Colombus Part II Epilogue

In the early 16^th century, all universities and institutions of learning were run by the church. They wove their ideas about doctrine with their “picture” of the universe.  A new idea was often labeled heresy.  In 1514, a Polish monk who had taken a Latin name, Copericus, speculated about how the sun made a better center of the universe than earth, but he feared so much he didn’t publish his idea, nor was he able to do any mathematical calculations of the orbits.  The accepted model at the time was from Ptolemy, a Roman philosopher.  It held that earth was the center of the universe. The moon didn’t float in space; it was attached to crystal (like totally transparent glass) sphere and revolved around earth as did the sun.  Planets like Mars had a trajectory in the sky that backtracked often as they revolved around earth.  So the thinking was that Mars was attached to a glass sphere that rolled within its main orbital sphere—a ball rolling within a ball—hence the retrograde motion.  All this was only approximate.  Astronomers had to speed up and slow down certain planets to make measurements fit.  The stars were fixed on a faraway sphere. 

An Italian, Geordano Bruno, overheard Copernicus and began to openly talk about a solar system.  He went to England as a visiting scholar (though he was later found to be a fraud).  An Austrian court poet, Joachim Vadianus, published a pamphlet advocating a round earth composed of both earth and water in spherical shape.  It was unread except by a certain Phillip Melancthon, Europe’s leading Greek scholar, who was tasked at Wittenberg College to teach the President, Martin Luther Biblical Greek, and to revamp the curriculum.  Melancthon published a textbook on astronomy with an illustration of Round Earth saying this was the only explanation possible (a pear earth would wobble).  Meanwhile Bruno made it back to Italy, was tried by the Inquisition and burned at the stake.  And then Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation,  Catholic scholars pointed to Melancthon’s book and surely this proved that the rebels were heretics. After all, if the earth moved, there would be a headwind and birds would be blown off trees! 

But an English mathematician, Digges wrote an explanation in his father’s almanac that Bruno wasn’t so dumb.  Motion is relative.  If you hang a plumbline on a moving boat, it doesn’t stream off the end of the boat.  There was no profession of “scientist”  at this time.  All these natural philosophers were just bookkeepers (Galileo), mathematicians (Kepler, Brahe) or munitions designers (Napier).  The Protestant world of merchants and farmers, with its reliance on a personal walk with God, was much more open to new ideas than the Catholics who ran universities with philosophers. Finally in 1543, Copernicus assented to publication of his book upon his death. He was friends with Luther.  They lived just over 100 miles apart.

In 1571, Tycho Brahe, a young Danish mathematician noticed  a new star in the constellation Cassiopea.  Day by day it grew brighter until it was visible by day (a supernova).  Brahe used parallax triangulation to measure the distance.  It had zero parallax and hence it was in the far heavens.  This was stunning.  God lived out there and the highest heavens were supposed to be unchangeable!  But Brahe had done an accurate calculation of something everybody had seen. The Danish king took Brahe under his wing and bought him the best instruments available.  In 1577, a comet appeared and Brahe calculated distances as it traveled, apparently piercing the Ptolemaic spheres! The Jesuits argued vehemently against this Protestant, but then a German, Johannas Kepler, 1604, used Brahe’s highly accurate measurements of the orbit of Mars to show three laws of planetary motion that absolutely killed the old Ptolemaic theory. When the Italian, Galileo observed the phases of Venus in 1610, the new solar system was proven beyond a  shadow of doubt.  The sun was the center with planets floating like fish in the sea around it.  Once again, the Inquisition attempted to silence Galileo and forced him into an unwanted retirement.

At this point, the science revolution began to be strongly carried in England and Netherlands.  The commerce and inventions that went with scientific advances were the work of commoners, rather than monks and clergy.  Harvey studied blood circulation; Leewenhoek invented microbiology; Newton and dozens of others did mechanics; Boyle studied gases; Toricelli created vacuums and the barometer. 

Within 100 years, belief in witches and trolls, fairies and leprechauns, alchemy and spontaneous generation of mice had died out.  People’s thinking had changed.  They wanted evidence to go with belief.  They wanted to see the experiment. And so it is that we moderns now think differently than our ancestors of a few hundred years ago.  And thus the West exploded in technology and organization over the Middle East and the East. It was the invention of Science.