A Short History of Astronomy, Arthur Berry [large screen ebook reader .TXT] 📗

their lifetime, and that spots were usually most plentiful in two regions on each side of the sun’s equator, corresponding roughly to the tropics on our own globe, and were never seen far beyond these limits.

Similar observations were made by other telescopists, and to Scheiner belongs the credit of fixing, with considerably more accuracy than Galilei, the position of the sun’s axis and equator and the time of its rotation.

125. The controversy with Scheiner as to the nature of spots unfortunately developed into a personal quarrel as to their respective claims to the discovery of spots, a controversy which made Scheiner his bitter enemy, and probably contributed not a little to the hostility with which Galilei was henceforward regarded by the Jesuits. Galilei’s uncompromising championship of the new scientific ideas, the slight respect which he shewed for established and traditional authority, and the biting sarcasms with which he was in the habit of greeting his opponents, had won for him a large number of enemies in scientific and philosophic circles, particularly among the large party who spoke in the name of Aristotle, although, as Galilei was never tired of reminding them, their methods of thought and their conclusions would in all probability have been rejected by the great Greek philosopher if he had been alive.

It was probably in part owing to his consciousness of a growing hostility to his views, both in scientific and in ecclesiastical circles, that Galilei paid a short visit to Rome in 1611, when he met with a most honourable reception and was treated with great friendliness by several cardinals and other persons in high places.

Unfortunately he soon began to be drawn into a controversy as to the relative validity in scientific matters of observation and reasoning on the one hand, and of the authority of the Church and the Bible on the other, a controversy which began to take shape about this time and which, though its battle-field has shifted from science to science, has lasted almost without interruption till modern times.

In 1611 was published a tract maintaining Jupiter’s satellites to be unscriptural. In 1612 Galilei consulted Cardinal Conti as to the astronomical teaching of the Bible, and obtained from him the opinion that the Bible appeared to discountenance both the Aristotelian doctrine of the immutability of the heavens and the Coppernican doctrine of the motion of the earth. A tract of Galilei’s on floating bodies, published in 1612, roused fresh opposition, but on the other hand Cardinal Barberini (who afterwards, as Urban VIII., took a leading part in his persecution) specially thanked him for a presentation copy of the book on sun-spots, in which Galilei, for the first time, clearly proclaimed in public his adherence to the Coppernican system. In the same year (1613) his friend and follower, Father Castelli, was appointed professor of mathematics at Pisa, with special instructions not to lecture on the motion of the earth. Within a few months Castelli was drawn into a discussion on the relations of the Bible to astronomy, at the house of the Grand Duchess, and quoted Galilei in support of his views; this caused Galilei to express his opinions at some length in a letter to Castelli, which was circulated in manuscript at the court. To this a Dominican preacher, Caccini, replied a few months afterwards by a violent sermon on the text, “Ye Galileans, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?”71 and in 1615 Galilei was secretly denounced to the Inquisition on the strength of the letter to Castelli and other evidence. In the same year he expanded the letter to Castelli into a more elaborate treatise, in the form of a Letter to the Grand Duchess Christine, which was circulated in manuscript, but not printed till 1636. The discussion of the bearing of particular passages of the Bible (e.g. the account of the miracle of Joshua) on the Ptolemaic and Coppernican systems has now lost most of its interest; it may, however, be worth noticing that on the more general question Galilei quotes with approval the saying of Cardinal Baronius, “That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us not how the heavens go, but how to go to heaven,”72 and the following passage gives a good idea of the general tenor of his argument:—

“Methinks, that in the Discussion of Natural Problemes we ought not to begin at the authority of places of Scripture; but at Sensible Experiments and Necessary Demonstrations. For ... Nature being inexorable and immutable, and never passing the bounds of the Laws assigned her, as one that nothing careth, whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operating be or be not exposed to the capacity of men; I conceive that that concerning Natural Effects, which either sensible experience sets before our eyes, or Necessary Demonstrations do prove unto us, ought not, upon any account, to be called into question, much less condemned upon the testimony of Texts of Scripture, which may under their words, couch senses seemingly contrary thereto.”73

126. Meanwhile his enemies had become so active that Galilei thought it well to go to Rome at the end of 1615 to defend his cause. Early in the next year a body of theologians known as the Qualifiers of the Holy Office (Inquisition), who had been instructed to examine certain Coppernican doctrines, reported:—

“That the doctrine that the sun was the centre of the world and immoveable was false and absurd, formally heretical and contrary to Scripture, whereas the doctrine that the earth was not the centre of the world but moved, and has further a daily motion, was philosophically false and absurd and theologically at least erroneous.”

In consequence of this report it was decided to censure Galilei, and the Pope accordingly instructed Cardinal Bellarmine “to summon Galilei and admonish him to abandon the said opinion,” which the Cardinal did.74 Immediately afterwards a decree was issued condemning the opinions in question and placing on the well-known Index of Prohibited Books three books containing Coppernican views, of which the De Revolutionibus of Coppernicus and another were only suspended “until they should be corrected,” while the third was altogether prohibited. The necessary corrections to the De Revolutionibus were officially published in 1620, and consisted only of a few alterations which tended to make the essential principles; of the book appear as mere mathematical hypotheses, convenient for calculation. Galilei seems to have been on the whole well satisfied with the issue of the inquiry, as far as he was personally concerned, and after obtaining from Cardinal Bellarmine a certificate that he had neither abjured his opinions nor done penance for them, stayed on in Rome for some months to shew that he was in good repute there.

127. During the next few years Galilei, who was now more than fifty, suffered a good deal from ill-health and was comparatively inactive. He carried on, however, a correspondence with the Spanish court on a method of ascertaining the longitude at sea by means of Jupiter’s satellites. The essential problem in finding the longitude is to obtain the time as given by the sun at the required place and also that at some place the longitude of which is known. If, for example, midday at Rome occurs an hour earlier than in London, the sun takes an hour to travel from the meridian of Rome to that of London, and the longitude of Rome is 15° east of that of London. At sea it is easy to ascertain the local time, e.g. by observing when the sun is highest in the sky, but the great difficulty, felt in Galilei’s time and long afterwards (chapter X., §§ 197, 226), was that of ascertaining the time at some standard place. Clocks were then, and long afterwards, not to be relied upon to keep time accurately during a long ocean voyage, and some astronomical means of determining the time was accordingly wanted. Galilei’s idea was that if the movements of Jupiter’s satellites, and in particular the eclipses which constantly occurred when a satellite passed into Jupiter’s shadow, could be predicted, then a table could be prepared giving the times, according to some standard place, say Rome, at which the eclipses would occur, and a sailor by observing the local time of an eclipse and comparing it with the time given in the table could ascertain by how much his longitude differed from that of Rome. It is, however, doubtful whether the movements of Jupiter’s satellites could at that time be predicted accurately enough to make the method practically useful, and in any case the negotiations came to nothing.

In 1618 three comets appeared, and Galilei was soon drawn into a controversy on the subject with a Jesuit of the name of Grassi. The controversy was marked by the personal bitterness which was customary, and soon developed so as to include larger questions of philosophy and astronomy. Galilei’s final contribution to it was published in 1623 under the title Il Saggiatore (The Assayer), which dealt incidentally with the Coppernican theory, though only in the indirect way which the edict of 1616 rendered necessary. In a characteristic passage, for example, Galilei says:—

“Since the motion attributed to the earth, which I, as a pious and Catholic person, consider most false, and not to exist, accommodates itself so well to explain so many and such different phenomena, I shall not feel sure ... that, false as it is, it may not just as deludingly correspond with the phenomena of comets”;

and again, in speaking of the rival systems of Coppernicus and Tycho, he says:—

“Then as to the Copernican hypothesis, if by the good fortune of us Catholics we had not been freed from error and our blindness illuminated by the Highest Wisdom, I do not believe that such grace and good fortune could have been obtained by means of the reasons and observations given by Tycho.”

Although in scientific importance the Saggiatore ranks far below many others of Galilei’s writings, it had a great reputation as a piece of brilliant controversial writing, and notwithstanding its thinly veiled Coppernicanism, the new Pope, Urban VIII., to whom it was dedicated, was so much pleased with it that he had it read aloud to him at meals. The book must, however, have strengthened the hands of Galilei’s enemies, and it was probably with a view to counteracting their influence that he went to Rome next year, to pay his respects to Urban and congratulate him on his recent elevation. The visit was in almost every way a success; Urban granted to him several friendly interviews, promised a pension for his son, gave him several presents, and finally dismissed him with a letter of special recommendation to the new Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had shewn some signs of being less friendly to Galilei than his father. On the other hand, however, the Pope refused to listen to Galilei’s request that the decree of 1616 should be withdrawn.

128. Galilei now set seriously to work on the great astronomical treatise, the Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and Coppernican, which he had had in mind as long ago as 1610, and in which he proposed to embody most of his astronomical work and to collect all the available evidence bearing on the Coppernican controversy. The form of a dialogue was chosen, partly for literary reasons, and still more because it enabled him to present the Coppernican case as strongly as he wished through the mouths of some of the speakers, without necessarily identifying his own opinions with theirs. The manuscript was almost completed in 1629, and in the following year Galilei went to Rome to obtain the necessary licence for printing it. The censor had some alterations made and then gave the