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Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens solved the Saturn enigma in his 1659 work Systema Saturnium, in which he included this visual catalogue of the thirteen most prominent theories of Saturn, including those of I. Galileo, 1610; II. Scheiner, 1614; III. Riccioli, 1641 or 1643; IV–VII. Hevel, theoretical forms; VIII–IX. Riccioli, 1648–1650; X. Divini, 1646–1648; XI. Fontana, 1636; XII. Biancani, 1616; Gassendi, 1638, 1639; XIII. Fontana and others, 1644, 1645. Note the first image from Galileo’s observation of Saturn from which he concluded: “I have observed that the farthest planet is threefold.” Source: CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS, SYSTEMA SATURNIUM (THE HAGUE, 1659), FOLDOUT PLATE AT PP. 34–35. AS REPRODUCED IN EDWARD TUFTE, VISUAL EXPLANATIONS (CHESHIRE, CONN.: GRAPHICS PRESS, 1997), P. 107.

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Here we see the sun-Earth-Saturn system from above—an Archimedean point outside the solar system that grants a new perspective—with Saturn set in motion on its glacially slow 29.5-Earth-years-long orbit. About 1.8 Earth-years elapse between each of the 32 Saturns in the diagram. The effect is to show that Saturn will appear different to Earth-bound observers at different times of the Earth year. This explains why in the course of half a century so many keen-eyed astronomers saw so many different Saturns, including a Saturn with no rings at all. Twice each Saturn-year the rings appear edge on to Earth-bound observers. Edward Tufte eloquently describes the power of this visual explanation: “Huygens presents a series of still images in order to depict motion. To resolve such discontinuous spatial representations of continuous temporal activity, viewers must interpolate between images, closing up the gaps. Imaginative and original, this display is a classic, an exemplar of information design.”26

Figure 18. Saturn in 3-D and in Motion

The data-theory-presentation triad is on exquisite display here, in which Huygens takes those two-dimensional Saturns seen in Figure 17, blows them up into 3-D, and puts them in motion around the sun. It is a marvelous presentation of both data and theory, incorporating Copernicus’s theory that the sun is at the center of the solar system instead of the earth (as in Ptolemaic cosmology), Kepler’s first law that planetary orbits are elliptical instead of circular (as in Aristotelian cosmology), and Kepler’s third law that the inner planets revolve around the sun faster than the outer planets. SOURCE: CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS, SYSTEMA SATURNIUM (THE HAGUE, 1659), P. 55. AS REPRODUCED IN EDWARD TUFTE, VISUAL EXPLANATIONS (CHESHIRE, CONN.: GRAPHICS PRESS, 1997), P. 108.

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The Saturn enigma and its ultimate solution reveals the interplay between data, theory, and presentation, between induction, deduction, and communication, between what we see, what we think, and what we say. We cannot untangle the three, for the mind engages them all to produce knowledge on which we act in the world. The Saturn affair demonstrates, in the master rhetorician Stephen Jay Gould’s words, both “the power and poverty of pure empiricism.” How? Gould’s answer is one of the most eloquent ever penned on this contentious issue:

The idea that observation can be pure and unsullied (and therefore beyond dispute)—and that great scientists are, by implication, people who can free their minds from the constraints of surrounding culture and reach conclusions strictly by untrammeled experiment and observation, joined with clear and universal logical reasoning—has often harmed science by turning the empiricist method into a shibboleth. The irony of this situation fills me with a mixture of pain for a derailed (if impossible) ideal and amusement for human foibles—as a method devised to undermine proof by authority becomes, in its turn, a species of dogma itself. Thus, if only to honor the truism that liberty requires eternal vigilance, we must also act as watchdogs to debunk the authoritarian form of the empiricist myth—and to reassert the quintessentially human theme that scientists can work only within their social