The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [62]
For twenty years before Copernicus’ theory was published it was discussed all over Europe. Ironically, the earliest attacks came from the Protestants. Luther said: ‘People give ear to an upstart astronomer who strove to show that the Earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon… the fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy.’ His fellow revolutionary, Philipp Melanchthon, went further: ‘Fools seize the lover of novelty.’ Calvin looked to the Bible: ‘The Bible says “the world is also stablished that it cannot be moved“.’
The Papal Commission for the reform of the calendar, under the chairmanship of Pope Gregory XIII. Note the up to date astronomical instrument on the table, and the signs of the zodiac indicated by the speaker’s pointer.
The Roman Church, sitting in council at Trento only two years after Copernicus’ work was published by the astronomer’s pupil Johannes Rheticus, a professor at Luther’s university, accepted the text without reaction. It was unconcerned with the apparently revolutionary nature of Copernican thought. The official view had been expressed by the Dutch astronomer Gemma Frisius, in 1541:
It hardly matters to me whether he claims that the Earth moves or that it is immobile, so long as we get an absolutely exact knowledge of the movements of the stars and of the periods of their movements, and so long as both are reduced to altogether exact calculation.
Copernican theory was valued for its mathematical elegance. It made the heavens available to accurate and repeatable observation. In his introductory letter to the Pope, Copernicus himself had noted that previous attempts to put mathematical order into the sky were in confusion, with some people using one system, some another. His aim, he avowed, would be to bring order. Rheticus, defending him in 1540, said: ‘… the hypotheses of my learned teacher correspond so well to the phenomena that they can be mutually interchanged, like a good definition of the thing defined.rsquo;
Another academic, Giovanni Pontano, writing in 1512, had said:
The circles (spheres, etc.) are not seen because they do not, in fact, exist. Thought alone sees them, when intent on understanding or teaching. But in the sky there are no such lines or intersections. They have been thought up by extraordinarily ingenious men with a view to teaching and demonstration, since, apart from such a procedure, it would be well-nigh impossible to convey astronomical science… to others.
Even earlier, the medieval scholar John of Jandun had expressed the general opinion of his time thus:
Even if the epicycles… did exist, the celestial motions and the other phenomena would occur just as they do now… Provided [the astronomer] has the means of correctly determining the places and motions of the planets, he does not enquire whether or not this means that there really are such orbits as he assumes up in the sky… for a consequence can be true even when its antecedent is false.
With that final scholastic flourish John explains Church unconcern. All that mattered was to ‘save the appearances’ of the planetary and other celestial events. It was not considered likely that what Copernicus was proposing would be regarded as physical reality.
The task of astronomy since early times had been to explain the celestial irregularities in terms that fitted with the theory of circular motion. The attraction of the Copernican theory was that it reduced the heavenly motions to simplicity and uniformity and was easy to use. Copernican views were not anathematised because they were seen as a convenient mathematical fiction. Only God actually knew that the heavens behaved as the Bible and Aristotle said, whether or not