The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [156]
Galileo’s view had hit similar obstacles in 1612, two years after he had gained instant fame as a result of the publication of his telescopic observations. At the time Galileo was engaged in an argument about why objects floated on water. This apparently innocuous matter was to raise a tide of opposition to his views that would eventually engulf him. It began with an argument between Galileo and two professors at Pisa about the properties of cold. In particular, the argument centred on the behaviour of ice, which floated.
Galileo’s opponents, quoting Aristotle, said that ice floated because of its broad, flat shape, which was unable to overcome the resistance of the water and sink to the bottom. Lodovico delle Colombe produced supporting evidence in the form of flat slivers and small balls of ebony, both of the same weight: the slivers, he claimed, floated, while the balls sank. Galileo, in a reply published in 1612 and replete with experimental observation, argued that what mattered was the heaviness of the object. If it were heavier than the water it displaced, it would sink; if not, it would float. The shape was irrelevant. The ebony slivers had also floated, Galileo argued, because they had not been completely wetted.
This apparently harmless piece of wrangling, written in Italian rather than Latin, almost immediately ran to four editions and caused Galileo immense harm. The fact was that he had struck at the roots of Aristotelianism. If Aristotle were wrong in one aspect, the entire fabric of his system of nature must lie open to question. Early seventeenth-century Catholic society rested on Aristotelian foundations. In questioning belief in the system and obedience to its concept of a hierarchy subject to the Church, Galileo was attacking the very fabric of society. The Discourse on Floating Bodies was politically and theologically revolutionary in its implications, and as such was to be suppressed.
It is these structure-generated limitations on the freedom of action in science which set the boundaries beyond which it is unsafe to go. Within those boundaries the structure also dictates what research is to be considered socially or philosophically desirable.
In the England of the 1660s there was considerable fear of a return to the chaos and bloodshed of the recent Civil War, the first domestic revolution the country had ever experienced, which had also involved the execution of a king who had claimed, like all others before him, to rule by Divine Right. Surrounded by a predominantly Catholic and antagonistic Europe, England’s prosperity and strength had at all costs to be built up. In 1660 the Royal Society was founded. Its mandate was to encourage experimental science to produce inventions and techniques which would aid the development and extension of trade and industry, make England richer and provide jobs for the discontented 316 poor.
From Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, 1667, an illustration celebrating the beginning of the society. On the pedestal is a bust of the founder, Charles II, king and, more important, head of the Anglican Church.
One of the founders of the Royal Society was Robert Boyle, a confirmed experimentalist and leader of the empirical school of natural science. Boyle rejected the Aristotelian and scholastic view dominant on the Continent which held that logical argument was sufficient proof of a case. For Boyle any theory that could not be experimentally observed and tested was not proven.
One of the major topics of scientific argument at the time was the vacuum. Aristotelians denied its existence because, they said, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum.’They believed this was why water could be sucked up a tube, whereas Boyle claimed that it was due to the effects of air pressure on the surface of the liquid at the bottom pushing the water into the vacuum created by suction. However, Boyle’s stance in favour of the vacuum was taken for other than scientific reasons.
If the universe were filled with matter, as Aristotle had said, there would be no room for a vacuum. If this