The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [149]
Perspective geometry provided the tool with which to measure anything, at any distance. It made possible the creation of physical forms of expression, including architecture, according to proportionate scales. Balance and harmony became the standard of excellence. As the new system of measurement spread, it was applied to the planet. Unknown areas of the earth could be scaled and more easily examined. The universe lay open to exploration: the New World was discovered. In the new philosophy, nature could be described in terms of measurement which related all things to a common standard.
In the middle of the fifteenth century a German goldsmith called Gutenberg superseded memory with the printing press. In the earlier, oral world which the press helped to destroy, daily life had been intensely parochial. Knowledge and awareness of the continuity of social institutions had rested almost solely on the ability of the old to recall past events and customs. Elders were the source of authority. The need for extensive use of memory made poetry the carrier of most information, for merchants as much as for university students. In this world all experience was personal: horizons were small, the community was inward-looking. What existed in the outside world was a matter of hearsay.
The earliest illustration of a printing press, 1507.
Aristotle’s universe of crystal spheres.
Above: Tycho Brahe’s drawing of the new star of 1572 (I). This led directly to Newton’s calculations (below), which showed that the planets obeyed mathematical laws.
Printing brought a new kind of isolation, as the communal experience diminished. But the technology also brought greater contact with the world outside. The rate of change accelerated. With printing came the opportunity to exchange information without the need for physical encounter. Above all, indexing permitted cross-reference, a prime source of change. The ‘fact’was born, and with it came specialisation and the beginning of a vicarious form of experience common to us all today.
The Copernican revolution brought a fundamental change in the attitude to nature. The Aristotelian cosmos it supplanted had consisted of a series of concentric crystal spheres, each carrying a planet, while the outermost carried the fixed stars. Observation had shown that the heavenly bodies appeared to circle the earth unceasingly and unchangingly, so Aristotle made them perfect and incorruptible, in contrast to earth, where things decayed and died. Natural terrestrial motion was rectilinear, because objects fell straight to earth. In the sky all motion was circular.
The two forms of existence, earthly and celestial, were incommensurable. Everything that happened in the cosmos was initiated by the Prime Mover, God, whose direct intervention was necessary to maintain the system. At the centre of it all was the earth and man, fashioned by God in His own image.
Copernicus shattered this view of the cosmos. He placed, the earth in solar orbit and opened the way to an infinite universe. Man was no longer the centre of all. The cosmic hierarchy that had given validity to the social structure was gone. Nature was open to examination and was discovered to operate according to mathematical laws. Planets and apples obeyed the same force of gravity; Newton wrote equations that could be used to predict behaviour. Modern science was born, and with it the confident individualism of the modern world. In a clockwork universe we now held the key.
In the eighteenth century the world found a new form of energy which gave us the ability to change the physical shape of the environment and released us from reliance on the weather. Until then, all life had been dependent on agricultural output. Land was the fundamental means of exchange and source of power. Society was divided into small agricultural or fishing communities in which the relationship between worker and master was