Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [72]
In the light of what we have learned so far in our exploration of scientific anarchy, it is interesting to find that Copernicus’s source was as strange and irrational as Einstein’s: Copernicus was inspired by the bizarre ideas of a little-known Greek mystic.
Philolaus of Croton was a contemporary of Socrates. The cosmos came into being, he said, as a result of a complex arrangement of the primary elements, known as ‘limiters’ and ‘unlimiteds’. The unlimiteds included earth, air, fire and water; limiters were shapes, such as tetrahedra, that fitted mathematically with the unlimiteds. From all this, Philolaus concluded that the Earth orbits a ‘central fire’. And he wasn’t talking about the Sun.
Philolaus’ central fire is a mythic, religious flame that gave birth to the universe. To the Greeks it was also known as the Hearth of the Universe and the Watchtower of Zeus. In their view, the heavenly bodies orbited this central fire in ten concentric circles. Farthest out were the ‘fixed’ stars, then the five (known) planets, then the Sun, the Moon and the Earth. In the innermost orbit was the ‘counter-Earth’. This body remains invisible to us, because the Earth rotates on its axis as it revolves around the central fire; we always have our back to the counter-Earth, Philolaus solemnly pronounced.
In his defining work, De Revolutionibus, Copernicus cites this system as a ‘precursor’ to his astronomical system. Copernicus did not build on the accumulating scientific knowledge of the previous decades and centuries, but jumped back to the time of the mystical Greeks. This is rarely, if ever, mentioned by modern astronomers, for whom Copernicus is the patron saint of reason. This is simply not how things are supposed to be. Years after De Revolutionibus was published, Galileo expressed his shock. Contemplating how Copernicus took Philolaus’ strange and mystical ideas and turned them into something so self-evidently true, Galileo said in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, ‘there is no limit to my astonishment’. Ptolemy would have been turning in his grave: before his death in ad 168, Ptolemy referred to Philolaus’ ideas as ‘entirely ridiculous’.
Perhaps it was this source, acknowledged by Copernicus, that explains why the scientific establishment was not particularly convinced by Copernicus’s argument that the Earth must go round the Sun. For instance, the astronomer Tycho Brahe, born shortly after Copernicus died, simply refused to believe it. More problematic, though, was the fact that it flatly contradicted the sacred view of how the universe held together.
That is certainly why Galileo’s attempts to prove Copernicus right landed him in trouble; he ended his days under house arrest. Nevertheless, the anarchist Isaac Newton took up where Galileo had left off, and set the heliocentric universe on a firm mathematical footing. Newton left a little wiggle-room for God, though – he declared that there was still room for the divine hand to steer the fine details of planetary motion. Soon afterwards, though, Pierre-Simon Laplace made God redundant. His mathematics dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s; Laplace famously (and brazenly) declared that his calculations of the motion of the heavenly bodies were so accurate that there was now ‘no need’ for God’s involvement.
Not that this was Laplace’s explicit purpose. It is simply what science does: in pursuit of understanding it assaults the status quo and takes pity on neither God nor man. And as it began, so it carries on. Physicists have since taken their audacious theories all the way back to the beginning of everything. The Big Bang theory’s description of how the universe came into being is breaking taboos even now.