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Authors: Timothy Ferris
Tags: science, History, Philosophy, Cosmology, Astronomy, Science History, Metaphysics, Space and Time
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Magellan’s shipmate Antonio Pigafetta of the privations suffered during their crossing of the Pacific, “I believe that nevermore will any man undertake to make such a voyage.” 14
† As Columbus was a practical, unbookish man and not (yet) insane, presumably he had some reason other than the old geographies to think his voyage would succeed. We do not know what this was, but can speculate that he heard sailors’ tales of sighting the coast of South America when driven west by winds while trying to round the Cape of Good Hope, or knew that the Gulf Stream, which flows east, carries fresh horsebeans and other signs of a reasonably proximate landmass. The explorer Thor Heyerdahl even proposes that Columbus heard of Leif Erikson’s discovery of America, either from Vatican sources or during a visit to Iceland that Columbus is said by his son to have made at the age of twenty-six. 16
4
T HE S UN W ORSHIPERS
There is no new thing under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes
Amazed, and as if astonished and stupefied, I stood still, gazing for a certain length of time with my eyes fixed intently upon it…. When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone forth before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.
—Tycho, on the supernova of 1572
M ikolai Kopernik, though rightly esteemed as a great astronomer, was never much of a stargazer. He did some observing in his student days, assisting his astronomy professor at Bologna, Domenico Maria de Novara, in watching an occultation of the star Aldebaran by the moon, and he later took numerous sightings of the sun, using an instrument of his own devising that reflected the solar disk onto a series of graph lines etched into a wall outside his study. But these excursions served mainly to confirm what Kopernik and everybody else already knew, that the Ptolemaicsystem was inaccurate, making predictions that often proved to be wrong by hours or even days.
Kopernik drew inspiration less from stars than from books. In this he was very much a man of his time. The printing press—invented just thirty years before he was born—had touched off a communications revolution comparable in its impact to the changes wrought in the latter half of the twentieth century by the electronic computer. To be sure, Greek and Roman classics had been making their way from the Islamic world to Europe for centuries, and with enlightening effect—the first universities had been founded principally to house the books and study their contents—but the books themselves, each laboriously copied out by hand, were rare and expensive, and frequently were marred by transcription errors. All this changed with the advent of cheap, high-quality paper (a gift of Chinese technology) and the press. Now a single competent edition of Plato or Aristotle or Archimedes or Ptolemy could be reproduced in considerable quantities; every library could have one, and so could many individual scholars and more than a few farmers and housewives and tradespeople. As books spread so did literacy, and as the number of literate people increased, so did the market for books. By the time Kopernik was thirty years old (and printing itself but sixty years old), some six to nine million printed copies of more than thirty-five thousand titles had been published, and the print shops were working overtime trying to satisfy the demand for more.
Kopernik was as voracious a reader as any, at home in law, literature, and medicine as well as natural philosophy. Born in 1473 in northern Poland, he had come under the sponsorship of his powerful and calculating uncle Lucas Waczenrode, later bishop of Warmia, who gave him books and sent him to the best schools. He attended the University of Cracow, then ventured south into the Renaissance heartland to study at the universities of Bologna and Padua. He read Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch,
† As Columbus was a practical, unbookish man and not (yet) insane, presumably he had some reason other than the old geographies to think his voyage would succeed. We do not know what this was, but can speculate that he heard sailors’ tales of sighting the coast of South America when driven west by winds while trying to round the Cape of Good Hope, or knew that the Gulf Stream, which flows east, carries fresh horsebeans and other signs of a reasonably proximate landmass. The explorer Thor Heyerdahl even proposes that Columbus heard of Leif Erikson’s discovery of America, either from Vatican sources or during a visit to Iceland that Columbus is said by his son to have made at the age of twenty-six. 16
4
T HE S UN W ORSHIPERS
There is no new thing under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes
Amazed, and as if astonished and stupefied, I stood still, gazing for a certain length of time with my eyes fixed intently upon it…. When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone forth before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.
—Tycho, on the supernova of 1572
M ikolai Kopernik, though rightly esteemed as a great astronomer, was never much of a stargazer. He did some observing in his student days, assisting his astronomy professor at Bologna, Domenico Maria de Novara, in watching an occultation of the star Aldebaran by the moon, and he later took numerous sightings of the sun, using an instrument of his own devising that reflected the solar disk onto a series of graph lines etched into a wall outside his study. But these excursions served mainly to confirm what Kopernik and everybody else already knew, that the Ptolemaicsystem was inaccurate, making predictions that often proved to be wrong by hours or even days.
Kopernik drew inspiration less from stars than from books. In this he was very much a man of his time. The printing press—invented just thirty years before he was born—had touched off a communications revolution comparable in its impact to the changes wrought in the latter half of the twentieth century by the electronic computer. To be sure, Greek and Roman classics had been making their way from the Islamic world to Europe for centuries, and with enlightening effect—the first universities had been founded principally to house the books and study their contents—but the books themselves, each laboriously copied out by hand, were rare and expensive, and frequently were marred by transcription errors. All this changed with the advent of cheap, high-quality paper (a gift of Chinese technology) and the press. Now a single competent edition of Plato or Aristotle or Archimedes or Ptolemy could be reproduced in considerable quantities; every library could have one, and so could many individual scholars and more than a few farmers and housewives and tradespeople. As books spread so did literacy, and as the number of literate people increased, so did the market for books. By the time Kopernik was thirty years old (and printing itself but sixty years old), some six to nine million printed copies of more than thirty-five thousand titles had been published, and the print shops were working overtime trying to satisfy the demand for more.
Kopernik was as voracious a reader as any, at home in law, literature, and medicine as well as natural philosophy. Born in 1473 in northern Poland, he had come under the sponsorship of his powerful and calculating uncle Lucas Waczenrode, later bishop of Warmia, who gave him books and sent him to the best schools. He attended the University of Cracow, then ventured south into the Renaissance heartland to study at the universities of Bologna and Padua. He read Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch,
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