Zero - Charles Seife [35]
The power of Copernicus’s idea was in its simplicity. Instead of placing Earth at the center of the universe filled with epicycle-filled clockworks, Copernicus imagined that the sun was at the center instead, and the planets moved in simple circles. Planets would seem to zoom backward as Earth overtook them; no epicycles were needed. Though Copernicus’s system didn’t agree with the data completely—the circular orbits were wrong, though the heliocentric idea was correct—it was much simpler than the Ptolemaic system. The earth revolved around the sun. Terra non est centra mundi.
Nicholas of Cusa and Nicolaus Copernicus cracked open the nutshell universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy. No longer was the earth comfortably ensconced in the center of the universe; there was no shell containing the cosmos. The universe went on into infinity, dotted with innumerable worlds, each inhabited by mysterious creatures. But how could Rome claim to be the seat of the one true Church if its authority could not extend to other solar systems? Were there other popes on other planets? It was a grim prospect for the Catholic Church, especially since it was beginning to have trouble with its subjects on even its own world.
Copernicus published his magnum opus on his deathbed—in 1543, just before the church started clamping down on new ideas. Copernicus’s book, De Revolutionibus, was even dedicated to Pope Paul III. However, the church was under attack. As a result, the new ideas—the questioning of Aristotle—could no longer be tolerated.
The attack on the church began in earnest in 1517, when a constipated German monk nailed a list of complaints to the door of the church in Wittenberg. (Luther’s constipation was legendary. Some scholars believe that his great revelation about faith came to him when he was sitting on the privy. “Luther’s release from the constricting bondage of fear corresponded to the release of his bowels,” notes one text, commenting on this theory.) This was the beginning of the Reformation; intellectuals everywhere began to reject the authority of the pope. By the 1530s, in a quest to ensure an orderly succession to the throne, Henry VIII had spurned the authority of the pope, declaring himself the head of the English clergy.
Figure 19: Epicycles, retrograde motion, and heliocentrism
The Catholic Church had to strike back. Though it had been experimenting with other philosophies for several centuries, when threatened with schism it turned orthodox once again. It fell back upon its orthodox teachings—the Aristotelian-based philosophies of scholars like Saint Augustine and Boethius, as well as Aristotle’s proof of God. No longer could cardinals and clerics question the ancient doctrines. Zero was a heretic. The nutshell universe had to be accepted; the void and the infinite must be rejected. One of the key groups that spread these teachings was founded in the 1530s: the Jesuit order, a collection of highly trained intellectuals well suited to attack Protestantism. The church had other tools to fight heresy as well; the Spanish Inquisition started burning Protestants in 1543, the same year Copernicus died and the same year that Pope Paul III issued the Index of forbidden books. The Counter-Reformation was the church’s attempt to rebuild the old order by crushing the new ideas. An idea embraced by Bishop Étienne Tempier in the thirteenth century and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century could mean a death sentence in the sixteenth century.
This is what happened to the unfortunate Giordano Bruno. In the 1580s, Bruno, a former Dominican cleric, published On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, where he suggested, like Nicholas of Cusa, that the earth was not the center of the universe and that there were infinite worlds like our own. In 1600 he was burned at the stake. In 1616 the famous Galileo Galilei, another Copernican, was ordered by the church to cease his scientific investigations. The same year, Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus