santini, and later many others but to talk of a perfected telescope is a joke. The early telescope lenses were made of very poor-quality glass and the grinding and polishing of those lenses left much to be desired. Suffering from both spherical and chromatic aberration, the images the early telescopes produced were blurred and had coloured fringes. As a result, there were lots of false sightings reported in the seventeenth century. That anybody was actually able to make accurate observations with those very poor-quality telescopes borders on a miracle.
…revealing a textured sphere with jagged mountains drenched in sunlight and sloping valleys cloaked in shadow.
Hulky: fancies himself as a bleeding poet, don’t he?
Probably due to his training as an artist, Galileo was able to interpret the dark patches he could observe on the Moon as shadows cast by uplands.
From that moment onward, the heavens and all the celestial objects therein became worlds…’
As I have pointed out on more than one occasion, Galileo’s hypothesis that the Moon’s surface was not perfectly smooth as Aristotle’s cosmology required but was Earth like with mountains and valleys was not as new or as spectacular as it is mostly presented.
That the moon was Earth like and for some that the well-known markings on the Moon, the man in the moon etc., are in fact a mountainous landscape was a view held by various in antiquity, such as Thales, Orpheus, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Pythagoras, Philolaus, Plutarch and Lucian. In particular Plutarch (c. 46–c. 120 CE) in his Onthe Face of the Moon in his Moralia, having dismissed other theories including Aristotle’s wrote:
Just as our earth contains gulfs that are deep and extensive, one here pouring in towards us through the Pillars of Herakles and outside the Caspian and the Red Sea with its gulfs, so those features are depths and hollows of the Moon. The largest of them is called “Hecate’s Recess,” where the souls suffer and extract penalties for whatever they have endured or committed after having already become spirits; and the two long ones are called “the Gates,” for through them pass the souls now to the side of the Moon that faces heaven and now back to the side that faces Earth. The side of the Moon towards heaven is named “Elysian plain,” the hither side, “House of counter-terrestrial Persephone.”[7]
Plutarch’s Moralia was a well-known, widely read, and much-loved text amongst Renaissance Humanists, so Galileo’s discovery was really not that sensational.
As, unfortunately, all too often NdGT is once again feeding his poor, benighted acolytes a diet of highly inaccurate, fanciful, ahistorical garbage. If I were National Geographic or their parent company Penguin Random House, I would be ashamed to have this detritus associated with my brand name.
[1] With apologies to Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart
[2] Hulky is the Renaissance Mathematicus pet name for the HISTSCI_HULK
[3] Recommended to him by his friend Frankenstein’s much maligned monster as a good place to escape from the stress of civilisation.
[4] Neil deGrasse Tyson & Lindsey Nyx Walker, To Infinity and Beyond: A Journey of Cosmic Discovery, A StarTalk Book, National Geographic, NY, 2023, p. 17
[5] Ptolemy’s Almagest, Translated and Annotated by G. J. Toomer, Princeton University Press, ppb. 1998, p. 173
I have gained a reputation for pointing out and demolishing myths in the history of science. One area where these are particularly prevalent is in the history of the European Middle Ages. With numerous people claiming that there was little or no science during this period and what there was, was all wrong, usually blaming this situation on the Catholic Church. The people making these claims completely ignore the quite extensive literature on the history of medieval science written by such excellent historians as David C Lindberg, Edward Grant, Stephen C McCluskey, Bruce S Eastwood, Alastair C Crombie, and John E Murdoch amongst others. For those who don’t wish to plough through the academic literature, there is also a selection of excellent popular books on the subject, which I can warmly recommend. For example, David C Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Tradition inPhilosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, (Chicago UP, 2nd ed. 2007), or perhaps Seb Falk, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science(Norton, 2020), which I reviewed here. Finally, James Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, (Icon Books, 2009).
One of the most persistent myths against which my friend the HISTSCI_HULK has rampaged on several occasions is that, during the European Middle Ages, people believed that the world was flat. Following up on his excellent God’s Philosophers, James Hannam has now delivered the book that should squash that myth for ever, but I fear won’t, The Globe: How the Earth Became Round.[1]
The blog post title is not just a piss poor play on words of the book’s subtitle, in his just over three-hundred pages, Hannam takes his readers on a journey both chronological and geographically around the world starting around 3000 BCE in the fertile crescent to England in the twentieth century on a wild zig zag course. The opening three chapters give brief but informative accounts of the image of the heavens and the earth of the ancient Babylonians, the ancient Egyptians, and the ancient Persians, all of whom believed in a flat earth with themselves at the centre under a ceiling like heaven, with varying explanations as to where the sun went at night and the moon during the day.
Imago Mundi Babylonian map, the oldest known world map, 6th century BCE Babylonia. Now in the British Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Having only devoted one brief chapter to each of these great ancient civilisations, Hannam now devotes six chapters to Ancient Greece! Seems unfair but it is here that the main action takes place, over a period of about four centuries the Earth transitioned from flat to spherical in Greek thought and Hannam, here, details each phase of that transition. He proceeds from Archaic Greece, the poems of Homer and Hesiod describing a circular flat earth, moving on to the Origins of Greek Thought, where he is refreshingly sceptical about claims made about Thales’ views. Next up are the Pre-Socratics and Socrates ending with Socrates death. Socrates is, of course followed by Plato and the earliest confirmed mention of a spherical Earth, Plato, in his Phaedo dialogue, supposedly quoting Socrates:
“I assumed that [Anaxagoras] would begin by informing us whether the Earth is flat or round, and then he’d explain why it had to be that way because that was what was better.”[2]
The following chapter on Plato goes deep into the discussion, as to where and from whom the idea that the Earth is a sphere first comes from, as it is obvious from the way that Plato writes about it that the discussion flat or round was already under way. After Plato comes Aristotle and we have the first clear statement that the Earth is a sphere, why it must be a sphere and empirical evidence that supports the statement that the Earth is a sphere:
Bust of Aristotle. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 BC Source: Wikimedia Commons
Aristotle concluded his discission by showing how the theory of the Globe explained observations that might seem otherwise inexplicable. In the first place, he said that when there is a lunar eclipse the shadow of the Earth on the Moon is always curved. This corroborates what he had already shown from his first principles. The umbra during a lunar eclipse follows from the shape of the Earth. If it is a ball, its shadow must always be an arc.
His second piece of empirical evidence is the way the visible stars change as we travel north or south. He noted that some stars, which are visible in Egypt and Cyprus, can’t be seen in the north. He is almost certainly referring to Eudoxus’ observations of Canopus. It is bright enough to be hard to miss in Egypt, albeit usually low in the sky. Its absence from view in Athens would have been obvious to anyone who had seen it further south. This is only explicable if the Earth is rounded, if it were a flat plane, everyone would see the same stars. Since it is spherical, it’s inevitable that our view of the heavens will change with latitude.[3]
So, we have reached our objective, Aristotle demonstrated that the Earth is a sphere and not flat. End of story! No! Everything up till now was merely a prelude, the real story is just beginning. Hannam closes his section on Aristotle with the following:
By any conventional standards he [Aristotle] knew the Earth was a sphere, and he was probably the first person who did. On that basis, he discovered the theory of the Globe. As we will see in the remainder of this book, everyone today who knows the Earth is round indirectly learnt it from Aristotle. This makes the Globe the greatest scientific achievement of antiquity. It’s only because we take it as obvious that we don’t give Aristotle the credit he deserves.[4]
Hannam now take his readers of a journey through history and around the globe explaining how different cultures reacted when confronted, either directly or indirectly, with Aristotle’s truth. What their own vision of the Earth’s form was before that confrontation. Who came to accept the new vision, who reacted against it, rejecting. It’s a complex story that Hannam handles with verve, explicating clearly and accurately every twist and turn.
First off, Hannam stays with the Greeks and explains how the Stoics, who succeeded Aristotle as philosophical flavour of the century by supporting his conviction that the Earth was a sphere spread and established the view not only amongst the Greek but also the Romans, many leading figures having adopted the Stoic philosophy. The Stoics main rivals, the Epicureans, however, having adopted the cosmological theories of the Atomists reject the sphere maintaining that the Earth was flat. Their rejection of the sphere followed from their belief that the Earth was not the centre of the cosmos, the starting point of Aristotle’s argument for the sphere. Hannam also takes a close look at Greek cartography, if the Earth is a sphere how do you represent in in a flat diagram? Hannam moves on to a discussion of Roman culture and the representation of the Orbis within that culture.
In these sections Hannam points out that the Greek and Roman terms, such as the Latin Orbis, can mean both circle and sphere. Orbis is etymologically the origin of both orbit, a circle, and orb, a sphere. So, a modicum of caution is required when interpreting the historical texts.
Our journey now takes us through India, the Sassanian Persian Empire, Early Judaism and with it for the first time the Biblical view of the shape of the Earth and on into Christianity. Christianity had of course a problem with the inherent contradiction between the Bible, the infallible word of God, and the words of Aristotle. This led to a spirited discussion in the early Church that Hannam explicates, with his usual clarity. There was not just one but multiple discussion in the various early Christian communities. He we get one of the most notorious flat earther from antiquity, Cosmas Indicopleutes, who often gets quoted by those claiming that the people in the Middle Ages believed the world to be flat. The last of the so-called Abrahamic religions, Islam, comes next. With once again multiple discussion in particular about the discrepancy between the Koran and Aristotle. We had early Judaism now we have later Judaism in particular Moses Maimonides.
Europe in the Early Middle Ages is our next port of call. Mostly Aristotelian, most notably Augustine, but with exceptions most notably Lactantius, who would later feature in Copernicus’ De revolutionibus. Of interest here is Isidore of Seville (c.560-636) one of the most important encyclopaedists from late antiquity, who is in his writing more that ambiguous abut the shape of the Earth. Hannam argues fairly convincingly that, although he accepted Ptolemy’s astronomy and cosmology, he was a flat earther. However, Jürgen Hamel in his Die Vorstellung von der Kugelgestalt der Erde in europäischen Mittelalter bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts – dargestellt nach den Quellen,[5](an excellent book if you can read German) agues equally convincingly that he wasn’t. I guess with Isidore, you pays your money and makes your choice.
Moving on to the next chapter, High Medieval Views of the World: ‘The Earth has the shape of a globe’, we are well into the territory of those promoting the myth that people in the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat; a myth that Hannam proceeds to demolish with style. The money quote is:
Take the coronation orb, which has been part of the regalia presented to kings and emperors from late antiquity. The orb represents the Earth, while the cross on top symbolises that the secular power was subject to the will of God. Presumably, if people in the Middle Ages had thought the Earth was flat, they would have presented their rulers with a diner plate instead.[6]
Frauenkirche Nürnberg Clock with the Holy Roman Emperor in the middle holding the Orb and Sceptre 1309! Source: Wikimedia Commons
We move into the Early Modern Period with Columbus and Copernicus: ‘New worlds will be found,’ where Hannam also demolishes the myth that people thought Columbus would fall of the edge of the world and the equally stupid myth that Columbus proved that the world was round. We get a brief guest appearance of the world’s oldest surveying terrestrial globe, Martin Behaim’s Erdapfel (1492-94).
Martin Behaim’s Erdapfel GNM Nürnberg
Columbus is followed naturally by Magellan and the first circumnavigation. The chapter closes with a brief look at what Copernicus has to say about the shape of the Earth and also why he said it.
China’s tradition view of the Earth and its reaction to the idea that it is actually a globe is a difficult and complex story, stretching over two chapters, which Hannam manages to relate with his usually sureness and style.
Moving into the modern period brief nods at the attempts to measure the size of the globe and the problems of determining longitude lead into the eighteenth-century dispute over the actual shape of the Earth, Newton & Huygens vs the Cassinis, oblate spheroid or prolate spheroid and the only part of Hannam’s entire narrative that I think is slapdash and shoddy. This is one of the most important episodes in the history of geodesy that also had ramifications for the theory of gravity and led to an indirect proof of diurnal rotation. It deserves more that Hannam’s sloppy two paragraph account.
This penultimate chapter contains two further sections, the first are brief accounts of explorers and missionaries bringing the news of the spherical shape of the Earth to communities that still hadn’t received it and how they reacted. The second is a brief account of the origins of modern Flat-Earth supporters in the nineteenth century. The final chapter continues with the flat earthers of the twentieth century. For theses two sections Hannam’s primary source is Christine Garwood’s excellent Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea,[7] which I highly recommend if you are interested in the topic. The chapter proceeds with brief accounts of Draper-White conflict thesis and then moves on to the modern fantasy authors C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Terry Pratchett, who all knew better but still placed their fantasy novels in flat earth medieval settings.
Hannam’s book has extensive endnotes that mostly refer to the equally extensive bibliography. The book also has an extensive index. The book is richly illustrated but in the proof copy I was supplied with to write this review they are unfortunately very poor quality grey scale reproductions. I can only assume that they are better in the published version of the book.
James Hannam’s book is truly first class and should become a standard work on the topic. He covers a very wide range of material in a comparatively small number of pages. Each section of the book is relatively brief but concise, historically accurate, and highly informative. He writes extremely well, and his prose is clear and light to read. Anybody who takes the trouble to read this book will at the end know when, where and how the various populations of the Earth became aware that their home was on a large sphere floating through space. A fact first truly recognised by Aristotle in the fourth century BCE and slowly disseminated around the globe over a period of more than two thousand years. Hannam has produce a first-class documentation of that dissemination.
[1] James Hannam, The Globe: How the Earth Became Round, Reaction Books, London, 2023
[5] Jürgen Hamel, Die Vorstellung von der Kugelgestalt der Erde in europäischen Mittelalter bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts – dargestellt nach den Quellen, Abhandlung zur Geschichte der Geowissenschaften und Religion/Umwelt-Forschung, Neue Folge, Band 3 pp. 51-52
The heading of today’s chapter is Brahe and Kepler, which immediately provokes a strange reaction in my brain. There is an unwritten convention in English that if one refers to Tycho Brahe by a single name then it is Tycho and not Brahe and by Johannes Kepler then it is Kepler not Johannes., so my brain says the chapter heading should be Tycho & Kepler. Why this is I have no idea and have often spent time wondering about it. Conventional use of names is a strange area that appears to defy logic. Galileo Galilei is almost always simply Galileo in English but in German he is Galilei, but I digress.
With this final chapter we are also scraping the barrel in terms of Strathern’s historical idiocies. It goes without saying that he pays far more attention to the long list of Tycho’s personal oddities than he does to his actual achievements in the history of astronomy. Quite often I couldn’t help getting the feeling that he actually just makes shit up. I have read an awful lot of literature on both of these astronomers, and I kept stumbling across statements that were not simply false but which I had never come across anywhere before. Let us begin. The opening paragraphs are pure purple prose of the worst sort and historically inaccurate:
Sometime during the 1590s, Richard Burbage and his players were invited by the King of Denmark to perform a lucrative summer season at the royal castle at Elsinore (Helsingør). Shakespeare was not amongst these players, but would later be regaled with tales of their foreign adventure. These would provide the background for the play he had in mind, whose full title would be Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
It is at night on the battlements of Elsinore Castle that Hamlet encounters his father’s ghost, whose revelations sow the seeds of the ensuing tragedy. Coincidentally, some years earlier, while pacing these same battlements, the King of Denmark had suddenly seen the solution to a problem that was troubling him.
King Frederick II had taken under his wing an aristocratic young astronomer called Tycho Brahe, whose behaviour was as eccentric as his appearance: he wore a false metal nose and his awkward paranoid character inclined him to flamboyant cantankerous outbursts. [bullshit!] Brahe’s most recent astronomical observations had made him famous throughout Europe, and the king knew that Brahe was planning to leave Denmark. Brahe had received an offer to set up in Basel, one of the leading intellectual centres in Europe: home of the artistic Holbeins; where Paracelsus had briefly been professor; location of the skilled printer Oporinus to whom Vesalius had entrusted his masterwork. Looking out over the sea, Frederick II’s eye happened to alight on the remote island of Hven, in the middle of the Øresund (Sound) between Denmark and Sweden. Hven was royal territory, occupied only by a small village of fisherfolk and smallholders. If he offered Brahe this island, where the astronomer could build his own private residence, perhaps this would tempt him to remain in Denmark.
Although I studied English literature, amongst other things, at university I’m not a Shakespeare expert. There is a vast amount of literature about the possible sources of Hamlet. However, it is possible that Shakespeare did take Elsinore, as the setting for his play, from visiting actors but not from Richard Burbage and not from the 1590s. When Kronburg, the royal castle in Helsingør, was inaugurated in 1585, three English actors–William Kemp, Thomas Pope, George Bryan–performed there. Later the three, together with Shakespeare established the acting company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
Kronborg Castle and the Øresund from the 1580s geography book Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Georg Braun (1541-1622) and Frans Hogenberg (1535-1590) Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1575, when the scene Strathern is describing took place, Frederick II, would not have been pacing those same battlements, as the Kronburg was still being constructed. The suggestion that Tycho should be given his own observatory came from the astronomer Wilhelm IV Landgraf von Hessen-Kassel (1532–1592), whom Strather never mentions, but should have, Wilhelm was related by marriage to Frederick. His sister was married to one of Frederick’s uncles. The suggestion to let Tycho use Hven probably came from Tycho’s uncle Steen Bille. Frederick had already offered Tycho the choice of a traditional fiefs and honours as was his due as a high-ranking aristocrat, but Tycho had demurred. Steen Bille made Frederick aware that Tycho did not want the responsibilities and duties that went with a conventional fief, as they would interfere with his astronomical work, it was then that Frederick made his offer with a rhetorical flourish.
“…when he had been at Helsingør recently, checking on the construction of Kronborg Castle Frederick’s glance had happened to fall on the little island of Hven, on the southeast horizon. This he thought, was a perfect place for Tycho: isolated, unassociated with any administrative obligations, and unbound to any noble in fief. If the royal exchequer were tapped for the expenses of founding and maintaining a proper establishment, was there anything that Tycho hoped tom [sic] do abroad that he could not do here, where it would rebound to the credit of his country, his king and himself.”[1]
Strathern further:
Brahe had received an offer to set up in Basel, one of the leading intellectual centres in Europe: home of the artistic Holbeins; where Paracelsus had briefly been professor; location of the skilled printer Oporinus to whom Vesalius had entrusted his masterwork.
Although Tycho was planning on moving to Basel he had received no such offer to do so. One has to ask if Strathern thought that Tycho wanted to go ghost hunting in Basel? Remember we now have 1575, Hans Holbein the Younger was last in Basel in 1532 and had in fact died in 1543, his elder brother Ambrosius had already died in 1519. Oporinus was somewhat closer to Tycho’s times dying in 1563, as for Paracelsus, the city of Basel would prefer not to remember his brief stay there, less than a year, and he had departed the planet in 1541!
Strathern now heads off into his usual collection of fairy tales, avoiding facts in favour of sensation.
Tycho Brahe was amongst the more exotic characters to have contributed to the northern Renaissance. He came from a high-flying but dysfunctional noble family. His father, Otte, was the resident governor of a succession of royal castles (and may even have been a temporary governor of Elsinore). Tycho’s uncle Jørgen, who had inherited the considerable family fortune, was a royal counsellor, naval hero and hard-drinking pal of Frederick II.
Tycho Brahe surrounded by the shields of the families of his influential relatives
The Brahe family was anything but dysfunctional and I have no idea where Strathern got this idea from. Otte’s career was more successful than Jørgen’s, he held a series of important fiefdoms and was indeed governor of Helsingborg Castle. There was no law of primogeniture in Denmark, so Jørgen did no inherit the considerable family fortune. As the only two children of Tyge Brahe and Sophie Rud, Otte and Jørgen both inherited, receiving equal shares. Otte became a Rigsraad (royal counsellor), Jørgen didn’t.
When Jørgen discovered that he could not have children, he decided that he would select his own heir. In pursuance of this aim, he bullied his younger brother Otte into promising that he would present him with his firstborn son.
Otte’s disappointment with this arrangement was allayed when his wife gave birth to twin boys. Unfortunately, the other twin died in infancy, and Uncle Jørgen turned up to collect Tycho when he was just two years old. (Some reports claim that Tycho was kidnapped.) Tycho’s father threatened to murder his older brother, but nothing came of this.
Tycho’s own account:
His uncle Jørgen “without the knowledge of my parents (took) me away with him while I was in my earliest youth [and] brought me up and thereafter supported me generously during his lifetime … and always treated me as his own son.”[2]
There is no record of Otte Brahe threatening to kill Jørgen. Jørgen’s justification seems to have been that he and his wife Inger Oxe couldn’t have children. He seems to have waited till Tycho’s younger brother, Steen, had passed the greatest uncertainties of infancy, before abducting Tycho.
Tycho’s childhood was passed in a succession of cold draughty castles on the Baltic coast, dining at long wooden tables crammed with innumerable relatives. At the head of the table sat the intimidating figure of Uncle Jørgen; topics of mealtime conversation were ‘warfare, politics and court gossip’.
Tycho’s childhood was no different to that of any aristocratic child growing up in sixteenth-century Denmark. The only difference to his biological family is that he was, in his foster family, an only child. Fostering was, for various reasons, not unusual amongst the Danish aristocratic families, so Tycho’s situation was not so strange.
Otte wished his son to be educated in Latin, but Jørgen did not believe in such fripperies. Ten years before Tycho’s birth, in 1536, Denmark had broken definitively from the Roman Catholic Church and converted to Lutheranism. Despite this, Tycho received a traditional education in accord with the Aristotelian beliefs which still prevailed in Denmark.
The opening sentence of this paragraph is complete codswallop. Tycho’s education appears to have been managed by his foster mother Inger Oxe, an intelligent woman of intellectual interests and capabilities and above all her elder brother, Tycho’s foster uncle, Peder Oxe a man of great intellect, who spoke several languages fluently, and who, unusual for a Danish aristocrat, had spent five years studying at various European universities. From 1567, Tycho was just twenty-one, till his death in 1575, Peder Oxe was Lord High Steward of Denmark and the most powerful man in the country. He did much to facilitate Tycho’s career, pulling strings in the background to help his foster nephew. Peder Oxe does not feature at all in Strathern’s account of Tycho’s life, a serious omission.
Tycho attended grammar school, where he learnt Latin, from the age of seven to twelve when he then entered Copenhagen University as Strathern, for once, correctly notes. At grammar school he would have lived in the house of the bishop, and at university in the house of a professor. His interest in mathematics began at university.
The following year, the adolescent Tycho witnessed a partial eclipse of the sun. Although this eclipse arrived a day after it had been predicted, the very fact of its prediction was what most impressed Tycho. Here at last he had a glimpse of something certain in his life. He immediately began purchasing books on astronomy, including one by Regiomontanus, a map of the constellations drawn by Dürer and De Sphaera Mundi (The Sphere of the World) written by the thirteenth-century monastic scholar Johannes de Sacrobosco, which was regarded as the classic exposition of the Ptolemaic earth-centred astronomical system.
He bought the Sacrobosco, a very elementary text, in 1560. In 1561 he bought the much more advance Comographia of Peter Apian and Regiomontanus’ Trigonometry. He didn’t acquire the Dürer star map until 1562, when he was in Leipzig, where he also acquired several other astronomy and astrology texts.
Dürer’s star map of the Northern Hemisphere Source: Ian Ridpath’s Star Tales
Subsequently, Uncle Jørgen despatched the fifteen-year-old Tycho on a tour of German universities, accompanied by a nineteen-year-old tutor who was instructed to cure him of this astronomy nonsense and make sure he equipped himself with the type of education expected of a court counsellor. Within months the young Tycho’s enthusiasm had convinced his tutor to disobey his instructions, and together the two of them embarked upon the study of astronomy at the safe distance of the University of Leipzig.
Normally, at the age of fifteen, a young aristocrat would be sent to live on the court of another aristocrat to train as a page, the first step towards becoming part of the ruling classes. That Tycho instead was sent on a tour of European universities was certainly due to his foster mother and foster uncle and not his foster father. His tutor was Anders Sørensen Vedel. Although Tycho began to study astronomy seriously in Leipzig he was not joined in this endeavour by Vedel, who, did however, admit defeat in his attempts to get Tycho to concentrate on his university studies.
Here [University of Leipzig] Brahe gained a thorough knowledge of both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems. Together, he and his tutor observed a close conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Brahe was perplexed to discover that the tables drawn up using both the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system contained minor inaccuracies in their predictions of the conjunction. This led him to start making astronomical observations of his own.
Tycho had begun making his own observation well before he observed the great conjunction and had already discovered the discrepancies in both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican tables.
He decided that the only way to create correct tables was to make meticulous personal observations, night after night, using the most accurate astronomical instruments available. (The telescope had yet to be invented.)
The only instrument that Tycho had available, at that time, was a cross-staff, that he had purchased, and which proved to be not particularly accurate.
Tycho returned to Denmark in 1565 at the age of eighteen.
[…]
Jørgen heroically dived into the canal and rescued the king, but unfortunately died some days later of pneumonia.
The bit I left out is not particularly important, but Strathern now continues:
Using the inheritance he received from his stepfather, Brahe set off to study at the historic University of Rostock, on the north German coast of the Baltic.
Jørgen had been intending to draw up his will naming Tycho his heir, but he died before he could do so, as Tycho was not legally his son he, in fact, inherited nothing. He was now depended for money on his father, Otte, who following the death of Jørgen, had taken over the supervision of his son, who was still a minor.
Here Brahe became involved in an altercation with a Danish cousin who was also studying at the university. Their dispute originated over which of them was the finest mathematician. However, rather than settle this in the obvious mathematical manner, the two of them ended up having a duel. It was during the course of this that Brahe lost his nose, which was sliced off at the bridge by his opponent’s sword.
The duel was not about who was the finest mathematician; this is a myth that was created by Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) in his biography of Tycho written long after Tycho’s death. At the time Denmark was still effectively a feudal state dominated by a warrior cast. All young aristocrats carried a sword and were trained in the use of them. Duels between them were common and often led to serious injury and even death.
Brahe would continue with his studies at various German universities until he was twenty-six years old, by which time he had accumulated a superb collection of observational instruments – including ‘a large quadrant of brass and oak, thirty-eight feet in diameter and turned by four handles’. This enabled him to measure with precision the angle of elevation of a star above the horizon.
Tycho returned to Denmark in December 1570, just twenty-four years old. At that point in his life, he had a very small collection of fairly inaccurate astronomical instruments. The large oak and brass quadrant that Strathern references was designed and built by Tycho on the estate of the astronomer Paul Hainzel (1527–1581) in Augsburg in March 1570, the arc of the quadrant was 78 feet long. Tycho made observation with it for about six weeks in April and May of that year. It required forty men to erect it, so he certainly didn’t take it home with him. Given its bulk and extreme weight, Thoren’s thinks it was very difficult to operate and therefore not particularly accurate.
Thoren’s Lord of Uraniborg p. 34
Next up:
Brahe was the first to insist upon the central importance of precise astronomical observation.* As recognized by the twentieth-century American philosopher of science E. A. Burtt, Brahe was ‘the first competent mind in modern astronomy to feel ardently the passion for exact empirical facts’. It was this empiricism, and his reliance upon mathematical calculation, which makes him a truly modern scientist – one of the first to emerge in the Renaissance era. Not until the third decade of the ensuing century would Galileo famously proclaim: ‘The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.’ Brahe may not have said this, and he certainly would not have fully realized its implications, but his practice undeniably chimed with Galileo’s later remark.
I feel that both Regiomontanus and Wilhelm IV of Hessen-Kassel would feel deeply insulted by this paragraph. In 1471, Regiomontanus moved to Nürnberg explicitly to carry out a major programme of accurate astronomical observations to replace the data from the ancient Greeks that had become corrupted through multiple copying over the centuries. Sadly, he died before he could really get his programme started. Wilhelm IV set up an observatory in his castle beginning in 1560, so well before Tycho, with the same aim. He was instrumental in helping Tycho along his path and, as noted about, recommended to Frederick that he should give Tycho an observatory. Wilhelm and Tycho cooperated over the decades and Wilhelm’s observations were as accurate as Tycho’s. In terms of Galileo’s ‘The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics,’ I have pointed out often in the past this was old hat when Galileo wrote it, for example Robert Grosseteste said almost the same in the thirteenth century.
Wilhelm IV. Landgraf von Hessen-Kassel Portrait by Casper van der Borcht 1577
The footnote attached to this paragraph is hilarious:
* As Arthur Koestler pointed out, during the course of his life Copernicus would just make twenty-seven astronomical observations. The remainder of his astronomical data was reliant upon observations made by the likes of Ptolemy and Hipparchus in the second century AD. [my emphasis]
Ptolemy did indeed live in the second century AD, but Hipparchus lived in the second century BC!
Strathern now covers Tycho’s move, in 1570, to Herrevad Abbey with his Uncle Steen Bille, where they set up a laboratory, a glass works and a paper mill. He then writes:
Herrevad Abbey A depiction of the estate in 1680 Burman, Gerhard von, 1653-1701 (author) Fischer, Abraham, 1724-1775 (publisher) Source: Wikimedia Commons
Despite such distractions, Brahe was able to continue with his unrelenting schedule of nightly observations.
What Strathern neglects to mention is that the chief attraction of Herrevad Abbey, for Tycho, was that he and his uncle had also set up an observatory, so astronomical observations were his principal activity.
We then get the story of the 1572 nova and Tycho’s book De Stella Nova (About the New Star), which did indeed establish his reputation as an astronomer. However, Strathern goes over the top with his purple prose:
The publication of this work would make Brahe’s name known in universities throughout Europe. He had done for the universe something similar to what Copernicus had done for the Ptolemaic geocentric solar system. Astronomy was now a new science, released from the constrictions of a false Aristotelian orthodoxy [my emphasis]. Brahe was invited on a tour of European universities, and the metal-nosed Danish wonder with the huge, drooping, sausage-like moustache delivered lectures in halls from Heidelberg to Basel, and even as far afield as Venice, where he prolonged his stay for some weeks.
The sentence in bold is complete and utter twaddle. Although the observation of the nova, and Tycho was not the only astronomer to determine that it was supralunar, had an impact on Aristotelian cosmology, it is in no way comparable to Copernicus’ introduction of heliocentric astronomy. Note I use the word cosmology, whereas Strathern writes incorrectly astronomy. There is a major difference between astronomy and cosmology and I’m not even sure that Strathern knows the difference. The Aristotelian cosmological postulate that the heavens were incorruptible had already been seriously question in the sixteenth century by those observing the comets of the 1530s. This was why every astronomer in Europe, and not just Tycho, very actively observed the comet of 1577, to determine whether it was sub- or supralunar. The scientific status of astronomy was in no way changed by the nova of 1572.
Tycho was not invited on a tour of the European universities, another one of Strathern’s fantasies. His father having died in 1571 and his testament finally having been settled in 1574 with Tycho receiving his share, he was now a wealthy man. In March 1575, he went on a full-blown aristocratic peregrination during which he visited friends and fellow astronomers, it was on this journey that he met Wilhelm IV of Hessen-Kassel for the first time, which led to Wilhelm suggesting that Frederick give Tycho an observatory. He visited many towns in Germany but also Basel and Venice, where he did stay for a couple of weeks chatting to the local intelligentsia.
Brahe took up the king’s offer, and was soon at work constructing a large castle on Hven. In this he was inspired by the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, with whose work he had been favourably impressed during his stay in Venice. Palladio’s villas sought to emulate the work of Ancient Greek and Roman architects, notably Vitruvius.
Uraniborg main building from Blaeu’s Atlas Maior (1663) Source: Wikimedia Commons
Brahe’s castle was named Uraniborg after Urania, the ancient classical muse of astronomy, mathematics and the exact sciences. The islanders were conscripted as building labourers, and 100 students were brought on board – to learn from the master, as well as assist him in his building project. Uraniborg was soon envisaged as far more than a castle, or even a scientific laboratory (though it would fulfil both these purposes); it was to be a Renaissance palace, fit for entertaining visiting scholars from all over Europe.
Urania was in Greek mythology the muse of astronomy. Urania is the goddess of astronomy and stars and has nothing to do with mathematics and the exact sciences, both terms being completely alien to Greek mythology. When I read about the 100 students drafted in to assist in building Uraniborg, I thought WHAT! Where did Strathern dredge that one up? Approximately one hundred was the number of students and assistant who worked on Hven, in the twenty-one years that it was in operation. Next paragraph, next blunder:
But this was not all. Quite apart from the castle, Brahe was determined to build himself the finest observatory in Europe [my emphasis]. This Stjerneborg (City of the Stars) would be constructed in the grounds of the castle, and would consist of no less than six chambers, placed underground so as ‘not to be exposed to the disturbing influence of the wind’.
Uraniborg was built primarily and principally as an observatory. The towers on either side of the building were observation platforms and the large mural quadrant that features in so many articles about Tycho ran through the very centre of the building.
Tycho Brahe’s large mural quadrant at Uraniborg Engraving from the book: Tycho Brahe (1598), Astronomiae instauratae mechanica Source: Wikimedia Commons
Stjerneborg was a secondary observatory built after the fact for a number of reasons. Later, when both observatories were in operation, they would observe fully independently of each other and then Tycho would compare the results obtained. The “no less than six chambers” makes it sound enormous, but they were in fact all very small.
Observatory Stjerneborg from Blaeu’s Atlas Maior (1663) Source: Wikimedia Commons
Strathern continues:
Such was the cost of Brahe’s project on Hven that Frederick II was soon diverting no less than 1 per cent of the entire national budget in order to keep it going, while many of the students and all of the locals were declared ‘indentured’ labour, i.e. unpaid.
The often repeated “1 percent” of crown revenues that flowed to Hven is misleading. Denmark was an oligarchy. Through his father and his foster father’s family, his mother’s family, and his foster mother’s family, Tycho belong to the upper one percent of the population. If he, as would have been expected of him, with his obvious intelligence and organisational talents, had taken up a political role, his share of the crown revenues would certainly have been more than one percent.
Nobody was declared ‘indentured’ labour. Hven was Tycho’s fiefdom and under Danish law, each farm on Hven was required to provide him with two man-day-labour a week, irrespective of the type of labour. The students who came to Hven over the years, did not work on the construction site but in the observatories. In exchange for their labour, they received free board and lodging as well as an on hands education in observational astronomy.
We then get the usual stories of royal visits, banquets at Uraniborg, and Tycho’s dwarf, Jepp. Strathern then delivers his usual presentist disapproval:
As we have already seen, Brahe remained susceptible to the scientific misapprehensions of his age. (The basement of Uraniborg also contained a number of furnaces, which were used for alchemy.)
The basement of Uraniborg was a purpose-built alchemical laboratory that was principally used to produce Paracelsian medicine, with which Tycho treated the inhabitants of his astronomical kingdom. Tycho was a close friend of Peder Sørensen (1542–1602), widely known by his Latinized name, Petrus Severinus, one of Europe’s leading Paracelsian physicians and personal physician to the king.
We finally get some more astronomy:
It was during these years that Brahe observed the Great Comet which was visible throughout Europe from November 1577 to January 1578. Brahe managed to calculate the distance of this comet from earth, and also its direction of flight. He was thus able to show that its orbit lay far beyond that of the moon. This disproved once and for all the Aristotelian contention that all stars beyond the moon were ‘immutable and eternal’.
The Great Comet of 1577, seen over Prague on November 12. Engraving made by Jiri Daschitzky. Source: Wikimedia Commons
As already mentioned above the central debate as to whether comets were sub- or supralunar had been raging in astronomical circles in the comets of the 1530s and that is why astronomers throughout Europe, and not just Tycho, very carefully observed the comet of 1577. Brahe did not calculate its distance from the Earth, but did, like several others, determine that it displayed no parallax and was therefore supralunar.
Tycho’s elk, which Strathern calls a Moose, falls down the stairs and Tycho’s sister, Sophie Brahe, gets an inaccurate nod:
Yet amidst all this, Brahe continued with his dogged research into what was indisputably genuine science. His meticulous map of the night sky had now progressed well beyond 500 stars. In this he was aided by his students, as well as his long-time assistant Sophie, his younger sister, who since the age of fourteen had clocked up a series of remarkable triumphs. These included a precise observation of the eclipse of the moon, as well as many adjustments to the Copernican tables.
There is no indication in Strathern’s narrative when exactly Tycho had succeeded in mapping 500 stars, but it would have been well into the 1580s. However, he places this next to his brief comment about Sophie Brahe. Sophie assisted Tyco in his observations of the lunar eclipse of 1573. This, observation, took place in Knutstorp Castle, the Brahe family seat, and not Uraniborg, which was not even a distant dream then. In Uraniborg, Sophie’s principal functions, on her visits, were acting as a host for aristocratic and royal visitors, a role Tycho’s common law wife could not fulfil and she was probably also, as a horticulturalist, responsible for the extensive herb garden and involved in the production of medicine, being like her brother a Paracelsian alchemist.
Up next is a long paragraph on the legendary accuracy of Tycho’s observations This contains the following gem:
Nothing before, or since, matched the accuracy of his observations reliant upon the naked eye, using early theodolites and such, unaided by lenses or telescopes.
The invention of the theodolite is attributed to Leonard Digges (c. 1519–c. 1559) in a book first published posthumously in 1579 and I doubt that its existence had been noted on Hven, also it is of course a surveying instrument and not an astronomical one:
The section on Tycho’s accuracy end thus:
Such was the accuracy of Brahe’s observations of the motion of the sun that he was able to calculate the length of a year to within less than a second. As a result, Brahe’s readings would play a decisive role in the reformation of the calendar which took place under Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.
The Papal bull, Inter gravissimas, announcing the advent of the Gregorian calendar was issued on 24 February 1582. Tycho started building Uraniborg in 1579 and it only became operational as an observatory in 1583. Even if the very first thing that Tycho had done was to determine the length of the year, it wasn’t, I see a “slight problem” here. The length of year based on Tycho’s observations, 365 solar days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds (365.24219 days), was first published by Johannes Kepler in the Rudolphine Tables in 1627! The mathematical model used for the Gregorian calendar was produced by Aloysius Lilius (c. 1510–1576), who used the length of the year from the Alfonsine Tables, 365 solar days 5 hours 49 minutes 16 seconds (≈ 365.24255 days). In fact, he only used the value to two sexagesimal fractions (that’s base sixty), as was general astronomical practice at the time, 365; 14, 33 days.
The first page of the papal bull Inter Gravissimas Source: Wikimedia Commons
Next up more garbage:
On the other hand, Brahe’s observations did not prevent him from making certain mistakes. For instance, he concluded that the distance from the earth of the planet Saturn (the furthest known planet at the time) was 48 million miles. As Asimov observed, this ‘seemed an enormous distance for the astronomers of the age but was only one-eighteenth of the real figure’.
Determining the actual sizes of the known cosmos and the orbits of the planets was in fact extremely difficult. The problem was only solved with the first approximately accurate determination of the astronomical unit, the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun, in the 1770s.
Strathern displays his ignorance of the history of astronomy in his brief presentation of the Tychonic system:
Another oddity in Brahe’s thinking was his overall conception of the universe – the so-called Tychonic system. Although Brahe was well aware of the Copernican heliocentric system, he refused to jettison all the workings of the Ptolemaic geocentric system. His view of the universe was essentially a compromise between the two. For Brahe the earth remained at the centre of the universe. The sun and the moon circled the earth. However, all other planetary bodies revolved around the sun. This lopsided picture found little favour with either camp in the growing Copernican–Ptolemaic debate [my emphasis].
We then get the death of Frederick and Tycho’s abandonment of Hven and his eventual invitation from Rudolf II to settle in Prague:
In 1599 Brahe accepted the invitation of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and moved to Prague to take up the post of Imperial Court Astronomer. He was given a castle in which to set up an observatory, and a young German assistant named Johannes Kepler. Brahe gave Kepler access to his star catalogue, and together they began working on the planetary motions, with the aim of drawing up a complete chart of these.
Rudolf II did not give Tycho a young German assistant named Johannes Kepler! The very idea is totally absurd. Kepler came to Prague on his own volition in 1600 hoping to find employment with Tycho and to gain access to Tycho’s data to fine tune his Platonic solids model of the cosmos. Tycho did not give Kepler access to his star catalogue, believing that Nicolaus Reimers Baer (Ursus) (1551–1600) had plagiarised him, he feared that Kepler would do the same. In fact, the first task that Tycho gave Kepler was to write an essay proving that Ursus had plagiarised him. Kepler wrote his Apologia Tychonis contra ursum (A Defenceof Tycho against Ursus), which, however, was first published in the nineteenth century, but is now regarded as an important contribution to the history and philosophy of science.[3] Following this, Tycho gave Kepler limited access to his data with the task of determining the orbit of Mars.
The misinformation continues:
Brahe was fifty-four years old and feared that he had not fully accomplished his life’s mission. His last words to Kepler were: ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain.’ But already Brahe had justified himself. In the eyes of Asimov, and other historians, ‘the crowning act of [Brahe’s] life’ was placing his star catalogue into the hands of his young assistant Kepler [my emphasis]. By now this did indeed record the verified position of almost 1,000 stars. Using Brahe’s work, Kepler would lay the foundations for the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, which culminated in Newton’s law of universal gravitation.
Portrait of Johannes Kepler 1620 artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
We then get a potted biography of Kepler’s childhood. Followed by Strathern’s antipathy towards everything that he doesn’t consider to be science, which culminates with the following description of Harmonice Mundi:
Not for nothing would his most characteristic work be entitled Harmonice Mundi (The Harmony of the World), which sought to bridge what we – with hindsight – see as the chasm between his scientific and pseudo-scientific thought. Here Kepler referenced musical harmony – his ideas harking back to Pythagorean mysticism. According to these ancient ideas, the individual soul is attuned to the movements of the heavens, reacting to the light emanating from the planets ‘according to the angles they form with each other, and the geometrical harmonies or disharmonies that result’. This is compared with the way the ear hears harmonies in music, and the eye sees harmonies in colour: ‘The capacity of the soul to act as a cosmic resonator has a mystic and a causal aspect: on the one hand it affirms the soul’s affinity with the anima mundi [world spirit], on the other, it makes it subject to strictly mathematical laws.’
After excelling at school, Kepler gained a scholarship to attend the nearby University of Tübingen. Kepler had been a sickly child, and it was expected that he would enter the Church, as his physique was thought incapable of surviving a more strenuous occupation. At university, Kepler studied theology.
Kepler did not study theology, as I explained in another blog post. Briefly, his scholarship was for a course of studies created to train new teachers and parish priests in Protestant Württemberg to replace the previous Catholic ones. Württemberg had only converted to Lutheran Protestantism thirty-six years before Kepler was born.
Strathern:
Fortunately, during this period theology was so all-pervasive that it included what we would call philosophy. And in doing so, it also included natural philosophy or science. All this was comprehended in the study of Aristotle – the most wide-ranging of the ancient philosophers. Aristotle’s theology predated Christianity; but as we have seen, over time this had been skilfully elided to enable his natural philosophy to become that most unscientific of entities – namely, the Holy Writ.
This is a constantly repeated claim of Strathern’s but no matter how oft he repeats it Aristotelian natural philosophy was never Holy writ. I’m still trying to imagine what Strathern thinks Aristotle’s theology was.
One step backwards, one step forwards: at Tübingen Kepler also embraced the Copernican view of the universe, yet with an unusual mystical twist. In student debate, ‘he defended heliocentrism from both a theoretical and theological perspective, maintaining that the Sun was the principal source of motive power in the universe’.
Strathern very obviously doesn’t realise that Kepler’s “the Sun was the principal source of motive power in the universe”, was in the context of the times a major step towards a theory of gravity.
Kepler would not finish his studies at Tübingen.
Yes, he did, see my blog post.
Possibly due to financial constraints, during his last year he accepted a post as a teacher of mathematics and astronomy at the Protestant school in Graz (in modern-day Austria). Here he continued to develop his mystic-scientific ideas along Aristotelian lines of teleology: the idea that everything in the universe has been created according to a divine purpose.
Kepler was sent to Graz as maths teacher at the Protestant school, and district mathematicus, as a condition of his scholarship, he would have preferred a position as a parish priest and only took up the post under protest. Kepler’s God was a mathematician and his philosophy of science was very definitely Platonic and not Aristotelian. Strathern obviously thinks that Aristotle’s philosophy was the only other thing around apart from modern science at the end of the sixteenth beginning of the seventeenth centuries. He apparently knows nothing about the revivals of Platonic, Stoic, and Archimedean philosophies, to say nothing of hermeticism, which are an important element of what we call the Renaissance.
One day while teaching at Graz, Kepler experienced a sudden insight into his understanding of the cosmos. He saw the sun as the centre of the solar system, with each of the planets orbiting about it according to a complex mathematical system. This involved an ingenious nesting of the five platonic solids, one within the other. Each of these solids was encased within a sphere, and these expanding spheres described the circular orbits of the planets about the sun. Though based on Greek mathematics, this shows a medieval ingenuity in its abstraction and symbolism. However, empirical science it is not.
This is a truly terrible description of how Kepler came to develop his geometrical model of the cosmos and I can’t be bothered to write the two-thousand-word essay needed to disentangle it; just accept it’s crap. I have a more accurate account here.
Kepler would publish these ideas in his first work, which he characteristically entitled Mysterium Cosmographicum (loosely, The Mystery of the Cosmos). This again has a distinctly medieval resonance: the Renaissance was very much an age of de-mystifying [my emphasis].
On the other hand, Kepler’s work was undoubtedly revolutionary – making, as it did, a strong contribution to the advancement of science. This was indeed the first work which publicly endorsed the Copernican heliocentric system [my emphasis].
No, it wasn’t! Rheticus, Gemma Frisius, Thomas Harriot, Giordano Bruno, …
Despite his otherworldly views, Kepler was ambitious and determined that his work should be recognized. With this in mind he sent copies of his Mysterium to the finest astronomers he knew – including Galileo and Brahe.
Brahe, on the other hand, recognized a kindred spirit. Although he dismissed Kepler’s Copernican view in favour of his own, he was sufficiently impressed to enter into a correspondence with Kepler. As a result, when Brahe arrived in Prague in 1599 he invited Kepler to visit him. By now Kepler’s Copernican views were beginning to attract the attention of the Catholic authorities of the Counter-Reformation, which was becoming a force to be reckoned with in Graz [my emphasis].Kepler travelled to Prague and was more than pleased when Brahe offered him the post of his assistant, under the auspices of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.
In the 1590s Kepler’s Copernican views did not interest the authorities in any way. Ferdinand the Archduke of Austria decided to banish all the Protestants from Styria. They were offered the choice of conversion or banishment. In the first wave of bans Kepler, a Lutheran Protestant, was granted an exception because in his role as district mathematicus he had produced very impressive astrological prognostications. Later the Protestant school was closed, and it was obvious that Kepler wouldn’t get a new exception, so he was desperately looking for alternative employment. After Mästlin and Tübingen refused to help, he set off to Prague to ask Tycho for work. Tycho had indeed invited him to Prague, but he never saw the invitation as he was already on his way to Prague before it arrived in Graz.
We get a garbled and inaccurate account of the initial dispute between Tycho and Kepler and then we move onto Tycho’s death:
When Brahe died in 1601, Kepler was left to fulfil Brahe’s injunction that he had not ‘lived in vain’. Kepler would more than fulfil this. Brahe had specifically set him the task of calculating the orbit of Mars, using his observations. Kepler had bragged that he would complete this within a week. In the end it took him eight years of ceaseless calculation [my emphasis].
Kepler continued in the employ of Rudolf II, painstakingly seeking to complete Brahe’s map of the stars.
No, he didn’t! He was a theoretical astronomer and not an observational astronomer. His eyesight had been damaged by a case of smallpox when he was four years old, so he didn’t seek to complete Brahe’s map of the stars, painstakingly or in any other way.
In 1611 Bohemian Protestants rose against Rudolf II, and he was forced to abdicate in favour of his brother Matthias. Both parties in the dispute turned to Kepler for astrological advice. He did his best to produce conciliatory interpretations of the movements of the heavens, but to no avail. Amidst the deteriorating situation Kepler and his family fled Prague. While travelling, his wife Barbara and three sons contracted smallpox. In the year that followed, Barbara and one of his sons died. Eventually Kepler returned to Austria, this time settling in Linz, where he would later remarry.
It was Rudolf’s brothers, Ernst, Maximillian and Matthias, all staunch Catholics, who led the rebellion against him. Barbara Kepler contracted Hungarian spotted fever, and their three sons’ smallpox whilst they were still in Prague, and one son, Friedrich 6, died there. Kepler travelled alone to Linz to secure a position as teacher and district mathematicus. On his return to Prague, Barbara died, and he remained in the city until Rudolf died in early 1612 and Matthias became Holy Roman Emperor. Matthias re-affirmed Kepler’s position (and salary) as imperial mathematicus but allowed him to move to Linz.
Despite his troubles, Kepler persisted with his astronomical work, completing Brahe’s catalogue of the stars, along with his own additions, in 1617. Owing to the political situation it would be another ten years before it was published as the Rudolphine Tables, named after his former benefactor Rudolf II.
Kepler added nothing to Tycho’s star catalogue. He completed the Rudolphine Tables in 1623 and they were printed in 1627.
Frontispiece of the Rudolphine Tables Source: Wikimedia Commons
Despite the advent of the telescope, these would become the standard work of reference for many decades to come. Despite their differences, Kepler and Galileo would continue to correspond on surprisingly amicable terms. Galileo even sent Kepler one of his telescopes. This enabled Kepler to see for himself the moons of Jupiter, whose existence he had previously dismissed.
We unpack this backwards. Kepler never dismissed the existence of the Moons of Jupiter, rather he sat down and wrote an enthusiastic book praising Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, sight unseen, his Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo (Conversation with the Starry Messenger) (1610). He sent a copy to Galileo in Padua, who had a new edition printed and published there, without asking Kepler’s permission or even informing him of what he had done.
Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo Kepler original publicationDissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo Galileo’s pirate copy
Their very limited correspondence was seldom amicable. Galileo never sent Kepler a telescope, he regarded him as far too lowly and lacking in influence to be worth one of his telescopes, but he sent one to the Venetian ambassador in Prague with a request that Kepler be allowed to use it. The RudolphineTables remained the standard work of reference for decades because even with telescopes it would take decades before astronomers could make the necessary new observation needed to replace them. It took John Flamsteed (1646–1719) more than forty years to produce the next star catalogue and tables that replaced the Rudolphine Tables.
His knowledge of optics even enabled him to make considerable improvements to Galileo’s telescope, introducing two convex lenses, which were capable of higher magnification than Galileo’s combination of convex and concave lenses.
Strathern makes it seem that Kepler was a telescope builder, he wasn’t. In 1611, he published his Dioptrice, building on his Astronomiae Pars Optica from 1604, in which he explained the optics of the Dutch or Galilean telescope, a necessary step to the acceptance of the validity of the telescopic observations and discovery being made by Galileo and others. The book goes on to explain the optics of the astronomical telescope, two convex lenses, which took a long time to become accepted because it produced an inverted image and also because Galileo dismissed it. He also described the optics of the terrestrial telescope, like the astronomical telescope but with a third lens to invert the image and, last but not least, the telephoto lens. Galileo dismissed this milestone in the history of optics, as unreadable.
Kepler continued with his observations of the planets, and his calculations enabled him to predict that the planets Venus and Mercury would pass across the sun and be visible from earth as they made this ‘transit’. Kepler died in 1630 at the age of fifty-eight, while travelling back through Germany. The following year the first ‘transit’ of Mercury across the face of the sun was observed, just as Kepler had predicted.
Kepler’s legacy is difficult to underestimate. Despite his mystical inclinations, his mathematical descriptions of the solar system were novel, revolutionary in scope, and precise. Such innovations proved so difficult to accept, let alone understand, that many astronomers refused to accept his elliptical-orbit version of the Copernican solar system, with the planets altering speed as they swept through their orbits. But the confirmation in 1631 of his prediction of the transit of Mercury would prove a tipping point. Kepler’s laws of planetary motion would lead directly to Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which he formulated just thirty-five years after Kepler’s death.
Kepler’s first law was accepted relatively quickly, as was the third law, which however remained largely ignored for several decades. There was much discussion of his second law, his own proof of which was to say the least suspect, with various astronomers trying to find a better one. This debate played a significant role in the final acceptance of Kepler’s model of the solar system. What also played a significant role was his work on comets De cometis libelli tres I. astronomicus, theoremata continens de motu cometarum … II. physicus, continens physiologiam cometarum novam … III. astrologicus, de significationibus cometarum annorum 1607 et 1618 / autore Iohanne Keplero … published in 1619,and which was much consulted during the wave of comets in the 1660s. Strathern doesn’t mention this work at all. The confirmation in 1631 of his prediction of the transit of Mercury was not a tipping point for the Keplerian system. It was a confirmation of the accuracy of the Rudolphine Tables and of the fact that Mercury orbited the Sun, which had been tacitly assumed since the first telescopic observations of the phases of Venus. But, as I get tired of repeating, this fitted into any Tychonic or semi-Tychonic geo-heliocentric model; the most widely accepted solution at the time, which, as we saw above, Strathern dismisses out of hand. The statement that ‘Kepler’s laws of planetary motion would lead directly to Newton’s law of universal gravitation,’ is simply factually false. Newton would go on to prove the law of universal gravitation using Kepler’s laws, but they didn’t lead him to it. Also, Newton didn’t form the law of universal gravitation, which wasn’t ‘his’, thirty-five years after Kepler’s death, i.e., in 1665, Strathern is obviously here buying into the myth of the Annus mirabilis. As a last comment, Strathern also completely ignores Kepler’s role in the founding of modern optics, at least as important as his work in astronomy.
Like all the preceding chapters that I have reviewed from this book, this final chapter on Tycho and Kepler maintains a standard of scholarship that is so low that to use the word scholarship at all is to misuse it. The history of science chapters of Strathern book are a badly thrown together collection of factual errors, misinformation, myths, straight forward falsehoods, and indescribable garbage. That a serious publisher brought this rubbish onto the book market in a thought crime, and it should be removed and pulped immediately.
[1] Victor E. Thoren with contributions by John R. Christianson, The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of TychoBrahe, CUP, 1990, p. 103 The Thoren’s Tycho biography is a masterpiece but of course Stratern didn’t consult it!
Discover has an article titled Galileo Galilei’s Legacy Went Beyond Science, which is about his artistic talents. Although, in style, totally over the top purple prose, the main content of the article is correct but nothing new. It is well known that Galileo was an excellent lutist and that he was a fully trained artist. In fact, his ability to recognise that what he was seeing on the Moon were the shadows of mountains and valleys was due to his artistic training. However, there are some points in the article that require comment.
The article opens thus:
In the first book of his epic poem Paradise Lost, John Milton mentions a “Tuscan Artist” who views the moon’s orb through optic glass. He is referring, somewhat perplexingly, to Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist famed for his telescopic observations and study of fundamental physical laws.
Today, it might seem odd that Milton’s description of the so-called “father of modern science” was first and foremost an artist. In their context, however, it makes perfect sense — both men lived during the Renaissance, a period of fervent innovation in politics, culture, art and science. To them, it seemed far more natural to blend the many fields of inquiry than to compartmentalize them.
In short, if there is a border between Galileo’s intellectual endeavors, it is often too fine to distinguish.
The authors interpretation of Milton’s use of the term artist is rubbish. In the first half of the seventeenth century the word artist would generally mean “one skilled in any art or craft” and not artist as we understand the word today and this is certainly the sense in which Milton used the term. Artist and artisan are still synonyms at the time.
We pass on:
We remember Galileo today mainly for his pivotal contributions to astronomy, physics and mathematics.
Galileo made almost no contributions to mathematics.
The Italian thinker emphasized a methodical approach to the study of the universe, and inspired the modern scientific method that remains a bedrock of scientific inquiry even 380 years after his death.
Beyond that, his astronomical observations completely upended the way we think about the cosmos. In short, we mostly think of Galileo as one of the greatest scientists of all time.
In reality, however, his accomplishments and expertise — including music, literature and visual arts — ranged as widely as those of other quintessential Renaissance figures, like Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Battisa Alberti, the latter of whom proclaimed the ideal of the era: “A man can do all things if he will.”
As already acknowledged above, it is well known that Galileo possessed talent as a musician, writer, and artist (in the modern sense). However, whether it is wise to compare him with Leonardo da Vinci is debateable. There is, however, an excellent book by Matteo Valleriani, Galileo Engineer (Springer, 2012) that argues persuasively for a general assessment of Galileo as a Renaissance engineer rather than as a scientist.
The description of his up bringing and musical education from his father is OK if somewhat overblown but the closing paragraph to that section is to say the least very questionable.
After the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant his views on heliocentrism (the then-heretical theory that Earth revolves around the sun), he spent much of his final decade under house arrest, blind and ailing.
The heliocentric theory was never declared heretical! The second half of the sentence is unnecessarily plaintive. It implies, whether intended or not, that Galileo’s ill-health in the last decade of his life were somehow a result of his house arrest. Let us first clear up what Galileo’s house arrest consisted of. He lived in his villa in Tuscany cared for by servants and served by an amanuensis, working in comfort on his real scientific legacy, Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze (Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences, 1638).
The villa in Tuscany where Galileo lived between 1631 and his death in 1642
He was also allowed to have visitors, John Milton for example. Although not allowed to travel, which given his age and his state of health he probably wouldn’t have done anyway, he led a life that was in quality considerable better than a large part of the general Tuscan population of the time. In 1633, when his house arrest began, he was already sixty-nine years old and had been suffering from ill-health for several years that was not unrelated to his bacchanalian lifestyle, he always loved his food and wine. He first went blind in 1638 and, despite his house arrest, he was allowed to travel the Florence for medical treatment.
To close:
And once again, Galileo’s aesthetic education can be detected in his scientific discourse. Years of reading these poets taught him to write clearly and believably about even the most foreign concepts, as he did in defending the heliocentric model of the universe against deeply entrenched beliefs, not to mention commonsense.
In fact, Galileo’s undeniable talents as a writer and polemicist, which make his writings so very readable, lead to the fact that people very easily oversee the large chunks of those writings that are in fact wrong and were wrong when he wrote them. For example, his Il Saggiatore (The Assayer, 1623) is undoubtably a polemic masterpiece but almost nobody realises that in the central argument of the debate on the nature of comets, of which the book in part, Galileo is simply and totally wrong and that the empirical evidence of the period clearly showed him to be wrong. The greatest scientists of all time‽
Renaissance Mathematicus friend, Michael Barton, expert for all things Darwinian, drew our attention to a new piece of history of science hot air from the HISTSCI_HULK’s least favourite windbag, Neil deGrasse Tyson. This time it’s a clip from one of his appearances on the podcast of Joe Rogan, a marriage made in heaven; they compete to see who can produce the biggest pile of bullshit in the shortest time. NdGT is this time pontificating about Galileo and the telescope. This is particularly interesting, because the topics he touches on are well documented in easily accessible sources, so it would really be not particularly difficult to gets the facts right. But motormouth Tyson doesn’t give a shit about getting his facts right, he just spews out some bullshit to impress the gullible punters.
I have transcribed what he says in this brief clip, so let us examine it:
Galileo perfects the telescope. He looks up and says whoa I see craters, mountains, valleys on the Moon, the Sun has spots, Venus goes through phases. This became the corpus of evidence for Earth going around the Sun in support of Copernicus’s idea that Earth goes around the Sun. My point is, what was the second thing he did with his telescope? He contacted the Doge of Venice, invited him to the clock tower and said, look at what this instrument can do for you, as we look out into the lagoon you can identify a ship’s intentions friend or foe by its flag 10 times farther away than you can with the unaided eye. Venice bought a boatload of these telescopes in the service of their military defense, and this was a source of money to Galileo, now he can go and look at the Universe.
I will excuse Tyson his, “Galileo perfects the telescope,” as it is a very widespread misconception that gets constantly repeated by numerous people, many of whom should know better. There was no fundamental optical difference between the instrument that Hans Lipperhey (c. 1570–1619) demonstrated in Den Haag to the Court of Prince Maurits of Orange during the last week of September 1608 and the various instruments that Galileo constructed. The only difference was that Galileo, probably by a process of trial and error, increased step by step the magnification of his instruments by using lenses of different focal lengths. A process that a substantial number of telescope users went through at the same time. A worse version of this false claim is that Lipperhey’s instrument was merely a toy and Galileo made a “real” instrument out of it. Lipperhey’s spy glass was a proper optical instrument, the military potential of which was instantly recognized during his demonstration. To use the words perfect or perfection in connection with any of the early Dutch or Galilean telescope is perverse as they were, due to the poor quality of the glass and of the lens grinding and polishing, of fairly miserable quality. As I have said on numerous occasions the quality was so poor that it was a miracle that anybody discovered anything at all with them.
Galileo’s telescopes
Tyson now makes two general claims, firstly stating some of the things that Galileo discovered with his telescope and secondly his demonstration of the telescope to the Doge and Senate of the city of Venice. He introduces the second as follows, “My point is, what was the second thing he did with his telescope?” this is completely arse backwards.
Galileo dismissed the first account that he had read of the telescope, and it was only when Paolo Sarpi drew his attention to the telescope and almost certainly showed him one, according to the most recent research by Mario Biagioli, that he took up the challenge of trying to construct one himself. By August 1609 he had succeeded in constructing an instrument with a magnifying factor of nine and it was this instrument that he demonstrated to the Doge and Senate on 21 August pointing out its advantages for a sea going nation like Venice. On 24 August he formally presented this instrument to the Doge and Senate. In the early seventeenth century patents as we know them didn’t exist and it was perfectly possible for someone to be regarded as the local inventor of an instrument and to receive an exclusive license for the area of jurisdiction of the local authority, it was this status that Galileo claimed for himself, but which on 24 August he formally signed over to the city state of Venice. This is documented in writing. In exchange for having signed over his rights to the telescope Galileo had his appointment as professor at the University of Padua confirmed for life and his salary increased to one thousand scudi pro year, a princely sum for a university professor. Particularly for a professor of mathematics, who were at the very bottom of the university status and pay hierarchy. When the state discovered that they had been basically gulled by Galileo and that telescopes could be bought on almost every street corner in Europe they were less than happy but did not revoke his rewards. Galileo repaid their generosity by beginning plans to leave Venice and return to Florence.
Galileo Galilei showing the Doge of Venice how to use the telescope by Giuseppe Bertini (1858). Credit: gabrielevanin.it
Galileo was required to keep the technical knowledge of his telescope, now the legal property of the state, secret and the only technical description that we have of his instrument in contained in one of Sarpi’s private letters, he, probably, having been commissioned by the state to examine it on their behalf. There is no record of the city of Venice buying “a boatload of these telescopes” and we only have one single source, a letter from Giovanni Bartoli, the Medici representative in Venice, claiming that Galileo was building twelve telescopes for the senate. Given the situation they would have exchanged hands at something close to cost price. Once the basic structure of the Dutch telescope was known the senate did not need Galileo to manufacture telescopes for them. Venice produced the best glass in the world and was a major European centre for the manufacture of spectacles. Someone who can grind spectacles lenses can also grind telescope lenses.
As far as we know Galileo didn’t start making systematic telescopic astronomical observations until December 1609 by which time, he had succeeded to constructing an instrument with a magnifying factor of twenty. Tyson mentions three of Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, “craters, mountains, valleys on the Moon, the Sun has spots, Venus goes through phases.” Only the first of these, the earth like nature of the Moon, was in the first series of discoveries, which he published in his Sidereus Nuncius in 1610. It is also the only discovery made by Galileo that can be truly credited to him alone. Thomas Harriot had made a telescopic sketch of the Moon before Galileo even had a telescope but had still perceived the surface as flat.
Thomas Harriot’ telescopic sketch of the Moon Source: Wikimedia Commons
Almost certainly due to his training as an artist, Galileo realized that what he was observing was a three-dimensional surface, which he then displayed in his famous washes in the Sidereus Nuncius. When Harriot, being an early recipient of the Sidereus Nuncius, saw them he immediately realized that Galileo was right and then produced the first fairly accurate map of the Moon.
Thomas Harriot’s 1613 telescopic map of the moon Source: Wikimedia Commons
Galileo didn’t produce anything new on the Moon and it should be noted that his washes were more an artistic impression than accurate drawings; the large crater near the bottom in the centre simply doesn’t exist in reality.
Galileo’s washes of the Moon from Sidereus Nuncius Source: Wikimedia Commons
Galileo’s discovery was not as sensational, as it is often presented. That the moon was earth like and that the well-known markings on the moon, the man in the moon etc., are in fact a mountainous landscape was a view held by various in antiquity, such as Thales, Orpheus, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Pythagoras, Philolaus, Plutarch and Lucian. In particular Plutarch (c. 46–c. 120 CE) in his On the Face of the Moon in his Moralia.
It should be noted that Tyson fails to mention Galileo’s most spectacular discovery, the Moons of Jupiter, the reason that he rushed into print with his Sidereus Nuncius, Before its publication Galileo was a middle aged professor of mathematics, as already noted not a prestigious post, in North Italy with a local reputation for his acerbic wit and his indulgence in fine wines, with no publications to speak of. After Sidereus Nuncius hit the streets he became to most famous astronomer in Europe and a celebrated academic.
All the other early telescopic astronomical discoveries were made not just by Galileo but independently by several observers at around the same time, which, of course, Tyson doesn’t mention. The Sunspots were first observed by Thomas Harriot, who, as usual, didn’t publish.The first to publish was Johannes Fabricius, who had observed them together with his father David; this was unknown to Galileo.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Christoph Scheiner also observed them and made the knowledge public through the standard Renaissance method, the republic of letters, by sending a series of letters to the German banker and astronomer Mark Welser, who forwarded them to Galileo and also published them. Galileo responded with letters of his own claiming to have discovered them first. A claim that can be doubted, as he kept changing the date when he supposedly observed them pushing it back each time. Galileo proved that the spots were actually on the surface of the Sun, whereas Scheiner first thought they orbited the Sun. Once again, as with the Moon, Galileo did little more with the sunspots, whereas Scheiner undertook a major solar observation programme that led to his Rosa Ursina sive Sol, a book on solar astronomy that remained unsurpassed until the nineteenth century.
The discovery of the phases of Venus was first made in 1613 independently by four different observers–Galileo, Simon Marius, Thomas Harriot, the Jesuit astronomers of the Collegio Romano–with the latter probably discovering them before Galileo.
Neither the “craters, mountains, valleys on the Moon”, nor “the Sun has spots” became “the corpus of evidence for Earth going around the Sun”, which anybody who gives it two second rational thought would realise. I mean, in what way does did covering that the surface of the Moon is mountainous, or that the Sun has spots provide evidence that the Earth orbits the Sun? Apparently, Tyson does consider rational though necessary before he opens his mouth.
To what extent the discovery was regarded as evidence that the Earth goes around the Sun was an open question at the time. Already in the fifth century CE, Martianus Capella (fl. c.410) had proposed a geocentric system in which both Mercury and Venus orbited the Sun, which in turn orbits the Earth. This was deduced from the fact that, viewed from the Earth, they never stray far from the Sun, they appear on different sides of the Sun at different times, hence Venus as both Morning Star and Evening Star, and the length of their apparent orbit around the Earth is the same as that of the Sun, one year.
Capellan system – Valentin Naboth (1573)
Famously, following the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus, Tycho Brahe and others extended Capella’s concept and developed a system in which all the known planets orbited the Sun, which, in turn, with the Moon orbited the Earth. A geo-heliocentric system, normally named after Tycho, a Tychonic system.
The Tychonic system
The discovered phases of Venus were conform with both the Capellan and the Tychonic systems and were initially taken as proof of such.
It might appear that I have wasted a lot of words picking to pieces Tyson’s roughly 150-word, off the cuff inanities. However, they stand representative for a very common trend in science communication. Popular figures, with very large audiences, who are venerated as science communicators, of which NdGT is a prime example, spout sound bite version of the history of science that are at best highly inaccurate and at worst simply false. This fuels, what I call, the mythology of science, a discipline that has pretension to being the history of science but is anything but. Because of their popularity and the size of their audiences, who are largely ignorant, in the sense of lacking knowledge, people like Tyson spread this mythology leading to a false public perception of how science arises and how it evolves. The clip, that I quoted at the start of this post, is the preamble to one of the biggest, most pernicious, and most widely propagated myths in the history of science, that Galileo with his telescopic discoveries proved Copernicus right and it was only the religious prejudice of the Church that tried to convince the people that he was wrong, even going so far as to punish him for it.
Me and my #histsci buddy the HISTSCI_HULK have dedicated our lives to trying to rot out the cancer that is the mythology of science. It’s like a giant game of Whac-A-Mole but as long as the moles keep popping up, we’ll keep on bashing them down.
If your philosophy of [scientific] history claims that the sequence should have been A→B→C, and it is C→A→B, then your philosophy of history is wrong. You have to take the data of history seriously.
John S. Wilkins 30th August 2009
Culture is part of the unholy trinity—culture, chaos, and cock-up—which roam through our versions of history, substituting for traditional theories of causation. – Filipe Fernández–Armesto “Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration”
The Renaissance Mathematicus 