A Short History of Astronomy

by Arthur Berry

127. During the next few years Galilei, who was now more than fifty, suffered a good deal from ill-health and was comparatively inactive. He carried on, however, a correspondence with the Spanish court on a method of ascertaining the longitude at sea by means of Jupiter’s satellites. The essential problem in finding the longitude is to obtain the time as given by the sun at the required place and also that at some place the longitude of which is known. If, for example, midday at Rome occurs an hour earlier than in London, the sun takes an hour to travel from the meridian of Rome to that of London, and the longitude of Rome is 15° east of that of London. At sea it is easy to ascertain the local time, e.g. by observing when the sun is highest in the sky, but the great difficulty, felt in Galilei’s time and long afterwards (chapter X., [§§ 197], 226), was that of ascertaining the time at some standard place. Clocks were then, and long afterwards, not to be relied upon to keep time accurately during a long ocean voyage, and some astronomical means of determining the time was accordingly wanted. Galilei’s idea was that if the movements of Jupiter’s satellites, and in particular the eclipses which constantly occurred when a satellite passed into Jupiter’s shadow, could be predicted, then a table could be prepared giving the times, according to some standard place, say Rome, at which the eclipses would occur, and a sailor by observing the local time of an eclipse and comparing it with the time given in the table could ascertain by how much his longitude differed from that of Rome. It is, however, doubtful whether the movements of Jupiter’s satellites could at that time be predicted accurately enough to make the method practically useful, and in any case the negotiations came to nothing.

In 1618 three comets appeared, and Galilei was soon drawn into a controversy on the subject with a Jesuit of the name of Grassi. The controversy was marked by the personal bitterness which was customary, and soon developed so as to include larger questions of philosophy and astronomy. Galilei’s final contribution to it was published in 1623 under the title Il Saggiatore (The Assayer), which dealt incidentally with the Coppernican theory, though only in the indirect way which the edict of 1616 rendered necessary. In a characteristic passage, for example, Galilei says:—

“Since the motion attributed to the earth, which I, as a pious and Catholic person, consider most false, and not to exist, accommodates itself so well to explain so many and such different phenomena, I shall not feel sure ... that, false as it is, it may not just as deludingly correspond with the phenomena of comets”;

and again, in speaking of the rival systems of Coppernicus and Tycho, he says:—

“Then as to the Copernican hypothesis, if by the good fortune of us Catholics we had not been freed from error and our blindness illuminated by the Highest Wisdom, I do not believe that such grace and good fortune could have been obtained by means of the reasons and observations given by Tycho.”

Although in scientific importance the Saggiatore ranks far below many others of Galilei’s writings, it had a great reputation as a piece of brilliant controversial writing, and notwithstanding its thinly veiled Coppernicanism, the new Pope, Urban VIII., to whom it was dedicated, was so much pleased with it that he had it read aloud to him at meals. The book must, however, have strengthened the hands of Galilei’s enemies, and it was probably with a view to counteracting their influence that he went to Rome next year, to pay his respects to Urban and congratulate him on his recent elevation. The visit was in almost every way a success; Urban granted to him several friendly interviews, promised a pension for his son, gave him several presents, and finally dismissed him with a letter of special recommendation to the new Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had shewn some signs of being less friendly to Galilei than his father. On the other hand, however, the Pope refused to listen to Galilei’s request that the decree of 1616 should be withdrawn.

128. Galilei now set seriously to work on the great astronomical treatise, the Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and Coppernican, which he had had in mind as long ago as 1610, and in which he proposed to embody most of his astronomical work and to collect all the available evidence bearing on the Coppernican controversy. The form of a dialogue was chosen, partly for literary reasons, and still more because it enabled him to present the Coppernican case as strongly as he wished through the mouths of some of the speakers, without necessarily identifying his own opinions with theirs. The manuscript was almost completed in 1629, and in the following year Galilei went to Rome to obtain the necessary licence for printing it. The censor had some alterations made and then gave the desired permission for printing at Rome, on condition that the book was submitted to him again before being finally printed off. Soon after Galilei’s return to Florence the plague broke out, and quarantine difficulties rendered it almost necessary that the book should be printed at Florence instead of at Rome. This required a fresh licence, and the difficulty experienced in obtaining it shewed that the Roman censor was getting more and more doubtful about the book. Ultimately, however, the introduction and conclusion having been sent to Rome for approval and probably to some extent rewritten there, and the whole work having been approved by the Florentine censor, the book was printed and the first copies were ready early in 1632, bearing both the Roman and the Florentine imprimatur.

129. The Dialogue extends over four successive days, and is carried on by three speakers, of whom Salviati is a Coppernican and Simplicio an Aristotelian philosopher, while Sagredo is avowedly neutral, but on almost every occasion either agrees with Salviati at once or is easily convinced by him, and frequently joins in casting ridicule upon the arguments of the unfortunate Simplicio. Though many of the arguments have now lost their immediate interest, and the book is unduly long, it is still very readable, and the specimens of scholastic reasoning put into the mouth of Simplicio and the refutation of them by the other speakers strike the modern reader as excellent fooling.

Many of the arguments used had been published by Galilei in earlier books, but gain impressiveness and cogency by being collected and systematically arranged. The Aristotelian dogma of the immutability of the celestial bodies is once more belaboured, and shewn to be not only inconsistent with observations of the moon, the sun, comets, and new stars, but to be in reality incapable of being stated in a form free from obscurity and self-contradiction. The evidence in favour of the earth’s motion derived from the existence of Jupiter’s satellites and from the undoubted phases of Venus, from the suspected phases of Mercury and from the variations in the apparent size of Mars, are once more insisted on. The greater simplicity of the Coppernican explanation of the daily motion of the celestial sphere and of the motion of the planets is forcibly urged and illustrated in detail. It is pointed out that on the Coppernican hypothesis all motions of revolution or rotation take place in the same direction (from west to east), whereas the Ptolemaic hypothesis requires some to be in one direction, some in another. Moreover the apparent daily motion of the stars, which appears simple enough if the stars are regarded as rigidly attached to a material sphere, is shewn in a quite different aspect if, as even Simplicio admits, no such sphere exists, and each star moves in some sense independently. A star near the pole must then be supposed to move far more slowly than one near the equator, since it describes a much smaller circle in the same time; and further—an argument very characteristic of Galilei’s ingenuity in drawing conclusions from known facts—owing to the precession of the equinoxes (chapter II., [§ 42], and IV., [§ 84]) and the consequent change of the position of the pole among the stars, some of those stars which in Ptolemy’s time were describing very small circles, and therefore moving slowly, must now be describing large ones at a greater speed, and vice versa. An extremely complicated adjustment of motions becomes therefore necessary to account for observations which Coppernicus explained adequately by the rotation of the earth and a simple displacement of its axis of rotation.

Salviati deals also with the standing difficulty that the annual motion of the earth ought to cause a corresponding apparent motion of the stars, and that if the stars be assumed so far off that this motion is imperceptible, then some of the stars themselves must be at least as large as the earth’s orbit round the sun. Salviati points out that the apparent or angular magnitudes of the fixed stars, avowedly difficult to determine, are in reality almost entirely illusory, being due in great part to an optical effect known as irradiation, in virtue of which a bright object always tends to appear enlarged;[75] and that there is in consequence no reason to suppose the stars nearly as large as they might otherwise be thought to be. It is suggested also that the most promising way of detecting the annual motion of stars resulting from the motion of the earth would be by observing the relative displacement of two stars close together in the sky (and therefore nearly in the same direction), of which one might be presumed from its greater brightness to be nearer than the other. It is, for example, evident that if, in the figure, E, E′ represent two positions of the earth in its path round the sun, and A, B two stars at different distances, but nearly in the same direction, then to the observer at E the star A appears to the left of B, whereas six months afterwards, when the observer is at E′, A appears to the right of B. Such a motion of one star with respect to another close to it would be much more easily observed than an alteration of the same amount in the distance of the star from some standard point such as the pole. Salviati points out that accurate observations of this kind had not been made, and that the telescope might be of assistance for the purpose. This method, known as the double-star or differential method of parallax, was in fact the first to lead—two centuries later—to a successful detection of the motion in question (chapter XIII., [§ 278]).