So it appears that it’s cool with the Obama administration if we suppress scientific dissent, at least if those reports don’t match their agenda.
Where have we heard about behavior like this before? :-)
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
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In Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” the interrogator tells Rubashov that opposition to Lysenko’s genetics must be suppressed, because agriculture is so important to society.
Dean, surely you know that it’s just DIFFERENT if Obama does it.
And this is yet another example of Obama EXPLICITY doing something that the Bush administration was only ACCUSED of doing.
It occurs to me that .. at no point in any of my science courses was I exposed to the name “Lysenko” or the horrors he wrought.
He’s almost a perfect counterpoint to Galileo in the story of Science.
Well, Koestler’s book was a novel, so it may not be a perfect counterexample. Then again, the story of Galileo being “suppressed” by the church is also mostly mythical, so I guess it’s a fair comparison anyway. ;-)
Lysenko was completely real.
Take some time, read the wikipedia entry on Lysenko, and contemplat e the suppression of alternate models.
No, no, Lysenko was certainly real, and Lysenkoism was the officially enforced scientific view of the Soviets long after disproven. I’m just saying Koestler’s book was a novel. ;-)
Where Galileo is held up as an example of good science being rejected by the powers that be, Lysenko is an example of bad science being accepted and made to stick.
“Global warming ” now “climate change” is bovine scatology.
HB
Dishman, absolutely, your comparison was quite apt, I was just quibbling. ;-)
“Darkness at Noon” was indeed a novel, of course, but Koestler was himself a former Communist with some real experience with the psychology of those attracted to such movements. See Koestler on closed systems.
Dean,
Correct me if I’m wrong but I seem to recall reading somewhere that Galileo was a bit of an arsehole. That as much as the Church’s treatment of him is trumped up, he himself wasn’t one to not stick his thumb in the eye of the Church when the opportunity arose.
Wish I could remember where I read that…
David: Yeah.
Kevin: Well, yeah and no. He actually didn’t get in as much trouble as is sometimes made out, his scientific (as opposed to theological) theories were not banned, and the idea that the Earth was NOT at the center of the universe was never outlawed. He was basically convicted of “theologizing without a license,” not for saying the Earth revolved around the sun.
And yeah, it happens he was old friends with the Pope at the time. They’d been friends long before the guy actually became Pope, and Galileo seems to have gotten under his skin and started the kind of irrational personal spat that only two friends can get into. His punishment consisted of spending time in house arrest in a luxury villa with a full-time assistant and free to pursue his research so long as he stopped publishing his theological views and would say “sorry, it’s a theory not a fact.”
You can read a pretty good de-mythologized blow-by-blow right here. No one involved at the time was covered in glory.
Oh, on Galileo’s side, it does appear that someone inserted a forged document (or at least one he’d never seen and didn’t know about) in his records that made him look really bad. You can I suppose theorize that the church institutionally conspired against him to put that document in there, but that rather flies in the face of the myth of an institutional Church that arrogantly tossed people for the “crime” of saying the Earth revolved around the sun, nor would it explain how he had so many friends at the very highest level of the church. He was a prickly personality (In the sciences?!? Really?!?!) and he’d made himself some enemies, so it’s hard to say who did that to him and exactly why.
I think it’s important to note that Galileo wasn’t right either. He supported heliocentrism which is just as wrong as geocentrism since the sun isn’t the center of the universe any more than the earth is.
Yeah, there’s a certain irony there.
He was right that the Earth revolves around the sun, but in reality there were substantial lacks in proof at the time. Scientifically speaking, in his lifetime he was actually overreaching and stated something to be factual which the best minds at the time (and there were a lot of good minds by the way) said was troubling because it had major holes in it that weren’t addressed. A century or two later, enough data came along to vindicate him, but not long after that he was shown to be wrong because the universe doesn’t revolve around the sun like he said either.
So oddly enough, the fact that he was scientifically vindicated in one area is used against his opponents as proof that they were idiots and closed minded fools, but the fact that he himself was substantially wrong on that point (and numerous others, as it happens) is proof of nothing.
It really doesn’t bug me except when this is used as a sort of “faith vs. science” argument, where people inconsistently portray where he was right as proof of the evils of faith and where he was wrong as just not particularly relevant. The fact is that in his day his theories really weren’t proven and they did have apparent problems, and later, when he was vindicated on some of it he was proven wrong on other parts of it. This is actually part for the course for science and doesn’t mean he was a bad man; actually he was quite brilliant and forward-thinking and made major contributions. The only thing that’s troubling (to me) is the mythology and the “faith vs. reason” false dichotomy that’s grown up around it.
In the early 17th century, there was much more proof that our planet Earth is spherical, and that as a planet, Earth orbited our star — the Sun — than there was upholding the theory that a galileean Jew named Yeshua of Natzrat arose from his grave after having been crucified by a roman colonial magistrate in Jerusalem some 16 centuries earlier. Religious interference with science more or less is par with government agencies attacking their own hired scientists who may disagree in whole or in part with official and popular theories of global warming as generated by release of CO2 gas stemming from human activities.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Waitaminute here….
Man this sort of scientific nitpickery drives me nuts. I was in another debate not too long ago and somebody was using the fact that Newton was “proven wrong” by Einstein as evidence that science itself could not be trusted.
Look, you can say a lot about Galileo’s scientific support for his heliocentric perspective, but to argue that because he thought the sun was the center of the universe that he was just as wrong as those who put the earth at the center of the universe is staggeringly disingenuous (or staggeringly ignorant).
Not only does it ignore the significant improvement of our view of the LOCAL universe, it also ignores the PROFOUND impact of moving the earth out of the center of the universe had on this planet from a RELIGOUS and PHILOSOPHICAL perspective.
There is a REASON Galileo’s heliocentric “proof” is held up as one of the VERY FEW fundamental worldview shattering moments in world history. That’s because it WAS WORLDVIEW SHATTERING. To argue that it was somehow less important because he was “wrong” about the rest of the universe outside the solar system is EXACTLY the same thing as to sneer at Newton’s Laws because he was “wrong” about anything moving near the speed of light.
The “faith vs. reason” dichotomy which rose up around the Galileo/Pope confrontatoin was ENTIRELY REAL and PROFOUNDLY IMPORTANT to science, to society and to our understanding not just of our unverse, but of OURSELVES.
Now I do agree that the confrontation has been played up for dramatic purposes and Galileo was not seriously inconvenienced by his “house arrest.” But to deny the actual IMPACT of the event itself is to call hundreds of years of the history of science and the church wrong.
It mattered. It was important. It was a critical science-defining moment. It led to further discoveries by Brahe, Kepler, Newton and others which TRANSFORMED the modern world.
Bah.
… besides, on a purely scientific basis, Galileo’s observations FALSIFIED the Geocentric view of the universe by demonstrating that four objects ORBITED JUPITER. This falsified the notion that all heavenly bodies orbited the earth. His observations of sunspots on the sun and craters on the moon falsified the nottion of the perfection of the heavenly spheres.
These were IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS EVENTS.
To demonstrate how important they were, both Einstein and Steven Hawking call Galileo Galilei the FATHER OF MODERN SCIENCE. That’s pretty high praise from a couple of pretty smart people.
Interesting article in American Scientist a few months ago (can’t find my copy and it’s not on-line) argued that the medieval view of Earth as center of the universe was *by no means* a compliment to Earth and to humanity–that “down” in medieval thinking was associated with mud, dirt, corruption.
David, I would argue that the article you read is technically correct, but misses the point. The medieval view of Earth as the center of the universe was both a positive AND a negative. Yes, it meant that the earth was singularly SINFUL, but there can be no doubt that it felt good to be the single most important object in the universe, as evidenced by an omnipotent God’s constant attention and affection.
Medieval philosophy (and earlier) was far more complex than most “modern” people give it credit for. They were not single-minded, philosophically ignorant peasants. These views were the result of thousands of years of debate of good vs. evil and body vs. spirit. For Earth to be the CENTER STAGE in the most important battle for the soul of the universe, it HAD to be partly evil. That was part of the whole deal that made it SO IMPORTANT!
I believe that, as a process, scientific method is the best we have.
At the same time, no particular piece of science should be trusted. Case in point, Trofim Lysenko.
Doubt and uncertainty are fundamental components of the scientific method. Rejection of those (as in the case of Lysenko) are rejections of science itself.
That doesn’t mean it’s not useful. It’s the best we have. It does not, however, offer certainty.
If you want certainty, look to faith. If you look to science for certainty, you will find only faith, as science will have been banished.
Cosmic, we probably disagree less than you think, but, I think you’re actually giving medieval philosophers, scientists, and theologians less credit than they deserve. Let me point out a few things which I think indicate this, and which I was trying to drive at:
1) Galileo did not come up with the heliocentric view of the universe. He just didn’t. It was not a new new and novel theory. It was considered eccentric and odd and probably wrong, but not threatening. Just an old idea that had been looked at by some of the best minds in the scientific world, going all the way back to Aristotle, and found to probably be in error.
2) Neither did Copernicus come up with the heliocentric view of the universe, although it was really mostly Copernicus’ work that Galileo was relying on and Copernicus (a Christian monk) had done most of the Yeoman’s work on the subject.
3) Aristotle himself had looked at the heliocentric model and rejected it, as had other researchers before Galileo, not for “faith” reasons but because it did not really appear to make sense, and the evidence for it was thin. This was the prevailing view at the time of Galileo–not that the Earth was the center of the universe “because the Bible said so” but because the available scientific data at the time indicated it to be so.
4 ) Ultimately though, the idea that Galileo’s accomplishment “shattered” preexisting notions about the nature of faith and science is, I’m sorry, pure mythology, and says more about those who eagerly expound the myth–yes, even the brilliant Hawkings and Einsteins of the world–than it does about reality in the medieval era. It was not faith-shattering. It did not require fundamental re-evaluation of everything the church thought it knew. It did not cause a crisis of faith. These things, they did not happen.
The church in fact was instrumental in funding and promoting the sciences. It had been all along. It never stopped being such. The pope at the time was an amateur scientist and many bigwigs in the church, not to mention workaday clerics, were part-time or full-time scientists. You’re talking here, indeed, about a church that established the modern university system and was directly responsible for funding and promoting some of the biggest scientific accomplishments of the previous thousand years.
Heliocentrism was not a new idea. As mentioned, Aristotle and others had already examined it and rejected it. Against Galileo was not a clutch of angry Bishops pounding their Bibles and screaming that the Earth was flat/at the center of the universe/whatever. That’s not what they were mad about. Discussion of these ideas had been allowed and was allowed. It was not viewed as a theological threat–it just wasn’t. It was viewed as probable scientific nonsense, possibly theologically troubling, but acceptable to consider. The idea of “Earth-not-center-of-universe” was not considered frightening or scary or to have “major ramifications for the faith,” it was more a matter of, “enh, that doesn’t really make sense does it? The information we have doesn’t really seem to indicate that.”
Galileo also used proofs for his heliocentrist ideas that were just wrong. For example, he tried to prove that tidal motion supported the theory. It really doesn’t. And the definitive proof that he was correct didn’t happen until it could be proven by observation that not just the planets appeared to move, but the stars themselves–and that was never shown in Galileo’s time.
So from my perspective a lot of the Galileo mythology (Brave Reason vs. Primitive Faith) stands on the fact that he happened to be ultimately correct, even though some of his proofs were flat-out wrong. And the ultimate tragedy of Galileo isn’t that he got one Big Thing right, because the wrong that was done to him was wrong even if he’d been expounding the theory that the universe was made up of monkey poo flung by a giant cosmic monkey. He should have been allowed to expound his theories, period.
Of course, as I said, others had expounded the heliocentric view before, and were not harassed for it. They were just deemed wrong and probably silly.
The idea that faith and science were not and should not be at war was nothing that came about because of Galileo. The notion that if science seemed to definitively disprove something we saw in the scriptures, that probably just meant we’d misunderstood the scriptures, was also in no way new; Church Fathers going back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, including St. Augustine himself, had already established that principle. Nor was the phrase, “the scriptures teach how to go to Heaven, not how the Heavens go” invented because everyone felt aghast at poor brave Galileo; that thinking, too, was already old to the faith, in response to all sorts of things including the fact that the Bible seemed to suggest that the Earth was flat and had corners, which no educated person inside the Church or out believed; it was already accepted and considered uncontroversial. (Another science myth being that Christopher Columbus “proved” the Earth was round, which wasn’t even controversial in his day. Although that’s a more egregiously wrong myth to be sure.)
The bottom line is that the supposed challenge to faith and humanity’s worldview that Galieleo represented simply wasn’t. That doesn’t mean his persecution was right, because it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean that, despite some of his errors he wasn’t ultimately vindicated, because he was. It doesn’t even mean that he’s not an example of the lone scientist standing against the world and saying “you people simply have to be wrong” and persevering no matter what people said about him, which is a tale as old as science itself, and one of the things that makes it so wonderful–and he was definitely one of those examples.
Nope, Galileo was wronged. He was ultimately vindicated. But this stuff about how his view was a threat to how everybody important viewed the world, that he touched off a massive crisis of faith and a re-evaluation of the relationship between reason and the church? Um, no. It’s a fun tale, but not really what happened.
And, by the way, no, it’s silly to suggest that you can’t trust science because Newton’s theories were ultimately proved to be wrong once you start getting close to the speed of light. Although to nitpick, you can show him as wrong on the math, at very long decimal places, at speeds far less than C. But that doesn’t prove anything except that he got way way closer than anyone before him and made a huge advancement, yet (duh) he hadn’t created a fully complete cosmology, and at the edges there were problems with his theory. Which, last time I checked, isn’t all THAT much different from the situation today.
To me a lot of the problem with science today–and I’m not sure it’s new at all, and so maybe I shouldn’t say “today” but I don’t know what word to use–is that we forget that the true scientist always says, “well, okay, I may be wrong but if so show me where.”
“This theory seems to best fit the data we have” is what the real scientist generally says, although debate is an important and crucial part of that. The whole purpose of the scientific method is, in fact, to remove as much as possible of the human frailties every human being–EVERY human being, no matter how brilliant, brave, and insightful–is subject to. It is arguably a more a way to objectively prove what isn’t true more than it is a way to prove what is true–but that’s a powerful thing.
But like all human endeavors, it sometimes gets clouded by those damnable human failings. Drat them. If we could just get rid of those bloody PEOPLE, we could get some real research done! ;-)
we forget that the true scientist always says, “well, okay, I may be wrong …
Some, in the model of Lysenko, forget to even think that.
When David Suzuki and James Hansen speak of “crimes against humanity”, I believe that is evidence that they do not entertain serious doubts as to the righteousness of their cause.
They have cast aside the mantle of scientist, and sought to take up that of inquisitor or Lysenkoist.
Dean: Please tell me you don’t think I’m unaware that the heliocentric theory dates back to at least Copernicus. It was called the “Copernican theory” in Galileo’s day. And Copernicus didn’t invent it either. You can trace it all the way back to ancient Greece or ancient India if you want to.
I don’t put Galileo in the rare company of Newton, Einstein and Hawking simply because he advocated a theory that already existed. I put Galileo there because he was one of the first experimental physicists who wasn’t satisfied with Aristotelian mind games that were supposed to reveal “truth” through sheer mental exertion. Galileo decided that you needed to DEMONSTRATE your theories and he did so with a vengeance. He didn’t just argue about heliocentrism, he took the brand-new telescope and APPLIED it to the problem.
And in your extensive post above you completely ignored the point I made that regardless how well Galileo may have “proven” heliocentrism, he UNEQUIVOCABLY DISPROVED Geocentrism, which at that time said that EVERYTHING orbits the earth.
What Galileo did with the sun-earth universe question was exactly what Newton did with gravity, force and acceleration. Neither reached UNIVERSAL, TOTAL truth, but BOTH reached a more ACCURATE truth that better explained the way the universe works.
We probably are closer to each other’s views on Galileo than it sounds from this discussion, but I believe you are seriously downplaying the effect the Galileo/Pope confrontation had on the world. It was a BIG DEAL. One of the biggest deals ever. And it was in large part due to Galileo that Newton and Einstein ever did what they did.
Science is wonderful —-scientists are the problem. They lie, steal, cheat just like everyone. More so, they have so much pressure to publish and get funding, that they, necessarily, can’t stray too far from the herd.
Generally, herd science is baaaaaad science.
–HB
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Galileo had published a book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632, which had been approved by the Rome Catholic censors. It purported to be a balanced discussion of the heliocentric theory vs the geocentric theory, but Galileo used a character named Simplicio to advocate for the geocentric theory and made him look like a fool. The pope was personally very angry about the book and thought that Galileo had used the book to ridicule the pope.
The Roman Catholic Church at the time was near the end of the Counter Reformation, which was a response the Protestant Reformation. To a certain extend the Pope found Galileo to be another challenge to Papal authority that needed to be dealt with accordingly.
One should realize that the trial and hour arrest of Galileo for the rest of his life did not end the Scientific revolution, it simply moved it outside the control of the Roman Catholic Church to protestant Germany and England, which is part of the reasons that they became the industrial centers of Europe.
Cosmic: Yes, we probably are much closer to agreeing than the discussion would seem. And no, you obviously know about Copernicus.
I’d merely note that Galileo actualy HAD NOT proven his case by the time he died. He had come up with some data that was hard to explain. This happens in science. He also offered proofs that were WRONG, such as his failed assertion that tidal motion proved the sun to be at the center. All he really had was some things that were tough to explain, but which did NOT make his own theory indisputable. The proof that vindicated him, the undeniable reality that the stars themselves moved, could not be shown with telescopic instruments of his day–Galieleo’s considerable advancements in telescopy weren’t sufficient to do that.
So what he had was some apparently very odd motions around the gas giants that couldn’t easily be jibed with Ptolemaic cosmology. Galileo (to my eye) seems to have had a huge intuitive leap based on that (and a few other things) and become absolutely convinced that what he was saying was irrefutable, but based on the data at the time it was compelling but not irrefutable.
Galileo really didn’t have enough data to settle the question, but he behaved as if he did, and as if anyone who disagreed with him was a chowderhead. That’s a big part of what cheesed a lot of people off (including a lot of his fellow scientists and not merely those brutish thug Bishops).
Mikeca: There are certain facts here that create problems for your analysis I think:
1) Copernicus, a Catholic monk, had already done huge work on heliocentrism, and Pope Leo X, an avid science geek, had encouraged public discussion and examination of Copernicus’ novel work suggesting that the old heliocentrist idea might actually be correct.
2) When the Pope did this, the major leadership of the Protestant Reformation were incensed. John Calvin and Martin Luther both PERSONALLY savaged Copernicus and this new and pernicious “Popish” idea.
3) In areas controlled by the Protestants, the Protestant Churches followed exactly the same practices as the Roman church; if you were in Lutheran Germany and you wanted to publish something you damn well got a Luther imprimatur on your work or you didn’t publish (or you went to jail). John Calvin expected exactly the same in areas he controlled.
Getting permission from authorities, both civil and religious, to publish anything was standing practice everywhere in Europe at the time. For every person, and any purpose.
That changed later, and you have to look to the 17th and 18th century classical liberal reformers and to rabble rousers in places like the British colonies in North America in the late 1700s for that.
So actually, Mike, you’re dealing with TWO strains of the Galileo mythology:
Myth Strain 1: It was a colossal battle between Faith and Science.
Myth Strain 2: It was a colossal battle between the oppressive Catholic Church and the enlightened Reformers.
The very fact that the Pope was in favor of open examination and discussion of heliocentrism before Galileo even made a name for himself, and that Protestant leaders savagely attacked the idea of heliocentrism, can’t really be jibed with the mythology. But it’s a fact.
What it looks like to me is that a whole lot of very bright scientists who came out cultural mileus like Germany (Lutheran territory) and Britain (Church of England territory), and seem to have simply absorbed the cultural attitudes they grew up with. The Galileo mythology made sense to them because it fit their preconceptions pretty well: “Well OF COURSE the Catholic Church is a backward semi-literate bastion of irrationalism and traditionalism, it makes perfect SENSE that they’d oppress a brave scientist like Galileo!”
Never mind that the Church actually made public discussion of Galileo’s ideas possible and that the Protestant reformers might actually have imprisoned or executed Galileo if he’d run to them.
By the way, it was in Galileo’s era that the Pope issued one of history’s major astronomical achievements: the Gregorian calendar, which, using copious astronomical data and analysis put together by scientists, fixed the old Julian calendar and gave us the Gregorian calendar the whole world uses today.
Protestant Reformers, who had savaged the Vatican for entertaining sacriligious heliocentrism, unsurprisingly grumbled at the new “Popish time,” but we still use it today–because it’s astronomically accurate, which is what Pope Gregory XIII wanted it to be when he designed it.
Dean: I guess we’ll never agree on the impact of Galileo’s battle with the Pope, nor on how well-founded his arguments were. Yes he did make a great intuitive leap for his time, but in retrospect it wasn’t that great of a leap at all, and Brahe, Kepler and others immediately recognized the value of it and within a generation of Galileo’s death the astronomical evidence of his correctness was overwhelming and hasn’t been challenged since. He didn’t just “guess” correctly, he correctly interpreted the data he had based on two competing theories and he chose the right one mostly by applying Occam’s Razor to the problem.
And please don’t overlook Galileo’s significant accomplishments in kinematics and physical theory outside of the Heliocentric debate. Those alone would have given him an honored place in science.
Dean:
I am notorious for “reading between the lines” and one of the reasons I think you are picking such nits on the Helio/Geo centric argument is because you feel the Catholic Church and the Pope have gotten a raw deal in the mythology that has risen up around the event.
I do agree with you there. I think the general attitude that the Catholic Church was some sort of dogmatic, hidebound, theocratic, reactionary bunch of neanderthals is an unfair picture of both the Pope (who, as you point out, was a friend of Galileo’s) and the church itself. Anyone who has actually studied the history of the Catholic church’s patronage of pure astronomy would know better.
However, there is no doubt that the church perceived Galileo’s published work as a threat and felt that they had to do SOMETHING in answer to it. But there were more nuances on the Catholic side, and less scientific certainty on the Galileo side than is usually presented in the comic-book style simplifications of the situation.
But it was still a BIG DEAL and the reverberations of it echo through the halls of academy and theology to this day.
For the record, I wasn’t trying to diminish Galileo’s contributions to science and people’s view of earth’s place in the universe in any way. My comment arises from hearing people say how utterly and absolutely correct Galileo was and how he stood up to the ignorant, oppressive Catholic Church which was completely wrong.
It is true that Galileo had met and discussed his ideas with the Pope. The pope told Galileo it was ok the publish a book on the heliocentric vs geocentric question as long as it was a balanced discussion of the question, did not advocate a single position and included the pope’s views.
Galileo wrote the book, had it approved by the Catholic censors, and it was published. When the pope read the book, he was offended. The pope thought Galileo was making fun of him and ridiculing his position.
The problem for the Roman church was that it’s censors had approved the book, so they had to claim that Galileo had tricked them into approving the book.
The fact that Galileo had gotten approval to publish the book and still was charged with heresy for writing it was part of the reason this action chilled science in Italy.
By the way on the original claim that started this thread was that the Obama administration approved suppressing a scientific study it did not like. It turns out the person who wrote this study is an economist employed by the EPA, not a climate scientist. He has become interested in the global warming debate, and done armchair research on global warming on his own time. He was not asked to write the report by anyone at the EPA, although he says his supervisor knew he was writing it.
The EPA block publication of the report because it did not meet scientific standards required in EPA reports.
The author has a BS in physics, as well as a PhD in economics and apparently has a web site with most of the same information.
mikeca:
Oh, well, gee then, we’ll just listen to the climate scientists on this question then.
Where did Al Gore get his climatology degree from again? I forget.
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