Cosmic Conservative said:
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.
brilliant and absolutely right in every particular. Cosmic conservative, indeed :)
{ 34 comments }
Excellent. I was just thinking that this deserved a dedicated discussion of its own, because we’d been going at it heavily in a thread only tangentially related at best. So, let me summarize my counterarguments for Cosmic, and we can go from there:
It is irrefutable that Galileo was vindicated in his most important assertions, and he was wronged. However, there’s a lot of mythology around the Galileo incident that needs to be punctured. Here are pertinent facts that are largely either forgotten or ignored:
1) The idea that the Sun was at the center was not new to Galileo, and was not considered pernicious or dangerous by the Church.
2) Although the idea itself went all the way back to Aristotle, it was a Christian monk named Copernicus who’d done most of the Yeoman’s work in mathematics showing that it could be true. Copernicus was working when Galileo was a child, and Galileo leaned heavily on Copernicus’ work to advance his own research.
3) Pope Leo X, around the time Copernicus’ heliocentric thesis was finally officially going to press, was (like many of his contemporaries in the Church) a science buff. He thought Copernicus’ work, suggesting that the sun was at the center of the universe after all, was fascinating and should be promoted for discussion in the many universities and scientific forums that ran under the auspices of the Church, or under its patronage. (Relevance of this fact discussed below.)
4) When the Pope did this, he was savaged by both Martin Luther and John Calvin, seminal figures in the Protestant Reformation. The idea was mocked by them as sacrilegious popish foolishness. (Relevance of this fact to be discussed below.)
5) The Church was really big on astronomy back then, and one of Leo X’s (fairly) immediate successors, Gregory XIII, commissioned astronomers to nail down problems in the Julian calendar then in widespread use, and Gregory used it to craft a new calendar–the Gregorian calendar now in worldwide use today. That calendar was just coming online when Galileo was young. (Relevance of this fact to be discussed below.)
6) Galileo was NOT put on trial for suggesting the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. The idea was considered theologically troubling because it seemed to contradict a few scriptural passages, BUT, science appearing to contradict scripture was nothing new. Such things were never considered justification for blotting out a scientific idea. As far back as Augustine, more than a thousand years before Galileo, the church had already established the principle that if scientific information seemed to contradict the scriptures, then that scientific information might be wrong, but it might just be that we were misinterpreting the scriptures. And a general principal was already well-established well before Galileo was born: that the scriptures teach how to go to Heaven, not how the Heavens go. Things like that had been worked out long, long before in response to science that had done things that challenged faith, like proving that the Earth was round even though the Bible seemed to imply that it was flat and had corners.
6a) This more of an aside: a truly egregious myth, that seems to have been made up whole cloth (I think by Nathaniel Hawthorne), is that in Christopher Columbus’ day everyone thought the Earth was flat and he set out to prove it wasn’t. This is bunk. The idea that the Earth was round was widely accepted by educated persons everywhere, and Christianity itself had already dealt definitively with any apparent “contradictions” in scripture (although there are still a few goofy Flat Earthers out there gamely trying to prove the Earth is flat using scriptures even today, the Church as a whole moved on from that one almost 2000 years ago).
7) Galileo did not actually prove that the sun was the center of the universe. He came up with some observations and supporting math that were very difficult to jibe with the Ptolemaic model of the universe which said that the Earth was at the center. He also didn’t get everything right. Some of his assertions were flat-out wrong, such as his failed attempt to show that tidal motion supported the idea that the sun was the center of the universe (it didn’t). And definitive proof that vindicated him–proof that the stars appeared to move in the skies and not just the planets–didn’t come along until more than a century after his death, when further refinements to telescopy and other measuring instruments made it possible to show this. He never actually proved his case in his own lifetime, and his views were considered questionable by many perfectly competent scientists and not just theologians.
8 ) He got in real trouble because he took his scientific arguments straight into the theological realm and began making broad assertions about scriptural interpretation, which is the main reason the Church felt compelled to get involved in the controversy.
9) He was a prickly personality (a prickly personality in the sciences?!? no!!!) and he cheesed off a whole lot of his fellow scientists, as well as people within the Church, by basically saying–and this is pretty literal–that anyone who disagreed with him was a stupid dumb-dumb. He made a lot of enemies that way, and crap really hit the fan when he insulted Pope Urban VIII, who was actually an old friend of Galileo’s and had been one of Galileo’s defenders even back before he was made Pope.
10) When he did get put on trial, a lot of those who handed in the religious verdict really didn’t want to be a part of it, some even refused to sign the condemnation, and Galileo was even vindicated on the spot on some things, getting some of the more spurious charges dropped. His punishment was that he was forced to recant his religious assertions, admit that his theories were theory and not established fact, and to spend a few years under house arrest in a luxury villa with a full-time assistant so he could continue his research unmolested just as long as he’d shut up and stop butting his head into theology.
11) It is now admitted, including officially by the Church, that regardless of his personality issues, he was still wronged, and personal conflicts with his friend the Pope probably intruded wrongly into the whole fiasco.
Relevance of the above facts to me are:
A) There is a widespread myth that this conflict was one between “faith and reason.” It wasn’t.
B) There is a related widespread myth that this was backward Catholics opposing the forces of reason in the face of the enlightenment brought on by the Protestant Reformers. It wasn’t. (See fact #4 and #5, above.)
C) The view that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe was not theologically or psychologically shattering, any more than the notion that the Earth wasn’t flat. The Church had a long standing respect for the sciences and for astronomy and was actually a big booster of astronomy right around the time of Galileo (see fact #5 above), and Galileo’s work wouldn’t even have been possible if the Church didn’t put so much effort into promoting and funding the sciences. Nor would his work have been possible if the Church were in the habit of slapping down scientists for suggesting things that might be theologically troubling.
D) Galileo was wronged even if some of his proofs were in error and even if later on it turned out he hadn’t gone far enough and the sun wasn’t the center of the universe any more than the Earth is. Even if he’d been theorizing that the universe was a giant banana and the Earth was nothing but a cosmic banana seed, he shouldn’t have been put through the wringer like that.
E) He seems to have been canonized by science students mostly because he was vindicated on one Big Thing; the irony being, he actually WAS WRONG on some of his assertions (see fact summary #7 above), and he actually DID NOT definitively prove his case. That proof came later, with instruments not available in Galileo’s time. If he’d been flat-out wrong, I’m not sure the mythology that’s grown up around him would have happened, but it wouldn’t change the fact that he was STILL MISTREATED.
I think that last point is what touched off Cosmic’s comment, because I seem to have given a bad impression. I don’t consider the fact that Galileo was right about some things and wrong about some things particularly relevant; you can say that about all great scientists, and he was wronged either way. I just think the irony is that the mythology of Galileo grew up around the idea that he was 100% right about everything, but he wasn’t, and around the idea that he definitively proved his case, which he didn’t.
And in summary: the idea that this was a seminal moment that shattered the world’s pre-existing theological, psychological. etc. preconceptions? Meh.
Man Dean, I sure can’t keep up with THAT post today… Maybe tonight…
Although I think you and I have already covered this ground, perhaps I should let others weigh in.
I will touch a bit on the tides thing….
Galileo was not only wrong on the tides argument, but he actually ignored contradictory data. (His heliocentric calculations predicted one tide per day, when there are actually two.)
However, to focus on this single issue as you have is similar to how people glommed onto Einstein’s inability to reconcile Quantum Mechanics with Relativity and his refusal to accept QM as evidence of his scientific shortcomings.
Both are EXCEPTIONS where an individual’s personal shortcomings show that they are HUMAN BEINGS who sometimes have difficulty reconciling their own beliefs with the evidence of their own eyes.
In other words, you are using the 2% to try to argue the 98%. Sure it’s ACCURATE to point out, but this was neither the strongest argument Galileo made AGAINST geocentrism, nor was it the strongest he made FOR heliocentrism (although I know Galileo THOUGHT it was strong at the time).
His best arguments AGAINST geocentrism were the moons orbiting Jupiter. His best argument FOR heliocentrism was the phases of Venus. Those two, within 30 years of his death, had completely transformed the scientific landscape and Geocentrism was abandoned en masse by physicists from that time onward.
By the way, while Galileo was embroiled in the heliocentric vs. geocentric debate, Tycho Brahe was meticulously recording the position of Mars in the sky to within less than 1 minute of arc error WITHOUT a telescope.
A few years after Tycho’s death, Johannes Kepler delivered the true death knell to the Geocentric model when he showed how the accurate Mars measurements fit perfectly within his Heliocentric elliptical planetary laws, but could not be reconciled with Geocentrism without severe mathematical contortions. Kepler, probably more than Galileo, really hammered the last nail in the Geocentric model.
(And my memory is a little fuzzy here, but I THINK Galileo found the elliptical planetary laws as difficult to accept as Einstein found Quantum Mechanics. In fact I think he refused to accept them.)
(Also of note, Tycho Brahe himself was not a Heliocentric proponent. He developed his OWN theory that was a sort of merged helio/geo centric model, but which kept earth at the center of the universe.)
One other minor note on this, just informational, but interesting.
Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei were perhaps the three most influential astronomers before the nineteenth century. They were contemporaries. They even corresponded, at least Galileo and Kepler did. Keplers Laws had just been published when Galileo first pointed his telescope at the heavens. Galileo had read Kepler’s work and actually sent him a letter with his telescopic observations. Kepler recognized the value of telescopic measurement and set about using telescopes to better record the positions of planets. He sent support back to Galileo on the Heliocentric model, which he believed he had proven. He was very disappointed that Galileo did not cite any of his (Kepler’s) comments and advice in his public statements or writings. Perhaps this was due to the dispute over spheres vs. ellipses, I don’t think anyone knows. But to give Galileo full credit for “proving” the heliocentric model is unfair. During that period (known as the “scientific revolution”) people were reading both Galileo’s and Kepler’s work. Galileo’s intuitive arguments may have won more lay people over to the heliocentric model, but most actual scientists were more impressed with Brahe’s observational recordings and Kepler’s “Laws” which they could apply to their own observations immediately.
A few years after Galileo’s death, a guy named Isaac Newton was born. He grew up in the midst of the Scientific Revolution and read both Galileo and Kepler. Again he was impressed with Galileo’s intuitive reasoning, but found Kepler’s mathematics and rigor more of a basis for his own extension of the laws of mechanics.
I find this stuff absolutely fascinating…
Actually, and it’s a very small point to the discussion, Relativity means that there is no frame of reference is superior to any other; that the sun orbits the earth and that the earth orbits the sun are equally tenable statements.
(It is true that there is something pleasant about considering the center of mass of the universe to be the “true” or “correct” frame of reference, but that’s not actually supported by the theory.)
Dean,
I would argue that whatever the ins-and-outs of Galileo’s run-in with the church (and I object to life-long house arrest being referred to as “a few years” and to suggest that somehow the banning of his book and considering him “erroneous in faith” to be somehow not censorship by the church. Additionally, he was, in fact, most specifically on trial for his science, not for his theology (though his theology may have been what brought him to trial in the first place), as the judgement rendered by the inquisition makes clear.), there is a worldview reflected in your comments about the Church’s attitudes towards Galileo – i.e. that it was within its purview to review Galileo’s findings and feel entitled to allow or disallow them – that is the most important bind Galileo shattered.
As you said, Galileo was not the first to suggest the heliocentric model – though I would argue that his work, taken in conjunction with the work of Kepler, Brahe, and others was fairly big stuff. Educated persons may have held that heliocentrism was at least a possibility, but to the everyday person geocentrism was it – and their work helped to reshape the entirety of public opinion. THAT is world shattering.
Galileo may have simply been a weather vane pointing in the direction the world was already moving, but there’s no denying the historical significance of being perhaps the last or one of the last men officially punished by the Church for the crime of holding a theologically unpalatable scientific belief.
ctl:
?
I have a limited understanding of relativity and the frames of reference it refers to, and to say that relativity equates earth orbiting the sun with the sun orbiting the earth is not any sort of relativistic argument I’ve ever heard.
In fact it is NEWTON’S Law of Gravity that tells us in reality the earth and sun rotate around a single center of mass. However, because the center of mass is very nearly the center of the sun and well within the sun’s surface, it is BY CONVENTION agreed that the earth orbits the sun, not vice versa.
What the GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY says about the earth and sun’s motions is that BOTH FOLLOW SPACE-TIME GEODESICS, which are created by the warping of space-time. Neither orbits the other, they move in what appears to them to be a straight line. But since space is curved, THEY curve.
It has been said that there are less than a hundred people alive that actually understand Relativity at the level Einstein did. I’m not one of them, but I’ve had a few classes at least.
Cosmic,
actually, ctl is correct. One may choose the earth as the static point in an intertial reference frame, and work out the laws of motion of the heavenly bodies from that standpoint. This is equivalent to the old example of the person riding the moving rail cart and tossing a ball. To him, the ball moves up and down. To the observer watching from outside the moving cart, the ball takes a parabolic path. Both observations are the truth when the starting point is a static observer (either the observer on the rail cart or the one on the ground).
zach:
So, if you did that, how fast would, say, Betelgeuse be moving to conform to the laws of motion you just worked out using earth as an inertial reference frame?
I suppose if you mean that for LOCAL inertial reference frames where you discount the rest of the friggin universe, then yes, ctl is right.
I assumed we’d look at the stars in the sky too.
i don’t know, but presumably its velocity could be worked out. there’s no need to discount the rest of the friggin’ universe, the principle still holds. bear in mind no one said it was the best choice of reference frame, from a mathematical standpoint, but it is a valid one.
zach:
I’ve been out of physics a long time, but I believe the inertial reference frame argument you and ctl are making are known to be local frames of reference only. In general relativity they don’t hold true. In special relativity they only hold true for local frames, which generally means for frames where your laws of motion don’t force you to come up with things zipping around faster than light speed all the time. Which would violate special relativity.
I could be wrong. It’s been a while. But I think that’s basically right.
Besides, I also think the argument is a classical physics argument, not a Relativity one. Again I could be wrong.
Cosmic: FYI, just to clear one of the data points you were uncertain about, I’m showing Copernicus dead in 1543, with Brahe born in 1546 and Galileo born in 1565, so, they likely didn’t have much correspondence with him. The rest of what you say makes perfect sense though, and knowing what we do about Galileo we shouldn’t be -too- surprised if he wasn’t quick to credit anyone but himself.
By the way, what’s the odds on the possibility that Galileo was an Aspie? I’m thinking they’re pretty high myself. ;-)
Zach: I have a bunch of things to do today, but your citation of the judgment and Galieleo’s personally handwritten confession do need a more thorough response, but there are things that have to be understood about it.
Briefly on other issues, however, the man’s “lifelong” house arrest wasn’t a life sentence, he was just pretty near the end of his life already.
Also, it *was not* a practice instituted by the Church to have the Church reviewing books for approval prior to publication. Having to go to the civil and religious authorities before publishing anything was standing practice everywhere and pretty much forever before some 18th century radicals (especially in Britain’s North American colonies) changed that. Prior to that, anywhere in the world (and *still* in much of the world today) that was just normal. And Galileo’s persecution in no way changed that. Nor did the Protestants change that, or say it should be changed. Not in Galieleo’s day anyway; if you wanted to publish something that had theological ramifications in Lutheran territory or Calvinist territory, you damn well got their permission or you went to jail or might even be executed–and Galileo had every reason to believe that if he’d fled to Protestant country he would have been treated much more harshly than he was treated by Rome.
The practice of asking the crown and/or religious authorities permission before publishing anything was simply normal, and Galileo never changed that–nor, to my knowledge, did he ever suggest it should be changed. He may or may not have felt that way; the general mentality in that era (and for thousands of years before and quite some time after) was that *of course* you wouldn’t publish things without permission, otherwise crazy people could publish lies as truth and the public mind could become confused! ;-) Using Galileo as an example of the move toward freedom of the press is a stretch.
More later, probably this evening. :-)
Cosmic,
You’re correct that I might be getting special and general relativity somewhat confused, it’s been a long time since I’ve studied this stuff myself.
You might be correct that there is some reference frame in which nothing appears to go faster than the speed of light, though it’s my understanding that the uniform expansion of the universe puts the kabosh on that anyway.
Dean,
This is some fascinating stuff. You really should collect it into its own post so that people can easily link it.
the fact that speed and motion is relative is a classical mechanics concept, not a Relativistic one. You *can* create a system wherein any given point is the center of the universe, and everything else moves in relation to it. The math however becomes insane if you pick a “bad” origin coordinate – which is why geocentric models ended up with horrendous helicals and epicyclic paths for the planets, especially Mars which has an infamous “retrograde motion”.
at any rate, the math for that kind of relative motion is right out of Newton, not Einstein. Einstein imposed teh ultimate speed limit and discussed how speed influences time and vice versa, which actually extends Newton to very-high-speed regimes, it doesnt refute it. In the low-speed regime, Einstein reduces to Newton. The classic relativistic scaling parameter is gamma, sqrt(1 – v^2/c^2), which as you can see will be unity for v << c. gamma is how you calculate time dilation and/or the distance shortening caused by speeds near c.
Dean,
Indeed, re: the state of publication of books in the 17th century. I read the sentence that CC linked to, and among many of the revealing things about it (of which one very prominent example, to me, was the familiar, informal, and even “contemporary casual” language it was presented in—though that might be the fault of the translator) was the way it talked about how one of their biggest problems with Galileo’s behavior was that when he had applied for a license to publish his book, he hadn’t disclosed to the publisher that he had previously been sternly warned not to by the Church.
I thought that was fascinating: their big complaint, more than anything else almost, was that he had gone and published a book (which presented his case but clearly went out of its way to pretend to be “agnostic” about it, as it were, though they saw this as a transparent subterfuge), and that he had misled the publishing authorities about its nature and his own history.
Of course, maybe this was just their pretext, and they were hoping to just be able to smack him down on some grounds. But that sentence in its entirety is fascinating reading, and a brilliantly clear little window through which to peer into another world.
Dean:
I didn’t put Copernicus and Galileo as contemporaries, I put Brahe, Kepler and Galileo as contemporaries. Kepler was actually a student or assistant of Brahe’s and took over when Brahe died. I know that Galileo and Kepler corresponded (which is what I mentioned in my comment), and I am sure that Brahe and Kepler discussed Galileo’s work, but I don’t know that Brahe and Galileo corresponded. Brahe was at least as cantankerous and anti-social as Galileo was.
Also, fyi, Galileo was under house arrest for ten years, which most of us would consider a long time. Although he was granted at least one exception for some medical treatment as I recall.
ctl: On the existence of reference frames where nothing goes faster than light, well, MOST relativistic reference frames meet this requirement (and in fact you might argue that ALL do, but I’ve been out of this too long). To explain the speed of receeding items that appear to be moving faster than light, relativistic reference frames utilize the expansion of space-time to account for that, meaning that the galaxy itself isn’t moving faster than light, but it’s motion, combined with the space-time expansion, makes it LOOK like it does. In fact this is a big reason that dark energy is so important in cosmic models since it dramatically increases that expansion (and increases the increas itself over time)…
Sigh… I need to get back up to speed with all this stuff….
Aziz: Thank you for pointing out that Newton’s Laws, as originally written (which were in the form if differential equations, not “F=mA”) are NOT contradicted by Einstein, they are actually still valid in relativistic environments, but the math gets very hard. Still, that’s mostly a testament to the robustness of Newton’s calculus, he didn’t anticipate relativistic effects in his theories.
Brian: Beyond the publishing shenanigans, a major issue the church had with Galileo’s book is that the “traditional” argument was made by a character with a name that could be loosely translated into modern English as “Doofus.”
Cosmic,
My only point there was that there do not exist any inertial frames of reference in which everything in the universe can be measured as moving no faster than the speed of light. This might simply be because the expansion of the universe means that there’s no fixed frame of reference, since space itself is constantly changing on us. Never-the-less, you can’t give preference to any particular inertial frame of reference on the basis of whether nothing goes faster than the speed of light in it.
Aziz,
There are many examples where classical mechanics and relativity give different answers for slow things; their different answers just happen to be very close. (Though I will grant that if distance in this universe is actually quantized, they might work out to be the same.)
But you see, my background is Mathematics, not physics. In math, zero and a number which isn’t zero are different numbers. I do realize that in physics, that distinction is largely ignored for small non-zero numbers. (In astronomy, I gather that it’s largely ignored even for fairly large non-zero numbers.) :)
ctl:
Heh, I would say that the inertial frames of reference argument is mostly an academic one, not a practical one. As my educational background was in physics, I’m much more concerned with practical, as opposed to purely academic, frames of reference.
Hey, I loved your reference to quantized distance. Isn’t that one of the most fascinating things to contemplate in our understanding of the universe? It certianly makes SENSE that distance is quantized since virtually everything else is. The same argument goes for time. If time and distance actually turn out to be quantized, the argument that our universe is nothing but a huge computer simulation suddenly becomes much more credible.
I’ve never been fond of the huge computer simulation hypothesis, but I have to say that it would be funny if the expansion of the universe simply turned out to be a bug in the program.
Oy, LOOOONG day here, just sitting back down here to this thread after finishing moving to a new home. Anyway:
The translation of Galileo’s sentencing and recantation was awesome and I’m glad Zach linked it. I liked Brian’s commentary on it too.
A thing to understand as you read that verdict is that the Cardinals who sentenced him made a big error–and I mean theologically and legally. They got duped, and made a HUGE goof that would still be a huge goof even if the Earth WAS at the center of the universe.
First off, just reading it cold, it looks like they declared officially that heliocentrism was false teaching*. But those 10 or so Cardinals really didn’t have the authority to do that, and that wording alone may be why some of them refused to sign it (I don’t really know why they refused, but that’s a good possibility for one of the reasons).
Moreover, they were flat-out *wrong*. Indeed, the sitting Pope, Urban, had been saying all along that heliocentrism was interesting and deserved to be discussed, and Copernicus’ work was already in circulation with the Church’s imprimatur and a strong endorsement by the late Pope Leo X. By rendering the verdict the way they did, you could easily read it that they’d just declared Leo X and Urban VIII heretics right along with Galileo. %-)
The apparent cause of this clearly wrong (and I mean clearly wrong not even in the scientific sense, but just within their own frame of reference as Cardinals of the Church and judges at a trial) verdict was a document of dubious origin found in Galileo’s record. The document–which so far as I know is still mysterious in origin–purported to be an official condemnation of Galileo’s heliocentric thesis as false teaching* and ordering him never to speak of it in public again. Galileo was reportedly aghast and claimed he’d never seen the damned thing, but in the verdict they decided he was lying.
So now we have 10 Cardinals, in effect, characterizing as heretics Copernicus, Galileo, Leo X, and others in the Church including and the very guy who’d just commissioned them to deal with this Galileo business, Urban VIII! I’m sure they didn’t realize they’d just done that, they were so busy trying to make Galileo shut up and go away, but basically they had done just that. :-D
And they’d done it based on a document of dubious origin that no one (that I’m aware of) to this day seems to have a solid explanation for. The best guess seems to be that one of Galileo’s many enemies forged it and stuck it in there.
There’s just no question that this was a massive fustercluck and Galileo was seriously wronged, and he damn well should have gotten an appeal and gotten most of that stuff thrown out. If he hadn’t just pissed off the guy he needed to most immediately appeal to, and if that guy hadn’t been a bit of a baby about the whole thing, he probably would have been let go with a stern lecture. Instead, Urban blew his stack and said to a group of a dozen or so Cardinals, “look, I’m sick of this jerk and his ideas, you deal with it because I just don’t want to see his jerk face or listen to his jerk ideas anymore. Friggin’ JERK!”
(Hey, Popes are human too.)
By the way, to me this story is far more interesting than the tale of the benighted scientist-as-beacon-of-clear-thought beleaguered on all sides by howling Bishops clutching their Bibles and beating him over the head with their croziers. ;-)
* – For anyone who doesn’t know, “heresy” simply means “false teaching.” These days the word is almost always used in an ironic or sarcastic way, but in the original sense that’s all the word means. A formal charge of heresy would basically be an accusation that you were knowingly and maliciously teaching people things you knew to be false.
CTL: Thanks, I think the whole discussion’s great so I put it in the Best Discussions archive.
CTL & Cosmic: you guys know more than me, but I thought that in normal usage when we refer to Relativity, we mean Einstein’s theories of Relativity, the most important one being that *time* is relative as well as space, and that there is no absolute frame of reference for time any more than there is for space. Have I got that wrong somewhere?
Dean,
glad you liked the link – liked your commentary on it as well. wish i could say i knew about it all along, but honestly i just ripped the link from wikipedia ;)
as a weak unbeliever (agnostic who generally operates assuming god doesn’t exist) in my very humble opinion, the church’s greatest lasting legacy will be the sheer amount of things it and its monks have painstakingly preserved – art, literature, science, etc. How cool is it that 3.5-4 centuries after the fact we can have discussions based on direct translations of the original source material.
anyone is welcome to say what they will about how many documents or cultural artifacts were destroyed by the church, the fact remains that without the church and its monks the absolute number of historical artifacts left in this world would be significantly lower.
Thanks Zach, seriously. I think that’s an observation that too many people wouldn’t make.
A book you might like is Thomas Cahill’s How The Irish Saved Civilization. Cahill’s both a real scholar and an engaging and fun writer, and in that book he documents the little-known fact that while much of Europe was burning in the 5th Century as Rome was collapsing from internal chaos and external invasions, Christian monks way way up in isolated Ireland were spending their entire lives painstakingly and exhaustively preserving and making handwritten copies of works of the great writers and mathematicians from antiquity. Some of those monks wouldn’t have even been able to really read what they were copying, but they painstakingly and lovingly duplicated each shape on the page so copies could be distributed and preserved. Libraries all over Europe were being sacked and burned, and here were these monks in an obscure backwater Roman province laboriously saving enormous amounts of it. “The Church says we need to keep copies of this stuff, so, that’s what we’re doing.”
Cahill’s thesis is that *most* of what we have that survives of the writings of the ancients is due to that project up in Ireland. His book probably wouldn’t have sold quite as well if it had been “How Irish Monks Saved Civilization,” but either way Cahill’s a crackerjack scholar and writer.
Can you imagine what life was like before the printing press, let alone cheap paper? Working all day, probably from sunup to sundown, using a feather quill to scratch out letter-by-letter copies of important books that you yourself might not even really be able to read? Whoof. I’d go insane.
Dean:
I made the point immediately that the inertial frame of reference argument was more of a classical physics argument than a relativity one. In fact Galileo himself may have been the first person to have published the concept of inertial frames of reference in the famous Dialogue book itself. He was reacting to the argument that if the earth was moving, then if you dropped something, it would fall at an angle. He used the example of people inside a ship with no windows being completely unable to tell if the ship was docked and stationary, or was moving at a constant speed in calm waters. Galileo extended this to say that within an inertial reference frame ALL physical laws remain invariant. This is really a remarkable insight and is one of the things that Hawkings and Einstein point to when they described Galileo as a great scientist. In fact this is known in physics as “Galileo’s principle of relativity.”
Einstein’s special theory of relativity essentially takes that same argument and says that it holds true for any speed you travel, meaning that if you measure the speed of light inside a ship moving at near the speed of light, you get the same result as if you measured the speed of light in a stationary laboratory. This is completely counter-intuitive and has some profound consequences if true. Among those is the prediction time dilation and length contraction.
The equations which come out of this application of the concept of invariance of physical laws in inertial frames of reference, when combined with Maxwell’s electro-magnetic equations, produce the famous “E=mc2″ formula. This was not what Einstein was driving for, but he immediately understood its significnance. It’s not completely accurate to say this, but basically special relativity is “special” because it excludes the effects of gravity and acceleration (which Einstein believed to be indistinguishable).
General Relativity was Einsteins attempt to show that the same concept hold true even when you take gravity and acceleration into account. Special Relativity is fairly understandable by most educated lay people. General Relativity is not. Much as Newton invented an entirely new form of math to pursue the expression of his Laws, Einstein did the same thing with General Relativity.
Dean,
no kidding re: difficulty copying things by hand on vellum. imagine the increased breadth of our history if we’d have managed to get on the ball and borrow/steal papermaking and the moveable type from china 500 years earlier.
i am vaguely aware of the efforts of irish monks. when i visited ireland 10 years ago, i remember passing through a (restored) church that had been ransacked and burned either by the vikings, british, or both, and they managed to destroy (of course) thousands of rare and priceless books in the monks’ library.
Dean:
Sorry, I didn’t directly address you questions about time and space.
One of the insights Einstein had in developing special relativity is that time cannot be separated entirely from space. He combined the two into a four-dimensional frame of reference he called “space-time.” This is frequently interpreted by people as saying that time is “just another dimension” and that’s not true. Even under Relativity, time is unique and has properties none of the other dimensions has, it is just WOVEN into the other dimensions at the most fundamental levels.
So under Einstein’s relativity theories, frames of reference INCLUDE time.
I’m not sure it is accurate, though, to say that there is no special frame of reference for time. Time is still special in relativity, and since time always has a DIRECTION, it is probably not fair to say that all frames of reference are equal for time.
But this is getting pretty esoteric and is starting to go beyond my comfort level. ;)
Zach: A quibble, the Chinese didn’t quite have movable type as we understand it. But they did have printing presses and with their pictograph-based writing had a rough equivalent, but real movable type was a European invention. Seriously though, too bad we didn’t have that a lot sooner.
Dean, are you sure movable type was a European invention?
I thought that was on Obama’s list of what the Muslim culture gave the world.
Dean,
they did actually invent moveable type. a printing press where characters of uniform size could be exchanged between printing runs. the fact that it wasn’t alphabetic is trivial. the wikipedia article has more.
zach:
This is the first time I heard that the Chinese were Muslim.
Who knew?
well…there are a significant number of chinese muslims…
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