As I write this, we have in the past few days gotten pictures of Pluto from the flyby of the New Horizons satellite. They are wonderful, but by now such detailed pictures of distant worlds are fairly commonplace. We used to explore space merely with earth-bound telescopes, and there was a time when even the telescope was a new invention. Telescopes were a sensation in seventeenth-century Europe; think how astonishing it must have been to have had a device that made distant objects look close! Such gadgets had extraordinary military potential, and all the kings wanted them. Galileo, however, took the telescope to the heavens, and changed history. How he did so is the story of <i>Galileo’s Telescope: A European Story</i> (Harvard University Press) by Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota, and Franco Giudice, translated by Catherine Bolton. The authors are all professors of the history of science, and have here traced the invention of the telescope and the roundabout ways that Galileo got his observations published, promoted, and accepted by many thinkers (although there was that little problem of their contradicting the Bible). The authors say they are telling a crime story, of how Galileo robbed us of our beliefs that the Earth was central to everything; that’s a fine way to describe how dramatic were the changes related here.
The idea of using a combination of lenses to make things seem closer had been around for a while, but the glass wasn’t fully transparent and the grinding of lenses was crude. Galileo didn’t invent the telescope, but he so improved it that many people think he did. What did Galileo get to see? First, he saw the surface of our Moon, and realized that it had mountains and valleys something like our own planet, and it was not the sort of perfect orb the heavens were supposed to contain. The Sun was no more perfect than the Moon, but changeable in that it had spots that played across its surface. The planets like Venus and Jupiter could be seen to be illuminated by the Sun, showing phases just as the Moon showed; they were all just spheres in orbit. When he looked at Jupiter, Galileo saw three (later confirmed to be four) moons. The discovery of Jupiter’s moons was to be a special blow against the universe as Earth-centered; those moons were going around with another planet at their center, and there was no reason to think anymore that everything went around the Earth. Galileo was quick to publish his discoveries; just two years after Lipperhey produced his lens tube Galileo published <i>Sidereus Nuncius</i>, and it caused a sensation. People didn’t even have to read Latin, or even read at all, to appreciate it. It was not the first illustrated book, but its words were there to discuss the images, and the images were such as had not previously been seen. There were engravings of Galileo’s watercolors of the Moon, a view of how many more stars were held in the Pleiades than anyone had ever suspected, and a chronological view of the movements of the moons around Jupiter.
The authors show how Galileo not only made the discoveries, and published them, but set out on a traveling campaign to defend them. Some scholars, even the Christian ones, were excited by the new view of the cosmos. Others, like Bonifacio Vannozzi of Pistoia, a papal court secretary, wrote, “To say that the Moon is earthlike, with valleys and hills, is as if to say that there are flocks that graze there and cowherds who cultivate it. We must stand by the Church, which is the enemy of anything new, according to the teachings of St. Paul.” The findings of the telescope were so repulsive that some said they were merely optical illusions or hallucinations. The most famous part of Galileo’s story, of how he was convicted of heresy in 1633 and was kept under house arrest until he died nine years later, is not covered here. Instead, here is the clear but complicated narrative of what Galileo had done with his singular device. “His discoveries seemed endless,” the authors write, “... the havoc he was wreaking could not have been more devastating.”
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Matt
Remember It's About The Telescope...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 26, 2022
