The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [71]
Investigation of different ways of measuring casks had led Kepler to divide the casks into a large number of parallel horizontal sections, each one circular. The circles themselves were then divided into many parallel sections. Lines at right angles to the end of each section turned it into an easily measured rectangle. Adding triangles whose bases were the narrow ends of the rectangle filled most of the area between the rectangle ends and the orbit curve. An infinite number of such sections and triangles would thus reduce the unmeasurable area between the triangle and the curve to an infinitely small amount and the calculation of the area of the orbit to virtually total accuracy. It was this system of infinitesimals which Kepler used during the later astronomical calculations of orbit which brought him to the third of his ‘laws’, in which he showed that the duration of a planetary orbit was related to its distance from the sun. The orbit time squared was equal to the distance cubed.
Kepler’s laws removed the planets from the community of celestial bodies. They also revealed a solar system in which the various parts were mathematically related to each other. The system worked as Kepler had wanted it to: ‘like clockwork’. The only problem remaining was the mathematics. Even with Kepler’s new geometrical technique, calculation was dauntingly difficult and time-consuming.
The solution was to come from another Protestant country. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century there were few places in which the intellectual spirit was able to have free rein. Spain was in the totalitarian grip of the incompetent Philip III. Germany was in the throes of the Thirty Years War that would almost destroy her and reduce the population as effectively as had the Black Death. Of the northern Catholic countries, France was recovering from her own religious wars, the last of which was to lead to the great exodus of the Protestant Huguenots to England and Holland. Nominally under the rule of Louis XIII, the country was in reality dominated by his minister, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Duke of Richelieu. The cardinal was Secretary of State by 1612 and Chief Minister by 1624. Richelieu’s aim was to create a strong, absolute monarchy and to do so he vastly increased the size of the army, raised taxes, strengthened the fleet and mobilised the Church to support the claims of the monarchy to rule without opposition since the Parlement had relinquished what authority it had held to the supreme Royal Council.
In the general atmosphere of repression and censorship, where even the proceedings of the new French Academy were controlled by the state, the only jarring note was sounded by the disagreement between the government and the Jesuits, whose interference with internal affairs of state would eventually lead to their expulsion. In the meantime, internal troubles kept the Order too busy to be effective against the small number of free-thinkers that grew up in the early years of the seventeenth century.
For reasons of safety these French libertarians held their first meetings by correspondence. The first ‘intelligencer’, or postal go-between, was a well to do southerner from Aix-en-Provence called Peiresc, who had contact with the academics in Florence. He collected scientific texts and gave observation parties at his home, where he kept a telescope. Through the newly improved French postal services he brought together over five hundred contributors from as far apart as Aleppo and Liibeck.
In 1617, in Paris, the historian and Member of Parliament J. A. de Thou held daily meetings and discussions in the library of his home, said to house the richest collection of scientific works in the city. When