The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler

by David Brewster

These discoveries were ill received by the followers of Aristotle. According to their preconceived opinions, the moon was perfectly spherical, and absolutely smooth; and to cover it with mountains, and scoop it out into valleys, was an act of impiety which defaced the regular forms which Nature herself had imprinted. It was in vain that Galileo appealed to the evidence of observation, and to the actual surface of our own globe. The very irregularities on the moon were, in his opinion, the proof of divine wisdom; and had its surface been absolutely smooth, it would have been “but a vast unblessed desert, void of animals, of plants, of cities, and of men—the abode of silence and inaction—senseless, lifeless, soulless, and stripped of all those ornaments which now render it so varied and so beautiful.”

In examining the fixed stars, and comparing them with the planets, Galileo observed a remarkable difference in the appearance of their discs. All the planets appeared with round globular discs like the moon; whereas the fixed stars never exhibited any disc at all, but resembled lucid points sending forth twinkling rays. Stars of all magnitudes he found to have the same appearance; those of the fifth and sixth magnitude having the same character, when seen through a telescope, as Sirius, the largest of the stars, when seen by the naked eye. Upon directing his telescope to nebulæ and clusters of stars, he was delighted to find that they consisted of great numbers of stars which could not be recognised by unassisted vision. He counted no fewer than forty in the cluster called the Pleiades, or Seven Stars; and he has given us drawings of this constellation, as well as of the belt and sword of Orion, and of the nebula of Præsepe. In the great nebula of the Milky Way, he descried crowds of minute stars; and he concluded that this singular portion of the heavens derived its whiteness from still smaller stars, which his telescope was unable to separate.

Important and interesting as these discoveries were, they were thrown into the shade by those to which he was led during an accurate examination of the planets with a more powerful telescope. On the 7th of January 1610, at one o’clock in the morning, when he directed his telescope to Jupiter, he observed three stars near the body of the planet, two being to the east and one to the west of him. They were all in a straight line, and parallel to the ecliptic, and appeared brighter than other stars of the same magnitude. Believing them to be fixed stars, he paid no great attention to their distances from Jupiter and from one another. On the 8th of January, however, when, from some cause or other,[12] he had been led to observe the stars again, he found a very different arrangement of them: all the three were on the west side of Jupiter, nearer one another than before, and almost at equal distances. Though he had not turned his attention to the extraordinary fact of the mutual approach of the stars, yet he began to consider how Jupiter could be found to the east of the three stars, when but the day before he had been to the west of two of them. The only explanation which he could give of this fact was, that the motion of Jupiter was direct, contrary to astronomical calculations, and that he had got before these two stars by his own motion.

In this dilemma between the testimony of his senses and the results of calculation, he waited for the following night with the utmost anxiety; but his hopes were disappointed, for the heavens were wholly veiled in clouds. On the 10th, two only of the stars appeared, and both on the east of the planet. As it was obviously impossible that Jupiter could have advanced from west to east on the 8th of January, and from east to west on the 10th, Galileo was forced to conclude that the phenomenon which he had observed arose from the motion of the stars, and he set himself to observe diligently their change of place. On the 11th, there were still only two stars, and both to the east of Jupiter; but the more eastern star was now twice as large as the other one, though on the preceding night they had been perfectly equal. This fact threw a new light upon Galileo’s difficulties, and he immediately drew the conclusion, which he considered to be indubitable, “that there were in the heavens three stars which revolved round Jupiter, in the same manner as Venus and Mercury revolve round the sun.” On the 12th of January, he again observed them in new positions, and of different magnitudes; and, on the 13th, he discovered a fourth star, which completed the four secondary planets with which Jupiter is surrounded.

Galileo continued his observations on these bodies every clear night till the 22d of March, and studied their motions in reference to fixed stars that were at the same time within the field of his telescope. Having thus clearly established that the four new stars were satellites or moons, which revolved round Jupiter in the same manner as the moon revolves round our own globe, he drew up an account of his discovery, in which he gave to the four new bodies the names of the Medicean Stars, in honour of his patron, Cosmo de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. This work, under the title of “Nuncius Sidereus,” or the “Sidereal Messenger,” was dedicated to the same prince; and the dedication bears the date of the 24th of March, only two days after he concluded his observations.

The importance of this great discovery was instantly felt by the enemies as well as by the friends of the Copernican system. The planets had hitherto been distinguished from the fixed stars only by their relative change of place, but the telescope proved them to be bodies so near to our own globe as to exhibit well-defined discs, while the fixed stars retained, even when magnified, the minuteness of remote and lucid points. The system of Jupiter, illuminated by four moons performing their revolutions in different and regular periods, exhibited to the proud reason of man the comparative insignificance of the globe he inhabits, and proclaimed in impressive language that that globe was not the centre of the universe.

The reception which these discoveries met with from Kepler is highly interesting, and characteristic of the genius of that great man. He was one day sitting idle, and thinking of Galileo, when his friend Wachenfels stopped his carriage at his door, to communicate to him the intelligence. “Such a fit of wonder,” says he, “seized me at a report which seemed to be so very absurd, and I was thrown into such agitation at seeing an old dispute between us decided in this way, that between his joy, my colouring, and the laughter of both, confounded as we were by such a novelty, we were hardly capable, he of speaking, or I of listening. On our parting, I immediately began to think how there could be any addition to the number of the planets without overturning my ‘Cosmographic Mystery,’ according to which Euclid’s five regular solids do not allow more than six planets round the sun.... I am so far from disbelieving the existence of the four circumjovial planets, that I long for a telescope, to anticipate you, if possible, in discovering two round Mars, as the proportion seems to require, six or eight round Saturn, and perhaps one each round Mercury and Venus.”

In a very different spirit did the Aristotelians receive the “Sidereal Messenger” of Galileo. The principal professor of philosophy at Padua resisted Galileo’s repeated and urgent entreaties to look at the moon and planets through his telescope; and he even laboured to convince the Grand Duke that the satellites of Jupiter could not possibly exist. Sizzi, an astronomer of Florence, maintained that as there were only seven apertures in the head—two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and one mouth—and as there were only seven metals, and seven days in the week, so there could be only seven planets. He seems, however, to have admitted the visibility of the four satellites through the telescope; but he argues, that as they are invisible to the naked eye, they can exercise no influence on the earth; and being useless, they do not therefore exist.

A protegé of Kepler’s, of the name of Horky, wrote a volume against Galileo’s discovery, after having declared, “that he would never concede his four new planets to that Italian from Padua, even if he should die for it.” This resolute Aristotelian was at no loss for arguments. He asserted that he had examined the heavens through Galileo’s own glass, and that no such thing as a satellite existed round Jupiter. He affirmed, that he did not more surely know that he had a soul in his body, than that reflected rays are the sole cause of Galileo’s erroneous observations; and that the only use of the new planets was to gratify Galileo’s thirst for gold, and afford to himself a subject of discussion.

When Horky first presented himself to Kepler, after the publication of this work, the opinion of his patron was announced to him by a burst of indignation which overwhelmed the astonished author. Horky supplicated mercy for his offence; and, as Kepler himself informed Galileo, he took him again into favour, on the condition that Kepler was to show him Jupiter’s satellites, and that Horky was not only to see them, but to admit their existence.