Suggesting that we weren’t at the center of the universe and that years of careful modeling had to be thrown out the window wasn’t winning Galileo any friends, but it had less to do with stars and planets and more to do with heresy—or contradicting the Church and its doctrine. Galileo’s problems begin in 1611, a full sixty years after the death of “scientific” clockmaker Nicholas Kratzer. They end with his formal interrogation in 1633 (for eighteen days), the threat of torture, and house arrest, under which he died in 1642. The contest is often reduced to religion versus science, but it’s actually far more complicated and more interesting. The cosmos, like the nine-sided sundial, supported the unquestioned mechanism of order, but also of authority. The Inquisition expanded its scope of influence in part to assert its authority over the Protestant Reformation, which began when Martin Luther nailed his “Ninety-Five Theses” to a cathedral door. A few years later, Henry VIII asserted his own authority by abolishing the Catholic Church in England and becoming a rule unto himself. The struggle over who has the power to give orders and make rules informs the backstory of all the conflicts to follow, including the English Civil War, which cost King Charles I his head and ushered in Puritan rule, which itself ended in violence—some of it posthumous (Oliver Cromwell was exhumed so he could be hanged). Regardless of personal faith or conviction, the 1600s would have seemed out of order indeed, nothing stable, nothing secure.
We fear chaos. We should. It speaks of confusion, disorder, mayhem. Chaos seeped from diseased bodies and sloughed from rotten timbers, but with Galileo’s ideas came a chaotic threat to the very cosmos above, the dwelling of God, and all the systems that had been built upon their unchanging nature. Today, with our general understanding of a constantly expanding universe, with our quantum physics and string theory, our acceptance of earth’s insignificance in the vast reaches of space, it’s hard to imagine the earth-shattering effect of new knowledge. But consider again what it meant the first time you heard it, when you wrapped your child-mind around the idea that Earth hurtled through space at a 1,080 miles per hour—or that the sun, which appeared to rise and set, actually stood still as we spun around and around. Imagine the foundation of belief crumbling from beneath you, and not only you, but a whole generation. When the Copernican system finally supplanted the Ptolemaic, it required new visions, new mathematical models, new means of reproducing that original desire for precision. In the process, “magic numbers” took on new significance, and empirical evidence new meaning. But something else emerged at its very birth, and from the same grisly throes. A dark twin, a doubt: a dread that the world had no foundations after all, that even religion may be faulty and untrustworthy, crept forth with the first questions of the empirical mind. Who would order the universe afresh? The coded language of the cosmos would be deciphered by three men, independently: Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Together, they imposed an order never thought of before, making the heavens and the earth alike mathematically legible. The rest of this chapter follows these unlikely heroes of “new philosophy” on their quest to find order in the numbers, and a divine God within the Machine.
Of Gods and Machines
“Grandfather Clock is a creature of logic and precision [. . .] He allows neither change nor error.”
—S. M. Peters, Whitechapel Gods
In S. M. Peters’s modern steampunk novel Whitechapel Gods, the world isn’t running like clockwork, it’s run by clockwork—by Grandfather Clock, an austere, joyless, rule-keeper of logic and precision, and Mama Engine, whose creative, reproductive power is also fiery destruction. Oliver (the vaguely Dickensian hero of Peters’s novel) struggles against the Whitechapel Gods, but also against his own physical nature. A kind of steampunk loom-breaker, Oliver intends to bring the system down by use of his own body. The scene screams at us, visceral and violent: wires and spikes pierce Oliver’s flesh and coil under his ribs. This is communion with the “father,” and he “succumbed without struggle, though the relentless pounding wounded him in ways he did not know he could be damaged.”13 Oliver’s great achievement is also his great fear—he loses awareness of himself, even as he destroys his god in the wasteland district of Whitechapel.
Peters gets a great deal right about Victorian London. Grit and bleakness, the harbingers and consequence of industrialization, smudge each page. The novel begins with a quote by Arthur G. Morrison from 1889, who described Whitechapel during the time of Jack the Ripper as “a horrible black labyrinth [. . .] reeking from end to end with the vilest exhalations” and “swarming with human vermin, whose trade is robbery and whose recreation is murder.”14 And of course, there is the Ripper himself, death stalking the alleyways. Arthur Morrison compares London to Rome—not the well-ordered columns we tend to imagine, but Rome at its fall, decadent and dangerous. But the “oozing” streets of 1889 London might also be the excrement-crusted alleys more than a century earlier, when Jonathan Swift published “Description of a City Shower”:
Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell
What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell.
[. . .]
Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood. (ll. 53–56, 61–63)
Like many steampunk novels, Whitechapel Gods looks backward to the Victorians. We are used to thinking of technology and industry as beginning somewhere in the nineteenth century, but the roots of mechanism, application, engineering, and mathematics begin in the muck of the seventeenth century. Henry Power had it right; something was coming that would dramatically reorder everything, but that something required the city itself, with its consolidation of men and of power and resources. In Whitechapel Gods, the bounds of urbanity self-expand; city and mechanism “grow” wild like kudzu, into everything. Even people. Its “maze of beams” sprout like living things, creeping ever upward. But the real seventeenth-century city was likewise a generating engine, an idea machine: London, heaving in filth, gives birth to pristine ideas. And in some ways, pestilence itself helped science on its journey. As a result of the plague years, a young man with a lot on his mind would change the world forever. Isolated on an obscure family farm, Isaac Newton discovered calculus, the language for decoding the mysteries of God and discovering the order of his universe.
Myths have great power, and myths about men are of an equally deep and clinging kind. Today, we consider Newton a great rational figure, a first father of science who did away with irrational ideas by establishing grand order, impregnable laws, and unshakable mathematics. But Newton didn’t use math to turn religion on its head or to banish superstition; his aim was to prove God’s existence and to commune with the divine. Mathematics, science, technology were not considered ungodly. His ideas so influenced the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their skepticism that we forget he was, in fact, a near contemporary to Galileo and an ardent believer in God (though he, too, believed the earth went around the sun). Ptolemy may have established the gears of the universe as early as 100 C.E., but the concept of a clockwork universe didn’t specifically interest Newton. Quiet, solitary, unusual in his habits, and unique for his pinpoint focus, Newton was a code-breaker, not a clockmaker. To understand him, this man who sought to know the secrets of the heavens and the earth, we must first understand his inspiration. From our vantage point, Newton appears to stand apart, a lonely divinity of scientific reason. But Newton’s world wasn’t empty; the first scientific revolution had already begun, and, as he famously stated, he could stand on the shoulders of giants . . . including among them Galileo himself.*
Galileo may have ended in bad straits, but his career took up a much broader territory than just the Copernican dilemma. He was a gifted mathematician working on concepts of gravity, and proved that all objects (regardless of weight) fall at the same rate in a vacuum. Publication was the key to success, and Galileo unde
rstood, perhaps better than anyone at the time, that making bold claims required speed and presumption. As mathematics became the language not only for understanding the heavens, but also for the earth, it opened up whole new realities—and larger scope of influence. “No human investigation can be termed true science,” Leonardo da Vinci claimed in his Treatise on Painting, “if it is not capable of mathematical demonstration.” Math had once been thought a rather “mechanical” occupation (associated with grease and labor); now it approached the heavens. In 1609, Johannes Kepler made math his grand obsession; not only did he work out God’s mystic numbers in a complex blueprint, he also wrote fiction about it—a voyage to the moon long before Jules Verne conceived of any such thing.
In Men, Machines, and Modern Times, Elting Morison describes a “syndrome” that afflicts innovators, inventors, and solitary men of genius (and in the period before women were allowed an education or many other rights generally, the records do favor men). A surprising number of those who brought about great changes drank a good deal, were careless with money, and had troubled relationships.15 They were loners. They got kicked out of school. They mostly annoyed and badgered those around them, the subject of as much vicious and bitter rancor as of adulation. They fought systems, they rebelled against the status quo, and they generally had trouble making themselves understood. But the reason we’ve heard of these “heroes” involved one further characteristic. They were loud. Convinced of their own superiority or of the superiority of their ideas, they rushed to publish, even when publishing might be dangerous. Galileo’s pamphlet Starry Messenger about Tycho Brahe’s new nova acknowledged no one else but Copernicus and himself (something even Kepler thought was a bit unfair).16 Galileo hurried to publish because he knew others might be onto him. The star had been seen by much of the known world, and in fact a man named Thomas Harriot was hot on his heels. Discovery by “reason,” Galileo argued, “is like racing and not like hauling, and a single Arabian steed can outrun a hundred plowhorses.”17 Few people have heard of Harriot because it pays to be first—to be flamboyant, insistent, incessant—and, in Johannes Kepler’s case, obsessed, and possibly a bit unhinged.
Like Newton and Galileo, Kepler spent most of his life working over the heavens, but his start was far from stellar: premature, stricken with smallpox, chronic sores on his feet, and separated from his closest associates by a genius intellect and a bad temper.18 (According to Elting, the perfect concoction for greatness.) Kepler found his stride at the early age of twenty-four. It might be described as a religious experience; Kepler felt he’d discovered the secret truth behind the Copernican, sun-centered system, and in so doing, he had communed with his God. In mathematics, we are often asked to provide proofs. From Aristotle onward, the object, however, was to arrive at a priori. We have our own meanings for this, today, but for Aristotle, it meant: “reasoning from the one, true cause to an effect.”19 In other words, we begin with an assumption (assuming the sun goes around the earth, for instance) and then using this assumption, we ferret out the details. It’s easy to see why the mathematics of Ptolemy became so incredibly complicated; he was attempting to fit the math to the system he already assumed (wrongly) to be true. Tycho Brahe had his own stumbling block of assumption; he may have abandoned the original Aristotelian idea, but he never let go of the “truth” on a stationary earth. It’s a caution that even today many hold beliefs that they can accidentally bend theorums to fit. Kepler believed the earth moved around the sun, and he desperately wanted to know why. God did not leave anything to chance, and so, Kepler reasoned, there must be rules. The opening of Kepler’s first publication, The Sacred Mystery of the Universe, wastes no time is asserting its grand design: Quid mundus, quae causa Deo, ratioque creandi. Kepler himself would discover “what the world is like, that is, God’s cause and plan for creating it.”20
Kepler began his quest like an alchemist, manipulating numerology. Jupiter and Saturn orbited with a conjunction (a point where they aligned) at points that were 117 degrees apart. In other words, they would line up every time 117 degrees from where, on the zodiac circle, they appeared before. We can imagine it as a pie, a circle with a point at the top and then one on either side, as though an invisible triangle sat among them. Now imagine Kepler, alone, leaning fervently over a drafting table and marking one conjunction arrangement after another until he arrived at a circle with multiple dots, evenly spaced. Kepler’s awe blossomed from his slate and chalk, his heart thundering as connecting the dots formed beautiful triangles, and at the center of them, a new circle. A design, merely, but it offered Kepler a glimpse of heaven’s own language. There were six known planets; each of them had a shape in space—and the relation of their orbits in three dimensions corresponded, Kepler reasoned, to three-dimensional polyhedra (solids with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners).21 Certain that he’d pulled back a curtain and revealed the cogs and gears behind our reality, Kepler struggled to put his discoveries into a language others would understand. His diagrams grew, circles and triangles nestled in squares, then pentagons, then hexagons, each with a circle between. A bit like Kratzer’s sundials, he’d developed a system where each planetary orbit had its own shape, and all shapes could be mathematically presented. Kepler’s architecture of the universe was elegant, simple—but the numbers refused to add up. Desperate to save so elegant a theory, he suffered endless computations, and concluded with a model that fit every shape into a three-dimensional model, a soccer-ball universe, of sorts. To Kepler, it was beautiful: “No one ever produced a first work more deserving of admiration, more auspicious and, as far as its subject is concerned, more worthy.”22 Kepler’s book catapulted his career in astronomy, and he apprenticed to Tycho Brahe on the strength of his endeavors. Brahe offered the chance at delving yet deeper into God’s mysteries: offered, but didn’t entirely deliver. If Galileo proved the necessity of getting work first into print, Brahe was a master of the bluster it took to keep on top—and he guarded his secrets carefully. Kepler only attained them at his death, and then spent twenty years trying to crack, not God’s code, but Tycho’s. What he found opened a door in the world, a vault out of which “truth” came with yet more chaotic doubt. The geometric model and all its gleaming, angelic order was wrong again. But worse, the holy shape of the circle, a sign of perfection from time immemorial, was also wrong.
Kepler knew when to throw out systems that didn’t fit the data. That alone makes him unique—we have trouble doing that even today in our own lives. But consider that Kepler began his training as a theologian, that he was a mystic who believed in a magical code behind all things, and that his faith remained unshaken and unshakable throughout all his life. Kepler (and many of his contemporaries) believed geometry had been “inscribed on the human soul” when it was created.23 God meant humans to discover his mystic language, and Kepler ardently believed that mathematical truths, like moral laws, were part of mankind’s natural allotment, and also a sovereign responsibility. Kepler felt it was his duty to discover God’s plan for the world, and in a world of chaos, his commitment actually approximates a kind of stoic heroism. If there were no geniuses willing to take on this momentous task, Kepler would do it, to the glory of God. He does not fail in his designs, except in one way—in pressing for “true” answers, he accidentally finds them, and they are not at all what he expected. What Kepler ultimately contributes are his three laws of planetary movement, each one arriving like a fever dream on waking and captured through messy, deliberate, painful equation-making: that the orbits of the planets are ellipses and not circles; that the radius vector from sun to planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times; and that the square of a planet’s cycle period divided by the cube of its mean distance from the sun is a constant.24 That last one is the kicker; it offers a glimpse at exactly what kind of mental acrobatics Kepler was capable of sustaining—in brief, you choose one planet, multiply its orbit by itself three times, square the planet’s year, then divide the first answer by
the second. Never mind that most of us don’t have a reason to try: imagine the mental dexterity required to discover and refine it. But this, Kepler asserted, was the language of God. And thus all the more worth speaking.
In God’s Own Tongue
Nineteenth-century theologian George MacDonald speaks of heaven as a place where “all that is not music is silence.” Kepler spent his later years exploring math and mysticism, his genius consumed with numerology as he sought the distant harmonies of God’s vernacular. He died in 1630, his grave marked with an epitaph he penned for himself: “I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth/Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.” Death comes, but though Kepler’s body may never have left the stratosphere, his claims about the cosmic realm of his mental faculties are only slightly exaggerated. How else does man first get to those heavens if not by flights of fancy? One of Kepler’s first such “trips” is chronicled in the Somnium, or a dream of lunar astronomy. Born out of Kepler’s early interest in lunar geography (such as mountains on the moon), Somnium wouldn’t appear in print until three years after his death. Related as a “dream,” partly to get around potential claims of heresy, and partly to gloss over the enormity of what he attempts to describe, the book takes Kepler (recharacterized as young Duracotus) to the surface of the moon.†
As in the tradition of most science fiction, Kepler deals with the journey not “magically” but with complex discussions about where to land, how to handle the trajectory and orbits of both heavenly bodies, and even the difficulties of breathing on the journey. Duracotus and his guide hide in a cave on the lunar surface to protect them from the sun, and discover from the inhabitants that Lavania, as the moon is called, has two hemispheres: Subvolva and Privolva. Subvolva because the Earth (Volva) is always above the moon, and Privolva which never glimpsed the earth at all.25 Considering the massive climate shifts between dark and light sides, Kepler gives Lavinia mountains, caves and crevices, and bodies of water for the residents to hide in; he also gives them exaggerated size and short life spans, extrapolating from his understanding of the natural world on earth, but not replicating it. Kepler never lived to see it in print, but when it appeared, originally in Latin, few knew what to do with it. Like Tycho Brahe’s nova, the hovering star of Kepler’s “dream” offered something really and truly new: a mathematical mind turned loose on imagination, attempting to build worlds most could not imagine in a language that melded new philosophy (science), mythology, and faith. We would recognize it today as “science fiction.” It was the first time an astronomer would seek out (in fancy as well as fact) the geography of the moon—first, but not last.
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