Galileo

by Mario Livio

  If you think about it for a moment, how is it even possible not to consider science as an integral part of the human culture and intellectual heritage? Science is, after all, a realm in which one can point to unambiguous progress. It would be difficult to argue convincingly that, say, art today is distinctly superior to Renaissance art, or that Sappho’s poetry was clearly inferior to that of Emily Dickinson. On the other hand, life expectancy in England in the seventeenth century was about thirty-five years, while now, mainly as a result of undertakings emerging from science, it is (averaging over women and men) about eighty-one. Or take the fact that Galileo was the first person to characterize correctly features on the lunar surface, while by now a dozen astronauts have walked on the surface of the Moon. Similarly, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, whose life partly overlapped with Galileo’s, established microbiology as a scientific discipline and identified microbes as new species. Since then, however, millions of biological species have been fully characterized. Finally, whereas Galileo was accused that his investigations into the nature of matter conflicted with biblical descriptions, today’s particle physicists have managed to discover all the basic constituents of ordinary matter. And this list of scientific achievements just goes on and on, with incredible advances made both in the exploration of the physical and biological microcosms and the cosmic macrocosm. Isn’t this progress an essential part of just one human culture?

  Imagine that we had to communicate now with an alien superior Galactic civilization. What would be a succinct way to convey to them (assuming that they could understand us) the intellectual and technological levels of our civilization? Believe it or not, one interesting and relatively straightforward method would be to simply inform them that we have succeeded in detecting gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes. Why would this seemingly esoteric topic provide such a powerful and informative statement? Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time produced by large accelerations, such as those created in the case of two neutron stars or two black holes that are spiraling toward each other. These waves were predicted to exist in Einstein’s theory of general relativity—a theory that changed the description of gravity from a mysterious force that acts across distance to one representing the curvature of space-time. That is, just as a heavy object causes a trampoline to sag, masses (such as the Sun or a black hole) warp space-time in their vicinity. When those masses accelerate, the disturbance propagates as ripples. On the theoretical side, therefore, informing an alien civilization that we know about gravitational waves communicates immediately the status of our understanding of the nature of space-time, a crucial element in the evolution of our universe. The fact that we have managed even to detect these gravitational waves conveys an immediate status report on our technological prowess, since the ability to detect these extraordinarily weak ripples is nothing short of miraculous. Basically, the gravitational wave researchers sensed a wave that stretched space-time by 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That is, this wave made the entire Earth expand and contract by about the width of an atomic nucleus.

  There surely aren’t many people who don’t acknowledge that scientific progress has been responsible for many of the improvements in the quality of our everyday lives. Unfortunately, the achievements in the humanities don’t always receive the respect they deserve—a phenomenon that would have undoubtedly upset Galileo.

  The contribution of the humanities to our ability to imagine even things that don’t exist, to human creativity, and to the development and evolution of the human language, with all of its associated ramifications in communication, cannot be overemphasized. Philosophy, soul-searching, and religion have helped humans in the construction of a moral framework. Still, there are those who instead of fostering a partnership between the sciences and the humanities—one which takes advantage of the assets that each domain has to offer—insist instead that the sciences and the humanities should strive for a hermetically separate coexistence. These “separatists” call for clear (if somewhat porous) borders. In my humble opinion, while certainly there are important differences in the subjects, styles, and practices of the two domains, the recognition that both the humanities and the sciences are integral parts of one human culture must come from both sides.

  This conclusion becomes particularly obvious when we realize that a few of the most fundamental questions that humans have ever posed, have crossed, over the millennia, first the boundary between religion and philosophy, and later, the border between philosophy and science. I am referring in particular to questions related to origins: How did the universe begin? How was the Earth formed? How did life on Earth start? How did consciousness emerge? These, as well as perhaps the even bigger question of Why does the universe exist?—or, as it is sometimes phrased, Why is there something rather than nothing?—are now widely recognized (although unfortunately not by all) as belonging to the science domain. More important, science has already provided at least partial answers to some of these questions.

  For example, we now know that our universe started about 13.8 billion years ago, from an extremely hot and dense state, commonly known as the big bang. We can almost determine the age of the universe with a higher precision than we can determine the age of a living person. We know that the Sun formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a cloud of gas and dust, and that the Earth formed through the coalescence of dust particles in the flat disk that formed around the Sun, and so on. Just as Galileo predicted, much of our picture of the world is based not on vague, qualitative descriptions but on detailed mathematical models and numerical simulations.

  These facts only increase the urgency of fighting illiteracy on all fronts, the scientific and the humanistic. In the same way that everyone should at least have the opportunity to be exposed, for instance, to a few of Shakespeare’s plays, or the writings of Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lu Min, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, he or she should also be aware that the world is governed by certain laws of nature, and that there is compelling evidence that these laws apply to the entire observable universe, and they don’t appear to change with time.

  As you may recall, Galileo objected vehemently to any type of compartmentalization, be it of different branches of science or even between the sciences and mathematics or the arts. He regarded such hermetic separations as “no less foolish than that of a certain physician who, moved by a fit of spleen, said that the great doctor Acquapendente [the sixteenth-century Italian surgeon Girolamo Fabrizio], being a famous anatomist and surgeon, should content himself to remain among his scalpels and ointments without trying to effect cures by medicine.” Galileo would have undoubtedly resisted any attempt to exclude either the humanities or the sciences from being an indispensable part of human culture. The point is that human culture is diverse. The essence of this fact has been captured in one sentence by University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum, when she said: “Education needs to impart skills of critical thinking, and it needs to cultivate the imagination.” These are indeed the crucial elements provided by the sciences and the humanities. Science attempts to explain and predict the universe. Literature and the arts provide our emotional response to it. Concepts such as freedom of thought emerge from the fusion of these disciplines. Galileo understood centuries ago that humans need both the humanities and the sciences. It is fitting that Galileo—one of the greatest scientists in history—has been immortalized in so many works of art (Figure 12 in the color insert shows a bust of Galileo by Carlo Marcellini). That is why, perhaps, the last words Bertolt Brecht put in the mouth of the blind astronomer in the play Life of Galileo were the poignant, “What’s the night like?”

  Figure 1. The Tribuna di Galileo in the Science Museum “La Specola,” Florence. The statue of Galileo is by Aristodemo Costoli. The frescoes were painted by Luigi Sabatelli (1772–1850). From left to right they show Galileo observing the lamp in the Cathedral of Pisa, Galileo presenting his tele
scope to the Venetian Senate, and the old and blind Galileo conversing with his disciples.

  Figure 2. The earliest known portrait of Galileo, from the last decade of the sixteenth century. Painted by an unknown Tuscan artist. Painting is in the private collection of Florentine art collector Alessandro Bruschi.

  Figure 3. Two of Galileo’s original telescopes. He designed and constructed these telescopes in his own workshop.

  Figure 4. One of Galileo’s telescope objective lenses (at the center), which he produced in late 1609 to early 1610 and used for many observations. The frame was made by Vittorio Crosten in 1677. Located at the Galileo Museum, Florence.

  Figure 5. Detail of the fresco in the Pauline Chapel of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Painted by Cigoli (Lodovico Cardi; 1559–1613). The Moon on which the Virgin stands is pockmarked with craters, as it had been revealed in Galileo’s observations.

  Figure 6. “Earthrise,” a photo of the Earth and a part of the lunar surface, taken on December 24, 1968, aboard Apollo 8 by astronaut Bill Anders from lunar orbit. Galileo was the first to show that the lunar surface was rugged, like the face of the Earth, and also the first to understand that light reflected from the Earth brightens the lunar night.

  Figure 7. Draft of a letter by Galileo to Leonardo Donato, Doge of Venice, with notes on the satellites of Jupiter. This is the earliest surviving record of Galileo’s observations of Jupiter.

  Figure 8. Galileo at an old age with his disciple and biographer Vincenzo Viviani. Viviani assisted Galileo from 1639 till Galileo’s death in 1642 while he was under house arrest at his villa in Arcetri, near Florence. Painting by Tito Lessi (1858–1917).

  Figure 9. A bust of Galileo by Giovanni Battista Foggini (1652–1725) on the facade of Viviani’s house in Florence. Two large inscriptions glorifying Galileo’s life flank the front entrance and give the house its current name: Palazzo dei Cartelloni, Cartelloni meaning “Billboards.” Viviani turned the facade of his house into a memorial for Galileo.

  Figure 11. The author in front of Galileo’s tomb at the Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence. The tomb is located opposite that of Michelangelo. It was designed by Giulio Foggini.

  Figure 10. Index finger, thumb of right hand, and a tooth of Galileo, which were detached from his body when his remains were moved in 1737. These remains are housed in the Galileo Museum.

  Figure 12. Bust of Galileo by Carlo Marcellini (1644–1713), Galileo Museum, Florence.

  Acknowledgments

  I am deeply indebted to many people and institutions who helped me bring this project to fruition. I would like to thank the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy, and its staff for their kind hospitality. I am grateful to the museum’s director, Paolo Galluzzi, and vice director, Filippo Camerota, for very helpful discussions on Galileo, and to Giorgio Strano for conversations on Tycho Brahe. Thanks to Giulia Fiorenzoli for her help in facilitating my stay. Alessandra Lenzi, Elisa Di Renzo, Sabina Bernacchini, and Susanna Cimmino greatly assisted me in the museum’s library and provided materials from the photo lab. I am especially grateful to Galileo scholars Michele Camerota and Maurice Finocchiaro for fascinating conversations on Galileo and for providing me with some of their important publications. I thank Federico Tognoni for his assistance with Galileo iconography. I had stimulating discussions with philosopher of science Dario Antiseri on philosophy, and on the relationship between science and religion, and science and the humanities. Stefano Gatti (who sadly passed during the writing of this book) and Marquis Mariano Cittadini Cesi provided me with important information on Galileo’s friend and patron Federico Cesi.

  Geologist and environmental scientist Daniel Schrag explained to me in detail the science of climate change and introduced me to important articles on the topic. Atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen, who is one of the more vocal climate change “deniers,” explained to me what precisely he objects to in the interpretation of climate change findings.

  I am grateful to Amy Kimball at the Special Collections of the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University for providing me with crucial materials. Kate Hutchins at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan provided me with an invaluable original document by Galileo.

  Art historian Lisa Bourla gave me important information on painter and Galileo’s friend Cigoli. Curators Joost Vander Auwera and Ingrid Goddeeris from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels helped me to search for a portrait of Galileo entitled Galileo in Prison. Art experts Benito Navarrete Prieto, Pablo Hereza, Jonathan Brown, and Xanthe Brooke gave authoritative opinion on the attribution of that Galileo portrait. Curators Annemie De Vos from the Vleeshuis Museum in Antwerp and Els Baetens from the Stedelijk Museum in Sint-Niklaas gave invaluable information and greatly assisted in the research concerning the whereabouts of the same portrait.

  My wife, Sofie Livio, showed an infinite patience and continuous support during the years of research for and writing of this book. For these, I am forever grateful.

  Finally, my agent, Susan Rabiner, encouraged me to write the book and skillfully guided me throughout the writing process. I thank Sharon Toolan for her professional assistance in preparing the manuscript for print. I am deeply indebted to my editor, Bob Bender, for his thoughtful comments on the manuscript, and to Johanna Li and the entire production team at Simon & Schuster for their support in the preparation of the book for publication.

  More from the Author

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  Brilliant Blunders

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  The Equation that Couldn't Be Solved

  About the Author

  © J. COYLE JR.

  MARIO LIVIO is an internationally known astrophysicist, a bestselling author, and a popular speaker who worked for twenty-four years with the Hubble Space Telescope. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has written six previous books and more than 400 scientific articles. He has appeared on television programs ranging from 60 Minutes and NOVA to The Daily Show. He has lectured all across the globe at venues such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Hayden Planetarium, the Henri Poincaré Institute, the Royal Astronomical Society, and TEDxMidAtlantic. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

  Visit the author at

  WWW.MARIO-LIVIO.COM

  SimonandSchuster.com

  www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Mario-Livio

  @simonbooks

  ALSO BY MARIO LIVIO

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  Notes

  The main source of information on Galileo’s life and work has been (since the beginning of the twentieth century) Antonio Favaro’s monumental Le Opere di Galileo Galilei: Edizione Nazionale (Florence, Italy: Giunti-Barbera, 1890–1909). It was reprinted in 1929. The first edition is now available online at www.galleco.fr, and the site at Liber Liber (www.liberliber.it) includes much of the text. The “Galileo Project” by Albert Van Helden and Elizabeth Burr at Rice University (galileo.rice.edu) provides excellent hypertextual information. Stafano Gattei�
�s very recent On the Life of Galileo presents an invaluable collection of early biographies and other important documents.

  When I cited text in English, I used mostly the translations by Stillman Drake, Maurice Finocchiaro, Albert Van Helden, John L. Heilbron, Mario Biagioli, Giorgio de Santillana, Mary Allen-Olney, Stefano Gattei, Richard Blackwell, William Shea, and David Wootton.

  CHAPTER 1: REBEL WITH A CAUSE

  At a breakfast that took place: The event is described in more detail in chap. 5.

  from the book of Joshua: Joshua 10:12–13, NIV: Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zonderini).

  letter to Castelli: A translation of the slightly revised letter appears in Finocchiaro 1989, 49–54. See chap. 6.

  “the greatest of the founders of modern science”: Russell 2007, 531.

  Max Born… once put it: Born 1956.