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Authors: Dava Sobel
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made Welser want to share Galileo’s letter with a larger audience than just the alleged Apelles, who didn’t even read Italian and had to wait months for a suitable translation to be made. Welser thought perhaps Prince Cesi of the Lyncean Academy, with whom he also corresponded, should publish the sunspot report as part of an ongoing series. “It would be a public benefit for these little treatises concerning new discoveries to come out one by one,” Welser opined, “keeping things fresh in everyone’s mind and inspiring others to apply their talents more to such things; for it is impossible that so great a framework should be sustained upon the shoulders of one man, however strong.”
Sunspot drawing by Galileo
Prince Cesi liked the idea so well that he not only initiated preparations for printing but also inducted Welser into the academy. Soon Welser and Galileo were both signing themselves proudly as “Lyncean” in their letters and politely commiserating with each other on their physical complaints. When Cesi published Welser’s four relatively short notes together with Galileo’s three very long replies as History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and Their Phenomena in Rome in the spring of 1613, he retained all the chitchat about Welser’s gout and Galileo’s miscellaneous infirmities.
“I have read [your letter], or rather devoured it, with a pleasure equal to the appetite and longing I had for it,” Welser wrote Galileo on June i, 1612. “Let me assure you that it has served to alleviate for me a long and painful illness that has been causing me extreme discomfort in the left thigh. For this the physicians have not yet found any effective remedy; indeed, the doctor in charge has told me in very plain words that the first men of his profession have written of this disease that ‘some cases are cured, but others are incurable.’ One must therefore submit to the fatherly disposition of God’s providence; “Thou art the Lord, do what is good in Thy sight.’”
Poor Welser would be dead within two years, escaping the pain of his disease through suicide, but meanwhile he worried how Cesi could accomplish the printing of the many meticulous drawings, which Galileo appended to his letters, of sunspots ingeniously observed. Galileo rendered these near-photographic records by letting the telescope image of the Sun fall on a piece of white paper instead of on his retina. There he faithfully traced them— and later retraced them, reorienting the telescope’s inverted vision— to avoid any damage to his eyes.
More than a month’s worth of excellent engravings embellished the finished book, tracking the Sun day by day from the first of June through mid-July of 1612. The ideas espoused in the book, however, exacerbated the existing tensions between Galileo and his avowed opponents. Book discussions attracted additional new opponents among people who had not even read the text. And, since Copernicus had died in silence in another country years before, Galileo began to be credited—or rather blamed—for having fathered the Sun-centered universe.
Although the “pigeon league” attacks on Bodies in Water had held up the books of Aristotle to oppose Galileo, critics of the Sunspot Letters now appealed to the even higher authority of the Bible.
[VI]
Observant
executrix of
God’s commands
The reorganization of the heavens according to Copernicus struck some individuals as suspiciously heretical.
“That opinion of Ipernicus, or whatever his name is,” an elderly Dominican father wagged in Florence in November of 1612, “appears to be against Holy Scripture.” Neither Copernicus nor Galileo, however, both Catholic believers, intended any such criticism of the Bible or attack against the Church. Copernicus had in fact dedicated De revolutionibus to Pope Paul III (the pontiff who excommunicated King Henry VIII of England and established the Roman Inquisition). Galileo, in the course of
Sunspot drawing by Galileo
Prince Cesi liked the idea so well that he not only initiated preparations for printing but also inducted Welser into the academy. Soon Welser and Galileo were both signing themselves proudly as “Lyncean” in their letters and politely commiserating with each other on their physical complaints. When Cesi published Welser’s four relatively short notes together with Galileo’s three very long replies as History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and Their Phenomena in Rome in the spring of 1613, he retained all the chitchat about Welser’s gout and Galileo’s miscellaneous infirmities.
“I have read [your letter], or rather devoured it, with a pleasure equal to the appetite and longing I had for it,” Welser wrote Galileo on June i, 1612. “Let me assure you that it has served to alleviate for me a long and painful illness that has been causing me extreme discomfort in the left thigh. For this the physicians have not yet found any effective remedy; indeed, the doctor in charge has told me in very plain words that the first men of his profession have written of this disease that ‘some cases are cured, but others are incurable.’ One must therefore submit to the fatherly disposition of God’s providence; “Thou art the Lord, do what is good in Thy sight.’”
Poor Welser would be dead within two years, escaping the pain of his disease through suicide, but meanwhile he worried how Cesi could accomplish the printing of the many meticulous drawings, which Galileo appended to his letters, of sunspots ingeniously observed. Galileo rendered these near-photographic records by letting the telescope image of the Sun fall on a piece of white paper instead of on his retina. There he faithfully traced them— and later retraced them, reorienting the telescope’s inverted vision— to avoid any damage to his eyes.
More than a month’s worth of excellent engravings embellished the finished book, tracking the Sun day by day from the first of June through mid-July of 1612. The ideas espoused in the book, however, exacerbated the existing tensions between Galileo and his avowed opponents. Book discussions attracted additional new opponents among people who had not even read the text. And, since Copernicus had died in silence in another country years before, Galileo began to be credited—or rather blamed—for having fathered the Sun-centered universe.
Although the “pigeon league” attacks on Bodies in Water had held up the books of Aristotle to oppose Galileo, critics of the Sunspot Letters now appealed to the even higher authority of the Bible.
[VI]
Observant
executrix of
God’s commands
The reorganization of the heavens according to Copernicus struck some individuals as suspiciously heretical.
“That opinion of Ipernicus, or whatever his name is,” an elderly Dominican father wagged in Florence in November of 1612, “appears to be against Holy Scripture.” Neither Copernicus nor Galileo, however, both Catholic believers, intended any such criticism of the Bible or attack against the Church. Copernicus had in fact dedicated De revolutionibus to Pope Paul III (the pontiff who excommunicated King Henry VIII of England and established the Roman Inquisition). Galileo, in the course of
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