Galileo : Decisive Innovator (Cambridge Science Biographies)

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Summary: Upside Down Through a Telescope
Review: To all of us who have had romantic rushes with astronomy, the name Galileo is deeply revered. It is a matter of faith among us that Galileo invented the telescope and consequently a spate of remarkable objects in the heavens, particularly the rings of Saturn. We know he performed wizardlike scientific demonstrations from the leaning Tower of Pisa. If we had the benefit of a good liberal arts education, we came to understand, albeit dimly, that he got in trouble for all this with the Church.

Biographer Michael Sharratt did a wise thing. He describes Galileo's adventures with the new telescope in the very first chapter of his biography, because he knows this is what we want to know first. It is a compelling chapter, although there is no way to tell the story without a certain measure of demythologizing. Galileo did not invent the telescope; the instrument was in common use in the Dutch Republic, though our hero certainly improved upon it. He never had a telescope strong enough to identify the rings of Saturn [another Dutchman, Huygens, gets credit for that.] And perhaps most depressing, Galileo first conceived of a telescope as an instrument of naval intelligence and tried to market it as such.

Sharratt's book is not for curious little boys, but for the thoughtful grownups they became. The bulk of this book is not about the dramatic discoveries, but the wonder and dismay they precipitated. This work has a certain jargon true to its time. Galileo by trade was a mathematician. As the times did not require the high precision math of the nuclear-computer age, mathematicians, at least the good ones, served society by promulgating what we might call the sciences of organization: logic, the structure of accurate thought, and physics, the predictability of causes and effects.

By Galileo's time, the early seventeenth century, traditional logic and physics were under assault by a number of independent scientists whose hypotheses and improved observation methods were bending the old medieval synthesis to the breaking point. Under particular assault were two venerable systems: Ptolemy's concept of the universe in which the sun, planets, and stars circled the earth; the other. Aristotle's complex synthesis of observable matter and motion.

Sharratt traces with considerable detail Galileo's early disenchantment with both Ptolemy and Aristotle. Although questioning whether the Tower of Pisa events were quite the spectacle they were reported to be, Sharratt examines Galileo's method of disproving Aristotelian truisms such as the tendency of heavier objects to fall faster than lighter ones. Galileo, like many of his contemporaries, romanced the theories of Copernicus, whose theory of a sun centered universe better explained the retrograde motion of planets as observed from the earth. It was Galileo's eventual marriage to the Copernican system that would cause him so much trouble with the Church.

The new telescope in the hands of a Copernican newlywed was an almost dangerous union. Galileo used his early observations virtually exclusively to attempt to prove the validity of the Copernican system [though Keppler, with all his number crunching, did a more thorough job of this.] Galileo's discovery of four moons revolving about Jupiter established at least that the earth was not the center of motion. The crescent face of Venus made a strong case, as he saw it, for a sun-centered universe. Perhaps most damaging to traditionalists, the discovery of mountains and valleys on the moon implied that heavenly objects could, for all practical purposes, undergo the same secular critiques as earthly matter and principles.

Sharratt depicts Galileo as a gregarious man with many friends who, like most struggling artisans, knew how to ingratiate himself to influential patrons for financial support and connections. He could be jealously protective of his prerogatives and he did not suffer fools gladly. Sharratt's research leads him to believe that Galileo ran afoul of the Jesuits, or at least some of them, who were only too happy to provide Robert Bellarmine and the Roman Inquisition with disquieting interpretations of Galileo's works.

The Inquisition's public dispute with Galileo involved the latter's teaching of Copernicanism. Put simply, adherence to Copernican theory in 1616 was tantamount to a denial of Biblical inerrancy in the eyes of the Catholic Church, then deeply enmeshed in struggles with Protestant reformers over, among other things, Biblical interpretation. However, there can be no doubt that Galileo's dismemberment of the Aristotelian system was viewed as an equally inimical threat to the unity and soundness of Catholic doctrine, also under fire from Protestants. In 1616 a somewhat friendly and informal encounter with Bellarmine and Pope Urban VIII resulted in an avuncular warning that Galileo refrain from public advocacy of Copernicanism. Sharratt reports that there was some confusion over precisely what these men agreed to. Hence, when Galileo published his masterpiece The Dialogue in 1632, in which he enhanced and reinforced earlier writings, he was arrested by the Inquisition for reneging upon the instruction of 1616. Sharratt's description of the trial is terse and brief; Galileo lived his remaining years under house arrest.

Somewhat misplaced is the final chapter on Galileo's rehabilitation by John Paul II in 1992. This chapter has the marks of an afterthought or editorial recasting. The author himself admits that the "rehabilitation" was of the Church, not Galileo. More tellingly, Sharratt makes no mention of present struggles between Church traditionalists and modern day Galileos, and he would have needed to look no further than to reproductive science. One need only consider the present state of Catholic sexual ethics to see that the microscope has replaced the telescope as an object of terror for today's Bellarmines.