Read Online Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris - Free Book Online
Authors: Timothy Ferris
Tags: science, History, Philosophy, Cosmology, Astronomy, Science History, Metaphysics, Space and Time
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gold disk the size of a cartwheel representing the sun, and another of silver representing the moon; soon he was Cortez’s prisoner, and soon thereafter dead. Atahualpa of Peru sued for his freedom by filling his cell with gold higher than a man could reach, but Pizarra had him strangled nevertheless; he would have burned him had Atahualpa not agreed to accept baptism.
The New World’s loss was the Old World’s gain. As the traders and explorers had hoped, Portugal and Spain—and, through Spain, Holland and Britain—prospered at the expense of Africa and America. The greatest profits, however, came not in coin but in knowledge, tools, and dreams; Toscanelli, in a skewed way, had been right. Blue-water sailing called for improved navigational instruments and better charts of the earth, sea, and sky, all of which promoted the development of geography and astronomy. Schools of navigation were established in Portugal, Spain, England, Holland, and France, and their graduates joined a growing professional class adept at applied mathematics and steering by the stars. The independent, self-reliant spirit of the explorers touched those on land as well, eroding medieval confidence in ancient authority; wrote one of Prince Henry’s captains, “With all due respect to therenowned Ptolemy, we found everything the opposite of what he said.” 21
More importantly though less distinctly, the great explorations opened up the human imagination, encouraging Western thinkers to regard not only the continents and seas but the entire planet from a more generous perspective. The dimensions of the known world had doubled by the year 1600, prompting a corresponding expansion in the cosmos of the mind. Heartened by the decline of the old authorities and by the adventuresome spirit of Columbus and the other explorers, the scholars of what would become the Renaissance began to imagine themselves traveling not only across the surface of the earth but also up into space. As Leon Frobenius was to write in a later century, “Our view is confined no longer to a spot of space on the surface of this earth. It surveys the whole of the planet…. This lack of horizon is something new.” Nicholas of Cusa pointed out that “up” and “down” are relative terms, postulated that each star might be its own center of gravity, and suggested that if we lived on another planet we might assume that we occupied the center of the universe. Leonardo da Vinci was forty years old when Columbus reached the continent to which Leonardo’s friend Amerigo Vespucci would lend his name, and he was a friend as well to Paolo Toscanelli, the astronomer who urged Columbus on his way. Imbued with an explorer’s vision, Leonardo cast his mind’s eye out into space and imagined that the earth from a distance would look like the moon:
If you were where the moon is, it would appear to you that the sun was reflected over as much of the sea as it illumines in its daily course, and the land would appear amid this water like the dark spots that are upon the moon, which when looked at from the earth presents to mankind the same appearance that our earth would present to men dwelling in the moon. 22
Copernicus was a student at the University of Cracow when Columbus landed in the Indies. He was forty-nine years old when Magellan’s ship completed its circumnavigation of the globe. He sent
his
mind’s eye journeying to the sun, and what he saw turned the earth into a ship under sail, assaying oceanic reaches of space undreamed of since the days of Aristarchus of Samos.
* The myth that Columbus was out to prove the world round was invented 130 years after the fact, and subsequently was popularized by Washington Irving.
* The circumnavigation of the earth by Ferdinand Magellan would prove the geographers right. In the course of that grueling, three-year voyage Magellan was killed, most of his men died, and his collaborator, the cosmographer Rui Faleiro, went insane. Wrote
The New World’s loss was the Old World’s gain. As the traders and explorers had hoped, Portugal and Spain—and, through Spain, Holland and Britain—prospered at the expense of Africa and America. The greatest profits, however, came not in coin but in knowledge, tools, and dreams; Toscanelli, in a skewed way, had been right. Blue-water sailing called for improved navigational instruments and better charts of the earth, sea, and sky, all of which promoted the development of geography and astronomy. Schools of navigation were established in Portugal, Spain, England, Holland, and France, and their graduates joined a growing professional class adept at applied mathematics and steering by the stars. The independent, self-reliant spirit of the explorers touched those on land as well, eroding medieval confidence in ancient authority; wrote one of Prince Henry’s captains, “With all due respect to therenowned Ptolemy, we found everything the opposite of what he said.” 21
More importantly though less distinctly, the great explorations opened up the human imagination, encouraging Western thinkers to regard not only the continents and seas but the entire planet from a more generous perspective. The dimensions of the known world had doubled by the year 1600, prompting a corresponding expansion in the cosmos of the mind. Heartened by the decline of the old authorities and by the adventuresome spirit of Columbus and the other explorers, the scholars of what would become the Renaissance began to imagine themselves traveling not only across the surface of the earth but also up into space. As Leon Frobenius was to write in a later century, “Our view is confined no longer to a spot of space on the surface of this earth. It surveys the whole of the planet…. This lack of horizon is something new.” Nicholas of Cusa pointed out that “up” and “down” are relative terms, postulated that each star might be its own center of gravity, and suggested that if we lived on another planet we might assume that we occupied the center of the universe. Leonardo da Vinci was forty years old when Columbus reached the continent to which Leonardo’s friend Amerigo Vespucci would lend his name, and he was a friend as well to Paolo Toscanelli, the astronomer who urged Columbus on his way. Imbued with an explorer’s vision, Leonardo cast his mind’s eye out into space and imagined that the earth from a distance would look like the moon:
If you were where the moon is, it would appear to you that the sun was reflected over as much of the sea as it illumines in its daily course, and the land would appear amid this water like the dark spots that are upon the moon, which when looked at from the earth presents to mankind the same appearance that our earth would present to men dwelling in the moon. 22
Copernicus was a student at the University of Cracow when Columbus landed in the Indies. He was forty-nine years old when Magellan’s ship completed its circumnavigation of the globe. He sent
his
mind’s eye journeying to the sun, and what he saw turned the earth into a ship under sail, assaying oceanic reaches of space undreamed of since the days of Aristarchus of Samos.
* The myth that Columbus was out to prove the world round was invented 130 years after the fact, and subsequently was popularized by Washington Irving.
* The circumnavigation of the earth by Ferdinand Magellan would prove the geographers right. In the course of that grueling, three-year voyage Magellan was killed, most of his men died, and his collaborator, the cosmographer Rui Faleiro, went insane. Wrote