In contrasting the conflicting meanings of these identical fakes in such radically different historical contexts, I can only recall Karl Marx’s famous opening line to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, his incisive essay on the rise to power of the vain and cynical Napoleon III after the revolution of 1848, in contrast with the elevated hopes and disappointments inspired by the original Napoleon. (The French revolutionary calendar had renamed the months and started time again at the establishment of the Republic. In this system, Napoleon’s coup d’état occurred on the eighteenth of Brumaire, a foggy month in a renamed autumn, of year VIII—or November 9, 1799. Marx, now justly out of fashion for horrors later committed in his name, remains a brilliant analyst of historical patterns.) Marx opened his polemical treatise by noting that all great events in history occur twice—the first time as tragedy, and the second as farce.
Beringer was a pompous ass, and his florid and convoluted phrases represent a caricature of true scholarship. Stall, he fell in the course of a great debate, using his limited talents to defend an inquiry that he loved and that even more pompous fools of his time despised—those who argued that refined people wouldn’t dirty their hands in the muck of mountains but would solve the world’s pressing issues under their wigs in their drawing rooms. Beringer characterized this opposition from the pseudo-elegant glitterati of his day:
They pursue [paleontology] with an especially censorious rod, and condemn it to rejection from the world of erudition as one of the wanton futilities of intellectual idlers. To what purpose, they ask, do we stare fixedly with eye and mind at small stones and figured rocks, at little images of animals or plants, the rubbish of mountain and stream, found by chance amid the muck and sand of land and sea?
He then defended his profession with the greatest of geological metaphors:
any [paleontologist], like David of old, would be able with one flawless stone picked from the bosom of Nature, to prostrate, by one blow on the forehead, the gigantic mass of objections and satires and to vindicate the honor of this sublime science from all its calumniators.
Beringer, to his misfortune and largely as a result of his own limitations, did not pick a “flawless stone,” but he properly defended the importance of paleontology and of empirical science in general. As a final irony, Beringer could not have been more wrong about the Lügensteine, but he couldn’t have been more right about the power of paleontology. Science has so revolutionized our view of reality since 1726 that we, in our current style of arrogance, can only regard the Würzburg Lügensteine as preposterous, because we unfairly impose our modern context and fail to understand Beringer’s world, including the deep issues that made his hoaxing a tragedy rather than a farce.
Our current reality features an unslayable Goliath of commercialism, and modern scientific Davids must make an honorable peace, for a slingshot cannot win this battle. I may be terribly old-fashioned (shades, I hope not, of poor Beringer)—but I continue to believe that such honor can only be sought in separation and mutual respect. Opportunities for increasing fusion with the world of commerce surround us with almost overwhelming temptation, for the immediate and palpable “rewards” are so great. So scientists go to work for competing pharmaceutical or computer companies, make monumental salaries, but cannot choose their topics of research or publish their work. And museums expand their gift shops to the size of their neglected exhibit halls, and purvey their dinosaurs largely for dollars in the form of images on coffee mugs and T-shirts, or by special exhibits, at fancy prices, of robotic models, built by commercial companies, hired for the show, and featuring, as their come-on, the very properties—mostly hideous growls and lurid colors—that leave no evidence in the fossil record and therefore remain a matter of pure conjecture to science.
I am relieved that Sue the Tyrannosaurus, sold at auction by Sotheby’s for more than 8 million dollars, will go to Chicago’s Field Museum and not to the anonymity of some corporate boardroom, to stand (perhaps) next to a phony Van Gogh. But I am not happy that no natural history museum in the world can pony up the funds for such a purpose—and that McDonald’s had to provide the cash. McDonald’s is not, after all, an eleemosynary institution, and they will legitimately want their piece for their price. Will it be the Happy Meal Hall of Paleontology at the Field Museum? (Will we ever again be able to view a public object with civic dignity, unencumbered by commercial messages? Must city buses be fully painted as movable ads, lampposts smothered, taxis festooned, even seats in concert halls sold one by one to donors and embellished in perpetuity with their names on silver plaques?) Or will we soon see Sue the Robotic Tyrannosaur—the purchase of the name rather than the thing, for Sue’s actual skeleton cannot improve the colors or sounds of the robots, and her value, in this context, lies only in the recognition of her name (and the memory of the dollars she attracted), not in her truly immense scientific worth.
I am neither an idealist nor a Luddite in this matter. I just feel that the world of commerce and the world of intellect, by their intrinsic natures, must pursue different values and priorities—while the commercial world looms so much larger than our domain that we can only be engulfed and destroyed if we make a devil’s bargain of fusion for short-term gain. The worth of fossils simply cannot be measured in dollars. But the Lügensteine of Marrakech can only be assessed in this purely symbolic way—for the Moroccan fakes have no intellectual value and can bring only what the traffic (and human gullibility) will bear. We cannot possibly improve upon Shakespeare’s famous words for this sorry situation—and this ray of hope for the honor and differences of intellect over cash:
Who steals my purse steals trash …
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
But we must also remember that these words are spoken by the villainous Iago, who will soon make Othello a victim, by exploiting the Moor’s own intemperance, of the most poignant and tragic deception in all our literature. Any modern intellectual, to avoid Beringer’s sad fate, must hold on to the dream—while keeping a cold eye on immediate realities. Follow your bliss, but remember that handkerchiefs can be planted for evil ends and fossils carved for ready cash.
2
The
Sharp-Eyed Lynx,
Outfoxed by Nature
I. GALILEO GALILEI AND THE THREE GLOBES OF SATURN
IN 1603, FEDERICO CESI, THE DUKE OF ACQUASPARTA, founded an organization that grew from uncertain beginnings to become the first scientific society in modern European history. Cesi (1585–1630), a teenaged nobleman, invited three slightly older friends (all in their mid-twenties) to establish the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynxes), dedicated to scientific investigation (“reading this great, true, and universal book of the world,” to cite Cesi’s own words), and named for a sleek and wily carnivore, then still living in the forests of Italy and renowned in song and story for unparalleled sight among mammals.
The legend of the sharp-eyed lynx had arisen in ancient times and persisted to Cesi’s day. Pliny’s canonical compendium of natural history had called the lynx “the most clear sighted of all quadrupeds.” Plutarch had embellished the legend by speaking of “the lynx, who can penetrate through trees and rocks with its sharp sight.” And Galen, ever the comparative anatomist, had written: “We would seem absurdly weak in our powers of vision if we compared our sight to the acuity of the lynx or the eagle.” (I have translated these aphorisms directly from Conrad Gesner’s 1551 compendium on mammals, the standard source for such information in Cesi’s day.)
The official emblem of Europe’s first scientific society, the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynxes), founded in 1603 and including Galileo as an early member.
Still, despite Cesi’s ambitious names and aims, the academy of four young men faltered at first. Cesi’s father made a vigorous attempt to stop his son’s foolishness, and the four Lynxes all dispersed to their native cities, kee
ping their organization alive only by the uncertain media of post and messages. But Cesi persevered and triumphed (for a time), thanks to several skills and circumstances. He acquired more power and prestige, both by growing up and by inheriting substantial wealth. Most importantly, he became a consummate diplomat and facilitator within the maximally suspicious and labyrinthine world of civil and ecclesiastical politics in Rome during the Counter-Reformation. The Lynxes flourished largely because Cesi managed to keep the suspicions of popes and cardinals at bay, while science prepared to fracture old views of the cosmos, and to develop radically new theories about the nature of matter and causation.
As a brilliant administrator, Cesi knew that he needed more clout among the membership of the Lynxes. He therefore recruited, as the fifth and sixth members of an organization that would eventually reach a roster of about thirty, two of the most prestigious thinkers and doers of early-seventeenth-century life. In 1610, he journeyed to Naples, where he persuaded the senior spokesman of the fading Neoplatonic school—the seventy-five-year-old Giambattista Della Porta—to join a group of men young enough to be his grandsons. Then, in 1611, Cesi made his preeminent catch, when he recruited the hottest intellectual property in the Western world, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), to become the sixth member of the Lynxes.
The year before, in 1610, Galileo had provided an ultimate proof for the cliché that good things come in small packages by publishing Sidereus nuncius (Starry messenger)—little more than a pamphlet really, but containing more oomph per paragraph than anything else ever achieved in the history of science or printing. Galileo shook the earth by turning his newly invented telescope upon the cosmos and seeing the moon as a planet with mountains and valleys, not as the perfect sphere required by conventional concepts of science and theology. Galileo also reported that thousands of previously invisible stars build the Milky Way, thus extending the cosmos beyond any previously conceivable limit; and that four moons orbit Jupiter, forming a miniature world analogous to the motion of planets around a central body. Moreover, Galileo pointed out, if satellites circle planets, then the crystalline spheres, supposedly marking the domain of each planet, and ordered as a set of concentric shells around the central earth, could not exist—for the revolution of moons would shatter these mystical structures of a geometrically perfect, unsullied, and unchanging cosmos, God’s empyrean realm.
But Galileo also made some errors in his initial survey, and I have always been struck that standard books on the history of astronomy, written in the heroic or hagiographical mode, almost never mention (or relegate to an awkward footnote) the most prominent of Galileo’s mistakes—for the story strikes me as fascinating and much more informative about the nature of science, and of creativity in general, than any of his valid observations.
Galileo also focused his telescope on Saturn, the most distant of the visible planets—and he saw the famous rings. But he could not properly visualize or interpret what he had observed, presumably because his conceptual world lacked the requisite “space” for such a peculiar object (while his telescope remained too crude to render the rings with enough clarity to force his mind, already benumbed by so many surprises, to the most peculiar and unanticipated conclusion of all).
The stymied Galileo looked and looked, and focused and focused, night after night. He finally interpreted Saturn as a threefold body, with a central sphere flanked by two smaller spheres of equal size, each touching the main planet. Following a common custom of the day—established to preserve claims of priority while not revealing preliminary conclusions ripe for theft by others—Galileo encoded his interpretation as a Latin anagram, which he posted to his friend and leading compatriot in astronomical research, Johannes Kepler.
Kepler may have matched Galileo in brilliance, but he never resolved the anagram correctly, and he misinterpreted the message as a statement about the planet Mars. In frustration (and a bit of pique), he begged Galileo for the answer. His colleague replied with the intended solution:
Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi.
[I have observed that the farthest planet is threefold.]
I regard the last word of Galileo’s anagram as especially revealing. He does not advocate his solution by stating “I conjecture,” “I hypothesize,” “I infer,” or “It seems to me that the best interpretation …” Instead, he boldly writes “observavi”—I have observed. No other word could capture, with such terseness and accuracy, the major change in concept and procedure (not to mention ethical valuation) that marked the transition to what we call “modern” science. An older style (as found, for example, in Gesner’s compendium on mammals, cited above) would not have dishonored a claim for direct observation, but would have evaluated such an argument as a corroborative afterthought, surely secondary in weight to such criteria as the testimony of classical authors and logical consistency with a conception of the universe “known” to be both true and just—in other words, to authority and fixed “reasonableness.”
But the new spirit of skepticism toward past certainty, coupled with respect for “pure” and personal observation—then being stressed by Francis Bacon in England, René Descartes in France, and the Lynxes in Italy—was sweeping through the intellectual world, upsetting all standard procedures of former times and giving birth to the modern form of an institution now called “science.” Thus, Galileo supported his theory of Saturn with the strongest possible claim of the new order, the one argument that could sweep aside all opposition by claiming a direct, immediate, and unsullied message from nature. Galileo simply said: I have observed it; I have seen it with my own eyes. How could old Aristotle, or even the present pope himself, deny such evidence?
I do not intend, in this essay, to debunk the usual view that such a transition from old authority to direct observation marks a defining (and wonderfully salutary) event in the history of scientific methodology. But I do wish to note that all great mythologies include harmful simplicities amidst their genuine reforms—and that these negative features often induce the ironic consequence of saddling an original revolutionary doctrine with its own form of restrictive and unquestioned authority. The idea that observation can be pure and unsullied (and therefore beyond dispute)—and that great scientists are, by implication, people who can free their minds from the constraints of surrounding culture and reach conclusions strictly by untrammeled experiment and observation, joined with clear and universal logical reasoning—has often harmed science by turning the empiricist method into a shibboleth. The irony of this situation fills me with a mixture of pain for a derailed (if impossible) ideal and amusement for human foibles—as a method devised to undermine proof by authority becomes, in its turn, a species of dogma itself. Thus, if only to honor the truism that liberty requires eternal vigilance, we must also act as watchdogs to debunk the authoritarian form of the empiricist myth—and to reassert the quintessentially human theme that scientists can work only within their social and psychological contexts. Such an assertion does not debase the institution of science, but rather enriches our view of the greatest dialectic in human history: the transformation of society by scientific progress, which can only arise within a matrix set, constrained, and facilitated by society.
I know no better illustration of this central principle than the tale of Galileo’s losing struggle with Saturn, for he insisted on validation by pure sight (observavi), and he could never see his quarry correctly—presumably because his intellectual domain included no option for rings around a planet. Galileo did not just “see” Saturn; he had to interpret an object in his lens by classifying an ambiguous shape (the best that his poor optics could provide) within the structure of his mental space—and rings didn’t inhabit this interior world.
The great Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens finally recognized the rings of Saturn in 1656, more than a decade after Galileo’s death. Galileo, who had wrestled mightily with Saturn, never moved beyond his trigeminal claim, and finally gave up and turned to other pursuits. In his
1613 book on sunspots, published by the Lynxes (with the author designated on the title page as Galileo Galilei Linceo), he continued to insist that Saturn must be threefold because he had so observed the planet: “I have resolved not to put anything around Saturn except what I have already observed and revealed—that is, two small stars which touch it, one to the east and one to the west.” Against a colleague who interpreted the planet as oblong, Galileo simply asserted his superior vision. The colleague, Galileo wrote, had viewed Saturn less often and with a much poorer telescope, “where perfection is lacking, [and] the shape and distinction of the three stars imperfectly seen. I, who have observed it a thousand times at different periods with an excellent instrument, can assure you that no change whatever is to be seen in it.”
Yet just as Galileo prepared his book on sunspots for publication, he observed Saturn again after a hiatus of two years—and the two side planets had disappeared (a situation produced, we now know, when the planet’s changing orientation presents the rings directly on edge—that is, as an invisible line in Galileo’s poor telescope). The stunned Galileo, reduced to a most uncharacteristic modesty, had just enough time to make an addition to the last chapter of his book. He abjured nothing about his previous observations or about the righteousness of the empirical method in general. He merely confessed his puzzlement, making a lovely classical allusion to the primary myth about the planet’s eponym:
I had discovered Saturn to be three-bodied…. When I first saw them they seemed almost to touch, and they remained so for almost two years without the least change. It was reasonable to believe them to be fixed…. Hence I stopped observing Saturn for more than two years. But in the past few days I returned to it and found it to be solitary, without its customary supporting stars, and as perfectly round and sharply bounded as Jupiter. Now what can be said of this strange metamorphosis? That the two lesser stars have been consumed? … Has Saturn devoured his children? Or was it indeed an illusion and a fraud with which the lenses of my telescope deceived me for so long—and not only me, but many others who have observed it with me? … I need not say anything definite upon so strange and unexpected an event; it is too recent, too unparalleled, and I am restrained by my own inadequacy and the fear of error.
The Lying Stones of Marrakech Page 4