Is God a Mathematician_ - Mario Livio [41]
Many were not amused. Some saw this mea culpa by the church as far too little, far too late. The Spanish Galileo scholar Antonio Beltrán Marí noted:
The fact that the Pope continues to consider himself an authority capable of saying something relevant about Galileo and his science shows that, on the Pope’s side, nothing has changed. He is behaving in exactly the same manner as Galileo’s judges, whose mistake he now recognizes.
To be fair, the Pope found himself in a no-win situation. Any decision on his part, whether to ignore the issue and keep Galileo’s condemnation on the books, or to finally acknowledge the church’s error, was likely to be criticized. Still, at a time when there are attempts to introduce biblical creationism as an alternative “scientific” theory (under the thinly veiled title of “intelligent design”), it is good to remember that Galileo already fought this battle almost four hundred years ago—and won!
CHAPTER 4
MAGICIANS: THE SKEPTIC AND THE GIANT
In one of the seven skits in the movie Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), Woody Allen plays a court jester who does comic routines for a medieval king and his entourage. The jester has the hots for the queen, so he gives her an aphrodisiac, hoping to seduce her. The queen does become attracted to the jester, but alas, she has a huge padlock on her chastity belt. Faced with this frustrating situation in the queen’s bedroom, the jester utters nervously: “I must think of something quickly, before the Renaissance will be here and we will all be painting.”
Jokes aside, this exaggeration is an understandable description of the events in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renaissance has indeed produced such a wealth of masterpieces in painting, sculpture, and architecture that to this very day, these astonishing works of art form a major part of our culture. In science, the Renaissance witnessed the heliocentric revolution in astronomy, led by Copernicus, Kepler, and especially Galileo. The new view of the universe afforded by Galileo’s observations with the telescope, and the insights gained from his experiments in mechanics, perhaps more than anything else motivated the mathematical developments of the following century. Amidst the first signs of crumbling of the Aristotelian philosophy and the challenges to the Church’s theological ideology, philosophers started to search for a new foundation on which to erect human knowledge. Mathematics, with its seemingly certain body of truths, provided what appeared to be the soundest base for a new start.
The man who embarked on the rather ambitious task of discovering a formula that would somehow discipline all rational thought and unify all knowledge, science, and ethics was a young French officer and gentleman named René Descartes.
A Dreamer
Many regard Descartes (figure 21) as both the first great modern philosopher and the first modern biologist. When you add to these impressive credentials the fact that the English empiricist philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73) characterized one of Descartes’ achievements in mathematics as “the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences,” you begin to realize the immensity of Descartes’ power of intellect.
René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, at La Haye, France. In honor of its most celebrated resident, the town was renamed La Haye–Descartes in 1801, and since 1967 it is known simply as Descartes. At the age of eight, Descartes entered the Jesuit College of La Flèche, where he studied Latin, mathematics, classics, science, and scholastic philosophy until 1612. Because of his relatively fragile health, Descartes was excused from having to get up at the brutal hour of five a.m., and he was allowed to spend the morning hours in bed. Later in life, he continued to use the early part of the day for contemplation, and he once told the French mathematician Blaise Pascal that the only way for him to stay healthy and be productive was to never