subliminal indoctrination, it is hard for us to imagine the frightening
disorientation that Copernicus’s theory produced in the minds of his
contemporaries. I’m not sure what the equivalent theory would be
today, but its author might be ridiculed as a New Age flake, dismissed
as a dreamer or pitied as a babbling, delusional acid casualty. It would
have to be a theory that suggested that much of our shared reality is
illusory. Copernicus took contemporary common-sense conceptions
(about “the world,” the Sun, up and down, the human place in the
grand scheme, and what it means simply to stand still and watch the
stars), turned them on their head, and sent them spinning.
Because it sparked a complete shift in worldview that has long since
been accepted by all but a few Flat Earthers and Republican senators
and was the first step in a drastic descoping of human importance and
influence in the universe, De Revolutionibus is a good candidate for
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Most Radical Book Ever Written. Copernicus himself never had to deal
with the upheaval caused by his revolution. He received the first
printed copy of his new book in May 1543, on the day he died.*
Astronomers didn’t immediately embrace the new system of
Copernicus. It didn’t actually do a good job of predicting the motions
of the planets—supposedly its major selling point. That was because
Copernicus, like Aristotle nineteen hundred years before him and every
philosopher in between, assumed that all shapes and paths in the heav-
ens were drawn in circles. In the Copernican system, the Sun occupied
the exact center of perfectly round concentric orbits on which Earth
and the other planets traveled. And so it remained, until a mad scientist
named Kepler came along and squished those circular orbits into oval-
shaped ellipses.
L O V E 2 2 A N D K E P L E R ’ S L A W S
Johannes Kepler was a late-sixteenth-century philosopher/freak who
walked the fine line between genius and delusion. He had a lifelong
conviction that a secret, simple mathematical order lay hidden just
beneath the confusing, chaotic surface of the universe. He found it hard
to find steady work and, like many astronomers of his day, kept a day
job as a court astrologer, casting fortunes for the rich and famous.†
With a seamless blend of mysticism and science he pursued his search
for the numerological and geometrical designs of creation.
The more I learn about Kepler’s actual life and work, as opposed to
the filtered version we are taught (and then teach) in Astronomy 101,
the more he reminds me of guys like Love 22. When I was in college
in Providence, this jovial crazy person named Love 22 hung around
Thayer Street preaching the gospel of the number 22 to all who would
listen. He lived in a red-white-and-blue converted school bus, and
though his material possessions were few, he knew the secret of cos-
mic harmony and wisdom. It all had to do with the number 22.
Wearing his trademark Uncle Sam uniform, he handed out $22 dollar
bills and showed how the number 22 is hidden in the names of presi-
dents, prophets, and all phrases of spiritual wisdom. He ran a perpet-
*In 1686, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle wrote of Copernicus’s death, “He didn’t want to rebut all the contradictions he foresaw, and he skillfully withdrew from the affair.”
†Today we just write grant proposals.
Spirits from the Vasty Deep
11
ual campaign for president and governor, on the Love 22 ticket (Love
for Gov!). Love was quite the comedian but he seemed sincere. My
friends and I thought that he was rather sweet and enjoyed talking to
him.*
There is only one Love, but there are many like him. There is a person-
ality type—and you’ve got to have it to go in for this kind of existence—
that is remarkably impervious to the fact that virtually everyone thinks
you’re out of your mind. These self-appointed misunderstood geniuses are
convinced they’ve discovered some system of knowledge that humanity
needs. I’ve met them handing out pamphlets in cafés in San Francisco,
Tucson, Providence, Cambridge, Boulder, Ann Arbor, and Madison, trad-
ing wisdom for cash to buy food or wine or to Xerox more pamphlets.
Often, more than money, they want a sympathetic ear. An earnest fellow
in Boston once showed me mathematically detailed plans for faster-than-
light starships and time machines.
Because I’ve published articles in popular-astronomy magazines, I get
letters from people all around the world with elaborate theories of
everything. I don’t throw them out. I keep them in a file labeled Kook.
Maybe somewhere in the kook files of the world’s astronomy writers is
an obscure tract containing the seeds of the next Copernican revolu-
tion. Kepler, the father of planetary physics, if he were alive today,
might well be living in a converted school bus on the outskirts of some
college town peddling mystical pamphlets, living off donations, and
spouting cosmic wisdom to anyone who would listen.
Kepler is a missing link between the two modern sources of belief in
aliens. The man who worked out the mathematical laws of planetary
motion was motivated largely by a desire to cast more accurate horo-
scopes. Today, two separate strains of believers about alien life coexist
in our culture: rationalist scientific followers of SETI (the Search for
ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) and mystical, New Age UFO believers.
The roots of science and pseudoscience are completely intertwined in
Kepler’s work. Like a modern scientist, he was seeking the simple pat-
terns underlying apparently complex phenomena. Like a modern New
Ager he was obsessed with numerological coincidences and convinced
they had cosmic significance.
*I hadn’t heard of him in, well, nearly twenty-two years, but today, thinking about Kepler, I searched for Love on the Web and learned that he’s in Key West, still doing his 22 bit with what seems to be a larger comedy factor than I remember.
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L o n e l y P l a n e t s
Kepler believed in the Copernican system, for reasons that were
essentially mystical. The Sun should be at the center of everything, he
felt, because it is the symbol of God and the source of heat and light. In
his restless, obsessive quest to explain the proportions and motions of
the planetary orbits, he crafted innumerable schemes, most of which
seem today to be elaborate, colorful nonsense. He wondered why there
were six planets (Earth plus the five visible to the unaided eye). He
wanted to find the significance of this number and an explanation for
the five distance intervals between the planets, a simple geometry that
would make it all fit together and reveal the plan of the creator. At age
twenty-four, in a fit of inspiration, he thought he found the answer.
He seized upon the fact that there are five “perfect solids” (pyramid,
cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron) and also (get this)
five unexplained distances between the planets. Coincidence? He didn’t
think so. He constructed a model of the solar system with the five per-
fect solids stacked tightly inside one another, like a cubist set of Russian
dolls. When he discovered that the relative sizes of the shapes in this
model are exactly the same as the size ratios of the planetary orbits, it
blew him away. This was the secret structure to the universe he had
been searching for. “The delight that I took in my discovery,” he wrote,
“I shall never be able to describe in words.”
Today Kepler’s solar system model, like most of his other discoveries,
is seen as a wacky and amusing dead end. Yet, Kepler considered this
model, not “Kepler’s laws” that we teach in every astronomy course
today, to be his greatest achievement. This design for the solar system
and the rush he got from its discovery inspired a lifelong, and ulti-
mately successful, quest for the laws of planetary motion. Though his
genius was profligate, undisciplined, and borderline crazy, his keen
intellect was less bound by convention than that of his contemporaries.
Kepler was bothered by the failure of the Sun-centered solar system
model to predict planetary motions accurately. The planet Mars, in par-
ticular, strayed from the sky path prescribed for it by the Copernican
model. In his determination to save the Copernican system, Kepler tried
innumerable mathematical schemes to make it work, often obsessing
maniacally for months on a new idea, only to toss it out and start on
another. Finally, in a classic example of out-of-the-box thinking (in this
case the box is round), he calculated the motions that Mars would
exhibit if its orbit were not circular but egg-shaped, elliptical. Eureka!
Spirits from the Vasty Deep
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Image unavailable for
electronic edition
Suddenly it all worked. Mars and the other planets moved exactly as
predicted once Kepler liberated them from Aristotelian circles and
allowed them to follow elliptical paths in a Sun-centered system.
It worked. But was it real? Were the planets—Earth among them—
really moving around the Sun in this manner? Could our world, our
rock-solid, all-encompassing Earth, truly belong to the same class of
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objects as those ethereal little lights roving the night sky? The answer
was not long in coming.
T H R O U G H T H E L O O K I N G G L A S S
In January 1610, Galileo Galilei swung his crude telescope skyward,
smashing the perfect, crystalline celestial spheres of Aristotle,* and
knocking the Earth off its immobile, biblically enshrined pedestal.
Galileo’s early observations of Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon were nails
sealing the coffin of the pre-Copernican worldview.
Studying Venus, Galileo saw what anyone with a small backyard
telescope and the patience to watch for a few months can see today: the
evening star is approaching and receding from Earth. He realized that
Venus is shining by reflected sunlight and, from Earth’s perspective,
passing alternately in front of and behind the Sun. This only makes
sense if Venus and Earth are both traveling around the Sun.
Turning his glass toward Jupiter, Galileo discovered that the giant
planet was attended by four tiny companions that tag along on its
orbit, rearranging themselves night after night. He had found the
moons of Jupiter, the first new worlds. The existence of moons orbiting
Jupiter showed that not everything travels around the Earth. This
spelled doom for the old Earth-centered cosmos of Aristotle.
The surface of our Moon, viewed through Galileo’s telescope, dis-
played a complex topography of shadows, pits, and mountains. This
was not the flawless, smooth sphere required by Aristotle’s dichotomy
between a perfect, spiritual celestial realm and an imperfect Earth. The
Moon’s “flaws” suggested to Galileo that it was a world like Earth.
Suddenly, it didn’t seem at all preposterous that the other planets might
be Earth-like. The abstract Copernican universe became real. Galileo
concluded that the other planets are worlds, and that “the world”—our
Earth—is merely one of many planets circling the Sun.
Galileo caught hell from the Church. In what has become a modern
myth of science’s collision with biblical authority, he was brought
before the Inquisition, forced to recant his Copernican beliefs, and lived
out his days under house arrest.
*Aristotle’s spheres were made of crystal because they had to be solid to hold up the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars, yet transparent since we can see through them.
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P L A N E T - H O P P I N G J E S U S
Largely because Aristotle was invulnerable, early Christian scholars
almost unanimously denied the existence of other worlds that might be
occupied by rational beings. In the tale of Genesis, God creates the
Earth for human habitation, and other worlds are not mentioned at all.
Like hand in glove, this human-centered narrative fits snugly into
Aristotle’s cosmos in which perfect, untouchable heavens envelop an
Earth that is unique, central, separate, stationary, and inferior.
Furthermore, the possibility of intelligent creatures on other worlds
presented paradoxes for anthropocentric Christianity. If Jesus died for
our sins alone, would intelligent aliens on other planets be damned by
his neglect? Or are they free from sin? If so, why did we get such a raw
deal? If not, was Christ a planet-hopper who managed to be incarnated
on all such worlds?
St. Augustine, widely recognized as one of the greatest thinkers of
Christian antiquity, argued that if other worlds were inhabited by
humanlike creatures, each would need a Savior, which was impossible
because Christ was singular. Several scholars, however, found clever
loopholes through which to admit intelligent extraterrestrials into a
Christian universe. The most common argument was that other worlds
would not need a redeemer because mankind’s sin was so original.
More specifically, aliens could not be sons of Adam and did not inherit
his sin, so they were off the hook.
Aristotle’s hold on the Christian imagination began to loosen when
some scholars pointed out that a universe with only one world implied
limits on the creative powers of God. In 1277, Etienne Tempier, the
bishop of Paris, issued a proclamation declaring Aristotle’s terrestrial/
celestial dichotomy a heresy. This precipitated a sea change in attitudes
toward other worlds and alien life. Many Christian scholars began
breaking from Aristotle, and numerous treatises were published argu-
ing that God could make as many worlds as he damn well pleased. He
is, after all, God.
Was the existence of alien life forbidden by the uniqueness of Christ’s
incarnation or required by God’s omnipotence? In 1440 Nicholas of
Cusa, a German ecclesiastic, wrote Of Learned Ignorance, a widely cel-
ebrated book that exuberantly rejected Aristotle’s hierarchical, Earth-
centered cosmology, advocating in its plac
e a universe bustling with life
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on every star. But Cusa was not scorned by the Church hierarchy for his
belief in life elsewhere. On the contrary, after writing Of Learned
Ignorance Cusa was made a cardinal. So why did the Church celebrate
Cusa and, 150 years later, condemn Galileo?
There are several reasons. First, Galileo was somewhat of a tactless
boor—a quality often left out of the Galileo myth—and his obnoxious-
ness helped seal his fate. Perhaps if he had put the right spin on his new
discoveries, Rome would have showered him with praise and rejoiced
in the addition of new worlds to God’s creation. Instead, he seemed to
go out of his way to piss off the Church authorities with his know-it-all
comments on Scripture. He might have fared better if he had kept a lid
on it and not told the clerics how to interpret the Bible.
In his Dialogue concerning the two Chief World Systems (1632),
Galileo popularized his findings and proselytized for Copernicanism. In
this book, the character who played the role of doubting the
Copernican system was a pompous ass with the unflattering name
Simplicio. In an impolitic move that well illustrates his arrogance,
Galileo had Simplicio give voice to the anti-Copernican views of Pope
Urban VIII, mirroring the pope’s words so closely that His Holiness
became convinced that Simplicio was created to mock him. The infuri-
ated pope was all too eager to preside over Galileo’s sentencing.
Galileo was also a victim of bad timing. He challenged authority at a
time when the Church was threatened by the Reformation. Even worse,
Galileo’s world-shaking telescopic discoveries were made before heretic
monk Giordano Bruno’s ashes had cooled. Bruno, a Dominican friar
who was condemned and burned at the stake in Rome on February 17,
1600, believed in an infinite cosmos filled with life virtually every-
where—on planets, stars, meteors, you name it. He is often mentioned
in the same breath with Galileo as another martyr for Copernicanism
and science in general. In reality, his colorful advocacy of other worlds
and alien life was seen by his persecutors as a minor offense compared
to his sorcery, pantheism, and denial of Christ’s divinity. Bruno was
murdered by the Church, first and foremost, for espousing superstitious
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