The Rice Report

Yellow Journalism at its best!

Thursday, January 7th MMX

Imagine that you're a fairly well-educated person living a month or so before January of 1610. You probably can't, in all honesty, and neither can I, because the basics of your worldview as far as what we now know as "science" is concerned, are, quite literally, astoundingly, alien. Your most advanced sciences would be astronomy and mathematics. In the latter field there's been a cataclysmic up-heaval just about 15 years previously with the discovery or, perhaps, invention of negative numbers. No one is quite sure why, but they prove exceedingly useful in solving problems in complex mortgage and intrest rate problems. If it weren't for their usefulness, they would be considered fictitious nonsense. Mathematicians wrestle with how to interpret them in the "real" world.

You may have heard of the philosopher Copernicus (everyone who engages in the speculative advance of knowledge is called a "philosopher.") You may even have read his book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. But all it is to you is another piece of unproven, and quite literally unprovable, speculation that "saves the appearances." That's the standard way to describe any hypothesis that explains the observed position of heavenly objects on a given day of the year. The astronomy of Ptolemy is in the same boat. But Ptolemy has something going for him that Copernicus doesn't--his system is of better pedigree and it's more accurate. Copernicus hadn't realized that planetary orbits are actually ellipses and besides, there's actually quite good evidence that his system is false. Copernicus can explain the retrograde motion of the planets through parallax, but, then, the "fixed" stars should also exhibit a parallax of their own, which they don't. Ergo, the Earth doesn't move.

But lack of stellar parallax isn't Copernicus' only problem. His system raises insoluble conundrums in physics, conundrums that Aristotle can solve handily. In the mind-set of Aristotle, which is also your mind-set, inanimate objects are filled with "desires" and internal "powers" that explain their motion. In fact, no object is truly "inanimate." Objects fall to Earth with a "desire" to regain their natural position at the center of the universe. This is the natural place for everything made of earth. Fire rises to the heavens desirous of attaining its natural place above the fixed stars. The stars, planets, and Moon remain where they are because for them, too, that is a position natural to the kind of non-earthly crystaline material of which they are made. They move in great circles because that is the motion natural to crystaline material. Objects made of earth travel vertically because that is the motion natural to earth. If objects made of earth travelled in perfect circles, they would be perfect. But earth is imperfect, so objects made of earth cannot travel in circular motion. And if they did, the motion would be unending like that of the stars.

So, you see, Copernicus can't be right because he has no way to explain why the Earth would continue to travel around the Sun and not fall into it, nor to explain why objects would continue to fall to Earth and not into the Sun. So, you see, physics and astronomy stand or fall together. Change your astronomy and your physics falls apart. But Aristotle has perfectly good explanations of why objects move as they do, and what on Earth could you replace that with?

Maybe you've heard of Martin Luther and his criticisms of Aristotle, how he ridiculed the idea that objects "desire" to be at the center of the universe. But he was a heretic, and as far as you're concerned, someone who should have been burned at the stake along with Giordano Bruno. So, you chuckle to yourself at his outlandish ideas.

If you've heard of Copernicus, more than likely you've also heard of the Dane, Tycho Brahe. He has his own system for "saving the appearances" and it's quite different from Ptolemy's, but he's also a good Aristotelian and you needn't destroy all of physics if you accept him. You give Ptolemy a slight modificaiton and have the planets orbit the Sun, while the Sun and everything else still circle the Earth. So, you can still be an open-minded philosopher and realize there's nothing priviledged about Ptolemy while rejecting bad hypotheses like Copernicus'.

Over all, you realize that just about all the phenomena of nature can be explained by deduction from the common-sense principles of Aristotle. What can't be, awaits further deduction from the school of Peripatetics. All is well with the world. In fact, it's qite hared to see why everything that's knowable isn't already known.

On Janurary 7th, 1610, an Italian professor Mathematics, Galileo Galilei, pointed his homemade telescope at the planet Jupiter and saw something that neither Aristotle, Ptolemy, Tycho, nor Copernicus could explain--four never before seen "fixed" stars that, the longer he looked, never stayed fixed. Galileo had seen the four moons of Jupiter we now call the "Galilean" moons--a Copernican solar system in miniature. It took a while, but not too long, and the world from that point on changed forever. You could say it was the night Aristotle died.

Approximately a month later, Galileo published his book documenting his telescopic observations, Siderius Nuncius, or Messenger of the Stars. By Summer, it was a run-away best-seller and everyone all over Europe wanted their own telescope. Not only did Galileo describe the four new planets he discovered around Jupiter, planets he referred to as "Medicean Stars," in honor of his would-be patron, Cosimo di Medici, but his detailed observations of the Moon made it clear that it was not a perfect crystalline sphere, but extremely Earth-like with mountains, valleys, and plains. It was another phenomemnon Aristotle could not have explained.

The middle-aged professor of mathematics had used his telescope as a baseball bat, and changed your world and mine forever the night of January 7th, 1610--the night the modern world began.

The views expressed here are my own--it's a good bet they don't reflect those of the University.