Galileo: The Real Story

Hello and welcome to this fifth podcast brought to you by the Vatican Observatory Foundation. I'm your host, Bob Tremblay. With us today is Chris Graney, Public Relations Officer for the Vatican Observatory Foundation and editor of the Faith in Science resource on the Vatican Observatory's website. Chris is the author of several papers and two books from Notre Dame Press on the topic of science during the time of Galileo. Also joining us is Brother Guy Consolmagno, Director of the Vatican Observatory and President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. I'll let our two guests tell us a bit more about themselves before we get into the sometimes contentious topic of Galileo. Let's start with Chris. Hello, glad to be here and interested to talk about the subject. I think, Chris, you should tell the audience a little bit more about how you got into the topic of Galileo because I think that's a fascinating story and a lot of them may not have heard that. I've come to the Vatican Observatory through an unusual path. My career has been in the community colleges in Kentucky and I taught an introductory astronomy course for a very long time and my students would ask me questions. Community college students often have not followed the normal path to the educational process. They do not have a high regard for what questions you're supposed to ask and not supposed to ask in a class. They would tend to drill me with questions like, why do we think this? Why would someone think that in the first place? When it came to the standard astronomy class would have this sort of typical bit of historical background and there would always be somebody who would ask. One student put it very clearly. He said, why would I ever believe that the sky is pink when I can look up for myself and see that it's blue and believe it's pink just because someone says that's what's in the Bible? This was in reference to this idea that somehow Galileo looked through his telescope and saw what reality was and then people were rejecting it. I didn't have an answer to that question and over time in answering my students questions I began digging into astronomy's history so I would be able to answer them and one thing led to another. I found myself unable to get the answers that I was looking for and just began doing the research myself and that's how I ended up with a pretty long list of publications. Just a new one out this month in the Journal for the History of Astronomy on Jacques Cassini and the universe of stars which is all related to this same topic so still doing the research. Well I guess it should be pointed out the other thing that makes it possible is that you and your wife are pretty good at reading and translating medieval Latin which is a skill that does not come easily to a lot of people. Yeah, pretty good at it is a relative term but yeah we can get through it when we want to. We can grind through. I understand sort of what's being discussed. Another thing that's really good about having worked in the community colleges is that Galileo and his colleagues of that time were very smart people who knew nothing about say Newtonian physics because Newtonian physics hadn't been invented then so they did not know anything about modern science. My students were often very smart people who know nothing about modern science and so I could see in the way my students thought stuff that the way these historical people thought and vice versa. So I can look at that. My wife is very grammar conscious. She knows how to parse things and she sort of keeps me on the straight and narrow on our translation efforts. I have a whole list of topics and questions here and the first one here is what is the relationship between Galileo and the Catholic Church and why is this relationship misunderstood? Well we'll start up by remembering the times. It was the beginning of the 17th century. It was in the 1600s and Europe at that point had divided itself over the last previous 90 years into Protestant and Roman Catholic camps. Galileo was absolutely a Roman Catholic and his two daughters were both nuns. Of course he never married their mom but that was the social mores of the time. She was not at the same class as he was but he was knowledgeable about what was going on both in the Protestant North and the Catholic South and definitely put down his stakes as being a Catholic, a devout Catholic, friends to cardinals, friends to many clerics, counted even popes among his friends including the pope who eventually turned on him. So when we have this discussion, I'm always going because I'm reading their scientific works of the time, I'm always going to come around to a more scientific or technical perspective and I would say that the relationship of Galileo to the Church was of a scientist and sometimes if you read the other people, for example, if you look at Galileo, Simon Marius and Christoph Scheiner all working doing similar work about the same time or right after 1610, 1615 and you will see that these three different guys support and criticize each other across their denominational boundaries and things like that. You see a very typical sort of scientific dialogue. So he's a guy in there doing science. On top of that, you've got to remember that the Church never has been monolithic. There was a tremendous divide in the Church between the Dominicans who had been running the universities since the 1200s and the Jesuits who were at that point considered upstarts who had just started a whole new set of universities more for the middle class. And Galileo was very clever at trying to play the one off the other. When the Dominicans attacked him, he would get the Jesuits to support him. When he thought the Jesuits were encroaching on his turf, then he would go to the Dominicans to get support. On top of that, he was an Italian and Italians love arguing. His teachers were all people who loved, who took it as a point of pride of having gotten in trouble with the Church. And his father was a rebel, sort of a rock star. He was a musician, he was a traveling musician and the irony is that both Galileo's teachers and his father's taught him to rebel against authority. So when he rebelled against authority, it was on the authority of his teachers and his parents. And sort of to illustrate the mix, you will see, if I go back to Shiner and Marius and Galileo, Shiner and Marius both agreed with each other in their view of the world. They both viewed that the earth was at rest with the sun going around it and the planets going on the sun. Galileo is the heliocentrist, he's the rebel. But when Shiner writes to describe the work of these other two guys, he praises Galileo, who he disagrees with scientifically, and sort of insults Marius, who he agrees with scientifically, but isn't part of his club, right? He refers to him as some Calvinist, right? This Calvinist came along and came up with these ideas, but... Yeah, you got to remember, Marius was a Protestant, Shiner was a Jesuit priest. Right. It's a very dynamic, complex, fascinating situation, and it does not hold up to any of the stereotypes that I learned in school. Fascinating stuff. So one of my questions here is, is the Catholic Church skeptical or opposed to science? And this leads into what you were just saying there. I'm trying to remember when I would have learned about Galileo. I mean, I asked my wife this a couple days ago, and she's like, oh, I would have been grade school, you know, father of modern astronomy. But I don't think she recalls being told that the Church was against science. Yeah, and of course, the whole point, the reason that Galileo was involved with the Church was because precisely the Church was fascinated with science. The Church was the academy at the time. Nowadays, you submit your paper to a journal, and the journal has to referee it. The Church were the referees. The Church were the places where these ideas were promulgated. And you've always needed some kind of gatekeeper to stop somebody in their basement writing in all capital letters on the internet and claiming that their work is as good as somebody who's, you know, been studying this stuff professionally for 20 years. Yeah, it's such a different world than what we look at today. But for Bob as to where would you have learned about Galileo, a while back, someone wrote into the Vatican Observatory asking about textbooks for teaching. And this led me to eventually dig through a whole bunch of textbooks and look at what they had to say about Galileo and also Johannes Kepler. And a lot of them do say something to the effect of that the Church was against science. You know, that kind of stuff is pretty common in either in perhaps explicit statement or in simply sort of an intonation. But on our Faith and Science web resource, I have a list of about 21 textbooks or so. And some of them, you know, what is said is all over the place. Some of it's correct factually, some of it's incorrect factually. It's really amazing how this story is told without a whole lot of effort. There's just a book I read that just came out this year, which I suppose I'm not going to run it down in this podcast, but by a very prominent author who is busy, you know, promulgating this idea that Church officials refused to even look through a telescope, refused to even look through a telescope. And that the trial was conducted by people who refused to look through a telescope. And Galileo said, but still it moves and all the rest of this sort of stuff that gets kicked around. It's a 19th century mythology. I think that's one of the fascinating things is that most of what we know about Galileo has nothing to do with what happened in 1600 and everything to do with what was going on in the world in 1870 and 1880 and 1890. Galileo was used as a whip to flog the Church, both in Europe where there was a lot of anti-clericalism in the political world. The Italian government was vehemently against the in those days. And so they promoted Galileo as sort of this hero who stood up against the Church, which was total nonsense. And in America, it was used to make sure that people with vowels at the end of their names, like Consolmagno, wouldn't be flooding America and destroying the place, like my grandfather who showed up in 1891. So what is the role the Catholic Church has played in advancing the sciences both in the past and today? Well, first thing, of course, is that they run schools. And since the Middle Ages, the Church was the first outfit to be organizing universities, to have a curriculum that was a curriculum that everyone would recognize, that if you studied in Rome, you were pretty much studying subjects that people in Paris would know what you had studied, that there was this common curriculum, this common background. And the Church was the body that had the educated people and sufficient wealth to be able to run schools. This was part of the political problem in the end of the 19th century, because the German university system, which was a paid-by-class university system, no longer tied to the Church, but tied to whatever money you were going to give your professor, they saw the old Church schools as rivals. And in some cases, they would want to say, oh, you want to come to our school? Well, you have to pay because we're going to give you a better education than those people stuck in the past. Yeah, I think that to that, I would add that, for example, when you look at the science going on in Galileo's time, an awful lot of the players are Church figures. Okay, for example, we don't know that, I'll return to this fellow, Christoph Scheiner, who's a Jesuit. He is the first person to produce a really detailed, long-term scientific study of a celestial object, the sun. And he publishes this years-long investigation of observations made of the sun. Incidentally, he publishes this before Galileo's trial. So, I was referring to this author who was referring to Church officials who would not even look through a telescope. And of course, this guy had published this huge, fat book about observing the sun through a telescope. His colleague, Christoph Greenberger, I can't remember if I got the name right there, but he, another Jesuit, is part of this work. He invents the equatorial telescope mount as part of their studies of the sun. A massive text that was a standard reference for quite a while, the Almagestum Novum, or New Almagest, published by Giovanni Battista Riccioli, another Jesuit, another person connected in with the Church. So, their idea that there's some sort of a divide between the Church and science at this point, or as far as I know, at any point, is not particularly well backed up by historical research. Consider, if you're going to be a scientist, you've got to have the free time, the education, the financial wherewithal to do this work, unless you've got a day job. So, the people who tend to publish in the scientific journals of the 17th and 18th into the 19th century were either wealthy noblemen, medical doctors, or clergymen. And you can see their names as the Reverend This or the Reverend That, because they're the ones who have the training to collect data. Collecting data is not all that different from collecting births and deaths and the sorts of data you collect when you're a parish priest. So, I've got two questions here I'm going to merge together. What are some things everyone knows about Galileo that are just wrong? And what are some things that they know are actually correct? What do they know that are actually correct? He used a telescope, he observed the moon, the sun. He's the first person to observe the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus. I'm going to keep this to astronomy. He also did stuff in physics, but that's a little bit outside of the scope of what we're talking about here. What do they know that's wrong is, first of all, that he proved that the earth went around the sun. That shows up everywhere from children's books to travel guides. I was reading a travel guide for Italy and it talked about Galileo, who was in prison for proving that the earth went around the sun. There's a children's book. I've seen it in grammar books, where the idea of proving that the earth goes around the sun shows up in a grammar text. So, that is what I would describe as perhaps the biggest myth about Galileo, is that he proved something. He observed things. He himself interpreted his observations in favor of the earth going around the sun. But lots of people, fellow scientists of the time, did not. For example, I always learned in school that the moons going around Jupiter were interpreted as evidence for the heliocentric system because, you know, the moons are going around Jupiter just like the planets would supposedly go around the sun. But when I read this guy, Johann Georg Locher's discussion of this, I was rather floored because he, this is someone writing at the same time, says, oh, he observes the moons of Jupiter, makes pretty precise measurements, excellent drawings of them, has a good telescope, and he says, oh, the moons of Jupiter support the old Ptolemaic model. And I thought, what? Because, of course, I've always learned that this is exactly the opposite of how they were interpreted. He says, now why do they support the Ptolemaic model? Because Ptolemy used circles turning on circles to explain the observed motions of the planets through the constellations of the Zodiac. And Locher says, look, Ptolemy postulated one circle turning on another as an explanation for this, but we've never actually observed it. We look at Jupiter's moons and we see moons going around Jupiter, Jupiter's going around something else. Therefore, here we are directly observing circles turning on circles, and therefore these observations show that this supports the old Ptolemaic model. Okay, maybe the sun's off its position in there, but the basic concept of Ptolemy is correct. And when I read that, my teeth about fell out of my mouth. Part of what we have to remember is that when you have a really clear idea in your head of what you expect to see, you almost always see what you expect to see. You know, Paul Simon mentioned that in one of his songs, man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. Galileo didn't believe in the Copernican system because of what he saw in the telescope. He had already decided, we've got, you know, his notebooks to show that 20 years earlier, he was talking in favor of the Copernican system before he had the evidence for it. So, of course, he sees evidence that's consistent, or at least not inconsistent with the Copernican system, and that's what he's going to jump on. I would say one of the things that people get right and wrong is the nature of Galileo. It's absolutely correct that he was a pivotal and incredibly important person in the history of science, and that he was a far better astronomer than the people around him. But the thing that made him better is not what people think. He didn't invent the telescope. The telescope had been invented in the Netherlands. He was not the first person to look at the moon through a telescope. We've got pictures of Thomas Harriot who had done that earlier. But what Galileo had was the imagination to recognize what he was looking at and the skill to illustrate it both with his artistry and with his writing. And this is a point that I think a lot of people are surprised at. Galileo studied not only mathematics, but he then, after he left university without a degree, hung out with artists and writers. And he learned to argue, and he learned to write, he wrote poetry—I'm told it's pretty terrible poetry—but he learned how to present. And being in Italy, he learned how to paint in perspective, which was something that would have been several hundred years old by then in Italy, but not really had penetrated to the more mathematical-minded in England. So Thomas Harriot's pictures are just circles with scribbles on them. And Galileo's paintings are beautiful watercolors that really look like spheres. It was his imagination to understand what he was seeing and his ability to describe it to other people that pushed him far ahead of anyone else. Let me add to that another one of the Jesuits I was talking to, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, who produced the new Almagest, the Almagestum Novum. That book, in it, he produces these arguments for why Earth does not go around the sun, and they are scientific arguments. And they're pretty good. He foresees the Coriolis effect. He has a diagram, says, look, if the Earth was turning on its own axis and you fired a cannon to the north, the ball would be, its trajectory would not go straight. It would curve because of the Earth's motion and the spherical shape of the Earth. Well, this is actually true. The Coriolis effect is a real thing. It's named after not Riccioli, who first came up with it, because that was forgotten, but for this guy Coriolis in the early 19th century. But part of Riccioli's problem is that this book he wrote, it's huge. It's a coffee table-sized book, solid text with small diagrams. It's like 1,500 pages full of cross-references. For more on this, go to book six, section four, sub-paragraph three, sub-paragraph four, line 55, all these things. It's hard to read. No one's going to read this monster, except for some guy like him. Whereas with Galileo's work, Galileo is readable. People like reading Galileo. So what Brother Guy is saying there, I want to re-emphasize that. Yeah, I think that's a big thing. And that Galileo's best opponents, I think, were just a little bit too nerdy in their approach to communicating science to the public, which is, of course, that's a running problem now today. Scientists are not that great at communicating their ideas to the public. I'll point out that what you're saying about Riccioli's book and nobody reading it is so true that I think in the last 100, maybe 120, 130 years, there's only one person I know who's actually slogged through it. And that would be a fellow named Chris Graney, who wrote a book on the Notre Dame Press about it. That's right. One of my books is that. And I didn't slog through all of it. I just slogged through the parts that were on the arguments over the Earth's motion. All the rest of the stuff, the illustrations of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn phases, all this other stuff is not there. Another myth or thing that people get wrong, and I'm only learning this through research now, is that we think that science at that time was revealing sort of a modern view of the universe. And we can talk about this in detail more if we want, because it gets kind of technical. But you look at works of guys like Locher and Shiner, Johannes Kepler, this fellow Jacques Cassini, they're not looking up and seeing a universe full of other suns. We think of like Giordano Bruno looking at the Copernican system and saying, oh, the stars are suns, they have other planets and Earth's going around it. Kepler argued strenuously against that. And you'll read that he argued this because he didn't want to accept the size of the universe or something. But if you read his work, he argues it from a scientific basis. He argues it based on observations of the stars, that they can't be suns. And it gets a little technical as to why that is. But the gist of it is that Kepler says, look up at the stars, add up all the stars that you see in the sky, pile them all together in a blob, there are going to be some significant fraction of the size of the sun in the sky, and yet they put out no light. So they can't be like the sun. And it's actually a very potent argument. And it turns out that a lot of scientists at time believed that. And so almost like the universe that they were arguing about at the time is a different universe than what we're thinking. You know, we think that they're debating one thing, and I think that they might not have been. Yeah, I've read someplace that after Galileo, up until Isaac Newton's new physics 100 years later, nearly 90% of the people writing about astronomy rejected the Copernican system, not because it was, you know, the church told him not to, but because they couldn't make it work with the physics that they understood at the time. Have you read any of Galileo's poetry? And is it written in Latin? I have not, I've not messed with, I've not read Galileo's poetry. For the most part, the stuff I've looked at is Galileo's opponents. I mean, I've read, I've read Galileo's things, the sort of standard stuff, but I have not gone digging into his work. His opponents have been where my main interest has been. I'm quoting a recent biography of, named Hilbrun, who's written a wonderful book about Galileo and his early education. Almost certainly it would have been written in Italian. He was a master of the Italian language to the point where school kids in Italy today read his writing, not because of its science, but because of its beautiful style. That's it for this podcast. I'd like to thank our guests, Chris Graney and Brother Guy Consolmagno. I'm Bob Tremblay. You can read posts from all three of us and listen to our other podcasts on the website of the Vatican Observatory.