The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [153]
In the end, what was known on the map mattered less than what was unknown, for it is undiscovered country that drives exploration and innovation, placing terra incognita at the very heart of science.
Look Through the Tube
During this age of positive exploration and negative discovery, other geographies of belief with their own unknown territories were opening up to human exploration. In 1609, the Italian mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei turned toward the heavens a modified version of the telescope first invented by the Dutch spectacle maker Hans Lippershey, who originally created it for much more earthly matters, such as viewing the flags and contents of merchant vessels approaching port. At this time astronomy was at something of a standstill. With the exception of the sun and the moon, the unaided human eye was inadequate for observing astronomical bodies in any detail much beyond a point of light. Galileo improved the Lippershey “looker” with a larger lens and a greater magnifying eyepiece, pointed it upward, and made a number of startling observations.
Galileo noted, for example, that there were satellites orbiting Jupiter, that Venus had phases, and that there were mountains on the moon and spots on the sun. He even discerned that the Milky Way—the blurry belt of light cinched across the waist of the sky—actually comprised an uncountable number of individual stars. The discovery of Jupiter’s moons was particularly significant in that it was evidence that the earth was not the center of everything, giving support to Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, which Galileo had already committed himself to believe even before he could prove it. Moreover, Galileo’s telescopic discoveries of mountains casting shadows on the moon, along with those pesky sunspots, posed a problem for Aristotelian cosmology, which held that all objects in space must be perfectly round and perfectly smooth.
The telescope provided an Archimedean point from which worldviews could be moved, but not everyone was eager to pick up the new fulcrum. Galileo’s eminent senior colleague at the University of Padua, Cesare Cremonini, was so committed to Aristotelian cosmology that he refused to even look through the tube. In fact, Cremonini was skeptical that there were even any heavenly bodies to see through it, concluding that it was all a parlor trick: “I don’t believe that anyone but he saw them, and besides, that looking through glasses would make me dizzy. Enough, I don’t want to hear any more about it. But what a pity that Mr. Galileo has gotten involved in these entertainment tricks.”6 Cremonini’s allegiance to Aristotle was due, in no small part, to the fact that the Catholic Church had wedded the uncontested authority of scripture (via the great thirteenth-century Augustinian scholar St. Thomas Aquinas) to the undeniable wisdom of Aristotle. Cremonini’s fidelity was to “the philosopher,” as he explained during the Inquisition: “I cannot and do not wish to retract my exposition of Aristotle because this is how I understand him, and I am paid to present him as I understand him, and, were I not to do so, I would be obliged to give back my pay.”7 Now that is loyalty to the company, and the Catholic Church was unquestionably the largest and most powerful corporate entity of its day.
Those who did look through Galileo’s tube could not believe their eyes—literally. One of Galileo’s colleagues reported that the instrument worked for terrestrial viewing but not celestial, because “I tested this instrument of Galileo