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5.0 out of 5 stars
Galileo's poor case against the church,
This review is from: Galileo and Copernican Astronomy: A Scientific View Defined (Science in a social context) (Paperback)
The Copernican model of the universe was at first little more than a mathematical theory, enabling Copernicans to avoid clashes with the church by arguing, as Osiander did in his preface to De Revolutionibus, that "it is not possible to know the true case of the motions of the heavenly bodies, it is only possible to invent theories which will account for the past motions and predict future ones" (p. 29). Of course, no real scientist ever believed that nonsense. Mathematical and empirical truth is one, as noted, for example, by Kepler: "Never have I been able to assent to the opinion of those people ... who try to prove that the hypotheses admitted by Copernicus may be false and that, nevertheless, true phenomena may be deduced from them ... I do not hesitate to declare that everything that Copernicus gathered a posteriori and proved by observation could without any embarrassment have been demonstrated a priori by means of geometrical axioms" (p. 34). Be that as it may, the rules of the game changed with the invention of telescopes, which lead to the discovery of much empirical support for the Copernican theory, such as for instance Galileo's discovery of the phases of Venus. "One problem which the Copernican system posed was that it predicted that Venus should be at some times sixteen times nearer the earth than at others. ... When Galileo turned his telescope to Venus he was able to discern that the planet's appearance varied between a long thin crescent and a small disc---the barely variant brightness of Venus was accounted for by the exhibition of phases, a 'new' face coinciding with a position close to the earth and a 'full' phase with a distant position" (p. 21, two typos corrected). So now Galileo could claim with confidence that the Copernican system did indeed describe reality, whereupon he was attacked by the church, of course. He defended himself in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, from which we read excerpts on pp. 36-51. On empirical evidence Galileo notes in passing that "in order to banish the [Copernican theory] from the world ... it would be necessary not only to prohibit the book of Copernicus ... but to ban the whole science of astronomy. Furthermore, it would be necessary to look at the heavens, in order that they might not see Mars and Venus sometimes quite near the earth and sometimes very distant ... as well as many other sensory observations which can never be reconciled with the Ptolemaic system in any way, but are very strong arguments for the Copernican. ... [T]o prohibit the whole science would be to censure a hundred passages of holy scripture which teach us that the glory and greatness of Almighty God are marvellously discerned in all his works and divinely read in the open book of heaven" (pp. 45-46). This is all Galileo has to say on empirical evidence in his long letter. He focuses instead on trying to beat the church at their own game, quoting St. Augustine and St. Jerome and arguing that "in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error" because "propositions uttered by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes in order to accommodate them to the capacities of the common people, who are rude and unlearned" (pp. 36-37), a principle which he immediately abandons to argue that Joshua's stopping of the sun, read literary, makes more sense in the Copernican system that in the Ptolemaic because, supposedly, "just as if the motion of the heart should cease in an animal, all other motions of its members would also cease, so if the rotation of the sun were to stop, the rotations of the planets would stop too" (p. 49), for which there was of course no evidence whatsoever. "But Galileo, who came so close to discovering the law of inertia, knew better than anybody that if the earth suddenly stopped dead in its track, mountain and cities would collapse like match-boxes ... Joshua would have destroyed not only the Philistines, but the whole earth" (Koestler, p. 54). So why did Galileo resort to such nonsense arguments instead of bringing the battle into the area of empirical science? Presumably because he knew he would have lost there. "If he had talked to the point, instead of around it, he would have had to admit that Copernicus' forty-odd epicycles and eccentrics were not only not proven but a physical impossibility...; that the absence of an annular parallax ... weighted heavily against Copernicus; that the phases of Venus disproved Ptolemy, but not Herakleides or Tycho" (Koestler, p. 53). It is thus absurd to conclude, as Morphet does, that while "superficially, at least, Galileo was defeated by the Inquisition" it is still "clear to all of us that his science survived" in that "the empirical method has ousted a priori argument and religious revelation" (p. 58). The essence of science, the real reason for believing Copernicus, was not empirical evidence but the trust in reason and mathematics expressed by Kepler above. Galileo, on the other hand, chose to defended himself with pseudo-scientific arguments and did this so poorly that he was deservedly defeated and had to retract his case in public. Some hero.
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