John Heilbron: On Galileo and the Catholic Church

Pope Francis: Wave of the Future?
Photo by Wally Santana
Associated Press

Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein, in his article "Climate of Change: The Catholic Church's Dance with Science" (Associated Press, May 27, 2015), quotes my history-of-science professor from my Berkeley days, John Heilbron, on the Church's relationship with science:

The Catholic Church "has got an uneven and not always congenial relationship with science," said science historian John Heilbron, who wrote a biography of Galileo. But after ticking off some of the advances in science that the church sponsored, the retired University of California Berkeley professor emeritus added, "probably on balance, the Catholic Church's exchange with what we call science is pretty good."

So . . . why the brouhaha over Galileo way back when?

Galileo was put under house arrest for the rest of his life after he continued to publish work showing the Earth orbiting the sun, despite warnings from the pope and the Inquisition. But it was more than a theological issue, said Heilbron . . . . It was partially a personality conflict between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII, former friends. The pontiff felt betrayed personally by the astronomer because Galileo had promised to include in a postscript the pope's philosophy that contradicted Galileo's work, Heilbron said. Galileo didn't. And it was also about geopolitics, because the church was trying to fight back against the Protestant Reformation and felt the need to show that it would not permit dissent, he said.

This means that while the Catholic Church might not necessarily have been against science, the Church didn't especially distinguish itself in the Galileo story. For readers interested in more about this story, see my blog entry on Heilbron's biography of Galileo

Or check out Amazon, where I've also posted the review.

John Heilbron's Galileo: A Book Review

Galileo

John L. Heilbron

(Image from Amazon)

To write a biography is to take the measure of a man's life, but what is the proper yardstick for a man of Galileo's stature? John Heilbron's biography of the man, Galileo, shows that several yardsticks are needed, and of various metrics. There was, naturally, Galileo the philosopher, what we would today call a scientist. And, of course, Galileo the mathematician. Certainly, Galileo the inventor. But there was Galileo the theologian, too. Also, Galileo the musician. And Galileo the literary critic. As well as Galileo the author of literature. Even Galileo the literary character. Not to mention Galileo the bon vivant! But which one was the real Galileo? Heilbron doesn't explicitly raise this particular question, but he nevertheless answers it in the rich detail provided on Galileo's life. Each of these was the real Galileo. Or rather, each was a shade to Galileo's character, and Heilbron uses all of these shades to color his lively portrait of the man.

Galileo inherited some of his character from his father, Vincenzo, a musician and music theorist who took issue with the Ptolemaic music theory defended and propagated by his music teacher, Gioseffè Zarlino. Heilbron offers the significant observation that "Vincenzo Galilei was a theorist of integrity" who "did not just reject authority but showed by 'sensory experience and necessary demonstration,' as Galileo would say, just where the authority went astray" (page 9). By his father, then, Galileo was raised to question authorities such as Ptolemy, but in a rigorous manner, by the use of empiricism and logic. Not that Galileo was rigorous to a fault. He was an accomplished gambler who "occasionally bluffed by raising the stakes on a losing hand" and whose "later claims about experimental results and theoretical insights contained a quantity of bluff" (page 24). As Heilbron notes, this raises a question: "Did experiment drive theory or theory experiment?" The answer:

Sometimes the one and sometimes the other, but also, and not rarely, neither. Galileo could stick to an attractive theory in the face of overwhelming experimental refutation. During his period of greatest creativity in the science of motion, from 1602 to 1609, he probably jumped from theory to experiment and from one idea to another, circled back and forth, inventing the form of descriptive mathematical physics, guided by little more than his buon gusto. The principal outcome was a somber, limited, exact science, and a few striking results, advertised as more exact than they were, to serve as a replacement for one chapter of the vast, colorful, diffuse library of Aristotelian philosophy. (pages 126-127)

The most fascinating point that Heilbron makes is that Galileo was guided by the aesthetic principle of buon gusto, that is, good taste! Was Galileo more artist than scientist? In a sense, yes, and often self-consciously so. By the time that he wrote his works The Assayer (1623) and Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632), he appears to have been more interested in making a splashy literary impact than in writing science. Heilbron explains the 'nonscientific' character of these two 'literary' works by Galileo:

[W]hat shall we make of the extravagance of the Pisan Drop, the creation point of the planets, said to answer perfectly to calculations? Or of the bizzarria (oddity), to which we will return, that a freely falling body does not accelerate but only changes its direction of motion? Salviati [i.e., Galileo] takes the trouble to demonstrate this bizzarria and Sagredo accepts it as a marvel. Modern readers also wonder at it. Was Galileo, the master of experiment, the facile geometer, the slayer of Aristotle, dishonest, as Arthur Koestler would have him, or just a charlatan, as Paul Feyerabend preferred? Neither. Galileo as stage manager is the creator of ingenious fancies, mathematical caprices, an epic poem, a set of stories. Sagredo asks Salviati to describe the curve of a freely falling body in space; the masked Galileo [i.e., Salviati] replies with the clever nonsensical bizzarria; nature too is part of the masquerade. Galileo's comedic talent reached full strength in the barbs, jokes, word plays, paradoxes, irony, satire, and gross caricature of the Assayer. As if to signal its epistemological level, Galileo inserted more quotations from Ariosto than he did in any other of his books. (pages 230-231)

Heilbron's point is that Galileo wasn't writing science as we understand it today. He was marshalling the power of rhetorical techniques and poetical figures, along with accepted literary convention, to overwhelm his opponents, all of which helps explain the 'martyr' of early modern science who many times seems not very scientific to us now. Indeed, Galileo often hardly even seems particularly reasonable. One surprising problem with Galileo as a person was, ironically, his limited horizon, for as Heilbron remarks in a chapter titled "Miscalculated Risks":

We are reminded again [by Galileo's social connections] how provincial or peninsular Galileo's purview was: his subject may have been the universe, but his audience was a few dozen highy-placed literate Italians whose good opinion he prized. (page 245)

Regardless what others might think, these "literate Italians" would appreciate him as a literate man, even as a literary figure, who knows how to turn a phrase -- or better, a quote from his favorite poem -- against a 'dishonorable' challenger like Lotario Sarsi Sigenzano, the pen name of Orazio Grassi, a Jesuit astronomer and mathematician who (legitimately, in fact) disputed some of Galileo's views, for example, on the nature of comets, Galileo not being the sort of man to share celestial glory with others who dared to explore his heavens:

Quoting a line from Ariosto, Galileo intimated that he was condescending to argue over truths he already possessed. Noblesse oblige. The line referred to a fight between Orlando and Mandricardo over Orlando's sword. "Mine [though] it is by right, let us stage a chivalrous duel for it." (page 245)

What is significant in this is Galileo's manner of casting himself as a medieval knight in a romance, specifically Charlemagne's knight Orlando (also known as Roland), for at issue are not so much points of truth as points of honor. Intellectual opponents are not merely incorrect, they are unworthy!

In a further joust with Sarsi (Grassi), therefore, Galileo constructs a literary scene in which he overwhelms this 'unworthy' opponent and scornfully advises him, "Therefore yield, and be silent," concerning which Heilbron dryly observes, "That is the way a knight does science." The real life Grassi does not fall silent, but publishes a rejoinder, a challenge to which Galileo replies . . . not at all. Why not? Because Galileo's friends, some of those "literate Italians" who mattered, "judged that he had saved their honor and his" own (page 252).

The chapter that follows this one in Heilbron's biography of Galileo is titled "Vainglory." Galileo, as the proud knight Orlando, sensitive to slights, loses all perspective, falls victim to his overweening pride, and meets with a tragic conclusion in a mad, furious fight with the Church that he cannot win and could have avoided. But avoidance would have come at a price. While Pope Urban VIII had allowed for Galileo to advocate the use of Copernican theory as a device for calculating the apparent motions of the heavens, the theory could not be defended as literally, physically true. Actually, the Pope went a bit further than that, insisting that God, in His omnipotence and infinite wisdom, may in fact have used any of a potentially infinite possible structures for the cosmic mechanism hidden behind the facade that we empirically perceive with our eyes. This was the Pope's position, a variant on theological voluntarism (i.e., God's free will), which has a rather long history in Christianity. Galileo seems not to have liked the argument, but he put the Pope's position into the mouth of one of the three characters in his Dialogue, the character named Simplicio, the simpleton who supports the traditional, earth-centered cosmos that was a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle (even though the Pope's view is not, strictly considered, even Simplicio's position). But why didn't Galileo bend his knee on this point and express as his own the Pope's view on theological voluntarism? Heilbron suggests:

Had Galileo written such words, philosophers, mathematicians, and astrologers whose theories implicitly limited God's past and future actions would find themselves opposed to the greatest mathematician in Italy, and perhaps the world. But Galileo could not speak Urban's words. That would have amounted to a denial of his mission. (page 304)

What was this mission? To defend the truth of Copernicanism! For Galileo, Copernicanism was the physically correct system to hold, for both rational and empirical reasons. Galileo was, implicitly anyway, opposed to theological voluntarism. But why opposed? Did he consider as theologically unworthy the belief that God would offer a cosmic facade misleading scientists to the false conviction that one cosmic system is preferable to another, that one cosmic system is physically true even though it isn't true at all? Some things remain unclear about Galileo's views, but his lack of clarity was the sort of thing that raised Church suspicions and brought Galileo to be "vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine that is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture" (page 317). Under that severe pressure, Galileo recanted.

Heilbron offers a sympathetic perspective on Galileo in his moment before the Inquisition, but he never overlooks Galileo's flaws and limitations, and he treats the great man's career with wit and irony, precisely the sort of approach that a man like Galileo would understand. But Heilbron also judges with appreciation in that irony as he considers whether or not Galileo is headed for sainthood, an inquiry based on the Catholic Church's revaluation of Galileo's 'reform' of scriptural hermeneutics in a way that placed his belief "that human beings can reach truth by the light of reason" above Pope Urban VIII's denial "that humans can recognize truth unaided by revelation" (page 364), as well as on the reverential treatment of Galileo's bones as 'relics' by various devotees of that man:

It might be objected that Galileo performed no miracles. What then were the miracles of Thomas Aquinas? In fact, Galileo performed a stupendous miracle. He obliterated the ancient distinction between the celestial and terrestrial realms, raised the earth to the heavens, made the planets so many earths, and revealed that our moon is not unique in the universe. Not since creation had there been such a refashioning. Then there was the miracle of himself, a rare combination of talents and personalities, who, despite mania and depression, arthritis, gout, hernias, blindness, and overindulgence in wine and wit, lived to write three books -- the Messenger, the Dialogue, and the Discourse -- any one of which would have given him enduring fame.

According to Galileo's mechanics, the slightest force can move the greatest weight given sufficient time. The direction of motion is clear. Who can doubt that within another 400 years the church will recognize Galileo's divine gifts, atone for his sufferings, ignore his arrogance, and make him a saint? (page 365)

Take these remarks with a hefty grain of salt, given the irony, but there's a pinch of sincerity revealed in these final words by Heilbron, properly interpreted with the aid of reason. Note, by the way, that this biography, published in the 400th anniversary year of the publication of the Starry Messenger, ends its story, appropriately enough for a book dedicated to a man concerned with the motions of the earth, on a page signifying both diurnal and annual motions, namely, page 365.

I heartily recommend this biography by Heilbron to anyone interested in the man Galileo. Some of the mathematics went above my head despite my background in the history of science, but the formulas and reasoning are part of Galileo's life, and Heilbron explains them with admirable clarity. Moreover, one need not understand all the technical details to appreciate Galileo's achievements, for the context provides sufficient information to offer readers an understanding of Galileo the philosopher (scientist), the mathematician, the inventor, the theologian, the musician, the literary critic, the author of literature, the literary character, and the bon vivant.

In short, an excellent, informative, entertaining book.

The Canonization of Saint Galileo?

Galileo Galilei (1851)

Aristodemo Costoli

Uffizi Gallery, Florence

(Image from The Museums of Florence)

I've finished reading John Heilbron's biography of Galileo, which ends on a half-ironic but also half-serious note 'prophesying' sainthood for Galileo, based on the Catholic Church's revaluation of Galileo's 'reform' of scriptural hermeneutics in a way that placed his belief "that human beings can reach truth by the light of reason" above Pope Urban VIII's denial "that humans can recognize truth unaided by revelation," as well as on the treatment of Galileo's bones as 'relics' by various devotees of that man:

It might be objected that Galileo performed no miracles. What then were the miracles of Thomas Aquinas? In fact, Galileo performed a stupendous miracle. He obliterated the ancient distinction between the celestial and terrestrial realms, raised the earth to the heavens, made the planets so many earths, and revealed that our moon is not unique in the universe. Not since creation had there been such a refashioning. Then there was the miracle of himself, a rare combination of talents and personalities, who, despite mania and depression, arthritis, gout, hernias, blindness, and overindulgence in wine and wit, lived to write three books -- the Messenger, the Dialogue, and the Discourse -- any one of which would have given him enduring fame.

According to Galileo's mechanics, the slightest force can move the greatest weight given sufficient time. The direction of motion is clear. Who can doubt that within another 400 years the church will recognize Galileo's divine gifts, atone for his sufferings, ignore his arrogance, and make him a saint? (Heilbron, Galileo, pages 364-365)

Heilbron is a master of irony, so take these remarks with a hefty grain of salt, but there's a pinch of sincerity revealed in his words, properly interpreted with the aid of reason.

This book may facilitate in the irony of that canonization, which has already begun by popular acclaim and artistic endeavor, the latter of which Heilbron perhaps alludes to in observing that Aristodemo Costoli depicts "Galileo as an Old Testament prophet . . . in the Loggia of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence" (Heilbron, Galileo, Plate 16; see also above image).

Note, by the way, that this biography, published in the 400th anniversary year of the publication of the Starry Messenger, ends, appropriately enough for a book dedicated to a man concerned with the motions of the earth, on a page signifying both diurnal and annual motions, namely, page 365.

John Milton and Galileo Galilei: Curious Musings

Galileo's Telescope

(Image from Norton)

The Norton Anthology site that I've linked to above claims the image to be Galileo's telescope, but the link also says 18th century, and Galileo died on January 8, 1642, so this might be the image of a copy.

Whatever the fact of that matter, we find reference to one of Galileo's telescopes in Paradise Lost 1.283-291, which describes Satan in Hell shortly after he has awakened from the concussion sustained in his long fall from Heaven. He has just spoken to his partner in crime, Beelzebub, and is moving toward the shore of Hell's fiery lake:

He scarce had ceas't when the superiour Fiend
Was moving toward the shoar; his ponderous shield
Ethereal temper, massy, large and round,
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands,
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe. (PL 1.283-291)

[Thomas H. Luxon, ed. The Milton Reading Room, February 2011]

This is a curious place for a telescope, even if only as the vehicle for a figure of speech, but it does resonate with the theme of Milton's epic poem, the demonically all-too-human attempt to scale the heights of heaven and achieve divinity . . . prematurely.

As is well known, in the year 1638, Milton met the old, blind Galileo, similarly fallen from great heights and likewise somewhat confounded by the events. John Heilbron thought the meeting worth noting in his biography of Galileo:

To lighten his [Galileo's] darkening days there remained of his nuclear family his son Vincenzo and Vincenzo's wife and children, and his estranged daughter, Suor Angelica. Vincenzo shared his father's interests in mechanical devices and poetry. We already know one consequence of this alliance, the first semi-practical pendulum clock. Another was a meeting between Galileo and Milton. The English poet had attended a literary society in Florence to which Vincenzo belonged. With Vincenzo as intermediary, Milton satisfied his wish to see the famous man who could not see, "the starry Galileo with his woes," "the famous Galileo, grown old a prisoner of the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Domenican licensers thought." (Heilbron, Galileo, page 353)

Heilbron is quoting from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (4.54) and Milton's Areopagitica, a very literate thing to do in a history of science text (cf. Heilbron, Galileo, page 448, note 128). I wasn't actually surprised by this, for Heilbron had a literate hand in an article that I've written on the seasons in Paradise Lost. To understand the puzzling seasons of Edenic Paradise, I had to deal with the starry heavens, the solar position, and the lunar sphere in a cosmos of unerring planets and therefore needed assistance with some of the technical details. I didn't realize at the time that Heilbron was also dealing with Milton's epic poem, but around that same time, he was citing a passage from Milton relevant the status of curiosity in the Christian tradition. Heilbron did so with respect to the issue of divine "voluntarism (so called for stressing God's will, voluntas) as a sort of legal restraint on [the] philosophizing" engaged in by Galileo around 1616 in elaborating his (erroneous) theory that the tides were a consequence of the earth's motion:

The doctrine [of voluntarism] was not fresh, as it goes back to the time of Adam, who had it from the Angel Raphael. Shut up the book of nature, Raphael had advised Adam, after you have reckoned the months and years and seasons, for God will not reward further researches.

From man or angel the great Architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets to be scanned by them who ought
Rather admire; or if they list to try
Conjecture, he his fabric of the heav'ns
Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide. (Heilbron, Galileo, page 222)

Heilbron is quoting Paradise Lost 7.72-78 as a residue of the warning against excessive curiosity in the Christian tradition. I say 'residue', for as Heilbron points out, "Conjectures that provoke divine chortles do not make heresies" (Heilbron, Galileo, page 222). But if not, what's that telescope doing in Hell?

Anyway, I now understand why Heilbron went to the excessive trouble of helping me on technical aspects concerning the seasons of Paradise -- the issue was close to his own scholarly heart. But I'm curious about his citation of Milton here with respect to the Catholic Church's position on divine voluntarism and curiosity. There is a formal equivalence between Adam's desire in Paradise Lost for astronomical knowledge in his prelapsarian state and Galileo's desire for astronomical knowledge prior to his 'lapse' as a good Catholic, for both are curious about the true physical structure of the cosmos, and both are cautioned against delving into divine matters in which they might err since God is arbitrarily free -- that divine voluntas! -- to have constituted the cosmos in any way that He may have seen fit, even in ways such that cosmic appearances hide the physical reality and mislead human observers. But the Catholic Church didn't laugh at Galileo's 'errant' philosophy, unlike Raphael's more readily amused deity.

Which raises another question: Is God generally thought to have a sense of humor in the Christian tradition?

Galileo contra Theological Voluntarism

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

Galileo Galilei

(Image from Wikipedia)

John Heilbron's biography of Galileo is now moving toward the crisis of this scientist's life, Pope Urban VIII's reaction to the publication in 1632 of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in which Galileo offers Copernicanism as an explanation for the tides, though his argument here was to prove erroneous. The Pope did not object to Galileo's book so much as to Galileo's obvious conviction that Copernicanism was true. While the Pope had allowed for Galileo to advocate the use of Copernican theory as a device for calculating the apparent motions of the heavens, the theory could not be defended as literally, physically true. Actually, the Pope went a bit further than that, insisting that God, in His omnipotence and infinite wisdom, may in fact have used any of a potentially infinite possible structures for the cosmic mechanism hidden behind the facade that we empirically perceive with our eyes. Galileo seems not to have liked the argument, but he put the Pope's position into the mouth of one of the three characters in his Dialogue:

As to the discourses we have held, and especially this last one concerning the reasons for the ebbing and flowing of the ocean, I am really not entirely convinced; but from such feeble ideas of the matter as I have formed, I admit that your thoughts seem to me more ingenious than many others I have heard. I do not therefore consider them true and conclusive; indeed, keeping always before my mind's eye a most solid doctrine that I once heard from a most eminent and learned person, and before which one must fall silent, I know that if asked whether God in His infinite power and wisdom could have conferred upon the watery element its observed reciprocating motion using some other means than moving its containing vessels, both of you would reply that He could have, and that He would have known how to do this in many ways which are unthinkable to our minds. From this I forthwith conclude that, this being so, it would be excessive boldness for anyone to limit and restrict the Divine power and wisdom to some particular fancy of his own. (Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican, translated by Stillman Drake, University of California Press, 1967, page 464)

This was the Pope's position, a variant on theological voluntarism, which has a rather long history in Christianity. Heilbron suggests that the Pope wanted Galileo to offer as Galileo's own position, and in Galileo's own words, something like the following:

The comedy has ended. Italian honor and the reputation of the Holy Church are saved from the calumniators who would destroy our faith. But do not deduce from this happy outcome, gentle reader, that you are free to assert the absolute truth of a physical system even if the arguments in its favor seem unanswerable. For as I learned long ago from His Holiness, any such assertion would derogate from the Omnipotence of God, who in His wisdom and power can do or make anything that does not involve Him in a contradiction. The argument of His Holiness is in fact and logic unanswerable. A true Christian must bend the knee and fall silent before it. (Heilbron, Galileo, 2010, pages 303-304)

This variant of theological voluntarism is not the most radical sort, for it still presupposes a rational deity, one who does not contradict himself -- which is, I have read, different from Islamic voluntarism, which does not even limit Allah rationally to the principle of noncontradiction, but that's neither here nor there in Galileo's case. But even this limited voluntarism seems not to Galileo's liking, for he did not write these words and express them as his own position. Instead, he expressed the Pope's view as the view of the character named Simplicio, the simpleton in the Dialogue who supports the traditional, earth-centered cosmos that was a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle (even though the Pope's view is not, strictly considered, even Simplicio's position). But why didn't Galileo bend his knee on this point and express as his own the Pope's view on theological voluntarism? Heilbron suggests:

Had Galileo written such words, philosophers, mathematicians, and astrologers whose theories implicitly limited God's past and future actions would find themselves opposed to the greatest mathematician in Italy, and perhaps the world. But Galileo could not speak Urban's words. That would have amounted to a denial of his mission. (Heilbron, Galileo, 2010, page 304)

What was this mission? To defend the truth of Copernicanism! For Galileo, Copernicanism was the physically correct system to hold, for both rational and empirical reasons. Galileo was, implicitly anyway, opposed to theological voluntarism. But why opposed? Did he consider as unworthy the belief that God would offer a cosmic facade that misleads scientists to the conviction that one cosmic system is preferable to another, that one cosmic system is physically true?

I do not know what Galileo thought, but that would appear to me to be a reasonable objection to even Pope Urban VIII's limited theological voluntarism, for to concede that a rational God might nevertheless deceive our sense perceptions on the structure of the world is, arguably, inconsistent.

Such a voluntarist view is the sort that Hans Blumenberg, in his magnum opus, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, called a variant on Gnosticism, perhaps the oldest theological heresy, and hence constituting an irony of history, if anything should, that the Pope would be advocating it against the 'heresy' of Copernicanism.

Galileo as Orlando the Mad?

Orlando Furioso

Ludovico Ariosto

Guido Waldman, translator

(Image from Amazon)

I'm still reading John Heilbron's Galileo, which I think he wrote to offer a moral lesson, a point that I might have more to say about after I've finished the book, but I believe that we can begin to intuit Heilbron's intention through what follows. Heilbron implies that Galileo wrote his famous Assayer to defend his honor and impugn that of his opponents, who were -- or so Galileo feared -- trying to steal his discoveries, much as he had once defended himself against an earlier, actual plagiarist, who had offended against his "honor, fame, and merited glory," as Heilbron quotes from Galileo's Difesa of 1607 (Heilbron, Galileo, page 246)

One surprising problem with Galileo as a person was, ironically, his limited horizon, for as Heilbron remarks in a chapter titled "Miscalculated Risks":

We are reminded again [by Galileo's social connections] how provincial or peninsular Galileo's purview was: his subject may have been the universe, but his audience was a few dozen highy-placed literate Italians whose good opinion he prized. (Heilbron, Galileo, page 245)

Regardless what others might think, these "literate Italians" would appreciate him as a literate man, even as a literary figure, who knows how to turn a phrase -- or better, a quote from his favorite poem -- against a 'dishonorable' challenger like Lotario Sarsi Sigenzano, the pen name of Orazio Grassi, a Jesuit astronomer and mathematician who (legitimately, in fact) disputed some of Galileo's views, e.g., on the nature of comets, Galileo not being the sort of man to share celestial glory with others who dared to explore his heavens:

Quoting a line from Ariosto, Galileo intimated that he was condescending to argue over truths he already possessed. Noblesse oblige. The line referred to a fight between Orlando and Mandricardo over Orlando's sword. "Mine it is by right, let us stage a chivalrous duel for it." (Heilbron, Galileo, page 245)

The version of Orlando Furioso that I've looked into has "Mine though it is by right, let us stage a chivalrous duel for it" (Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, translator Waldman, Canto 23.81, page 276, italics mine), but that's a minor point. What is significant is Galileo's manner of casting himself as a medieval knight in a romance, specifically Charlemagne's knight Orlando (also known as Roland), for at issue are not so much points of truth as points of honor. Intellectual opponents are not merely incorrect, they are unworthy!

In a further joust with Sarsi (Grassi), therefore, Galileo constructs a literary scene in which he overwhelms this 'unworthy' opponent and scornfully advises him, "Therefore yield, and be silent," concerning which Heilbron dryly observes, "That is the way a knight does science." The real life Grassi does not fall silent, but publishes a rejoinder, a challenge to which Galileo replies . . . not at all. Why not? Because Galileo's friends, some of those "literate Italians" who mattered, "judged that he had saved their honor and his" own (Heilbron, Galileo, page 252).

The chapter that follows this one in Heilbron's biography of Galileo is titled "Vainglory." Galileo, as the proud knight Orlando, sensitive to slights, loses all perspective, falls victim to his overweening pride, and meets with a tragic conclusion in a mad, furious fight with the Church that he cannot win and could have avoided (or so I infer, based on the chapter title and my background in history of science).

The moral of this story? Put it into a conditional: If you want to be a good scientist, then control your pride. In short, as I've noted before with respect to Heilbron's measured dose of what Galileo most needed: "humility, humility, humility."

And not coincidentally, Heilbron casts the historian in the role of one who can draw moral lessons from history, thereby also intimating that history is worthy of serious study.

John Heilbron on Galileo as Experimentalist

"Lamp of Galileo"

Dome of the Cathedral of Pisa

Perhaps not one of Galileo's empirical observations . . .

(Image from Wikipedia)

We've just returned from Busan to Seoul on the express train, which gave me just two and a half hours to read, but I got through more of John Heilbron's biography of Galileo and found some remarks on experimental method interesting:

What has been gained [from various modern analyses of Galileo's manuscripts] is an appreciation of Galileo's skill as an experimenter. The manuscripts contain many numbers and some diagrams that suggest the experimental arrangements that produced them: pendulums, inclined planes, water clocks, free drops. Several modern Galileians have repeated these experiments and, after much cut and try, have reproduced the numbers. Their success has only enlarged the domain of mystery.

Did experiment drive theory or theory experiment? Sometimes the one and sometimes the other, but also, and not rarely, neither. Galileo could stick to an attractive theory in the face of overwhelming experimental refutation. During his period of greatest creativity in the science of motion, from 1602 to 1609, he probably jumped from theory to experiment and from one idea to another, circled back and forth, inventing the form of descriptive mathematical physics, guided by little more than his buon gusto. The principal outcome was a somber, limited, exact science, and a few striking results, advertised as more exact than they were, to serve as a replacement for one chapter of the vast, colorful, diffuse library of Aristotelian philosophy. (Heilbron, Galileo, pages 126-127)

I don't quite know what to make of this, but I find interesting that Galileo might have been guided not so much by theory or experiment as by taste. But how might taste guide the scientist toward the truth? I don't know.

But maybe Heilbron does. He has some things to say about good taste in a reference to Ludovico Antonio Muratori, a scholar of good taste, in a lecture on "Physics and History: Forged in the Baroque," starting about 48 minutes and 30 seconds into the lecture and lasting about one minute.

Ever the good pedagogue, Heilbron reduces Muratori's instructions on buon gusto to three principles for ease of remembering them, but you can go to the lecture to find out what they are, for Heilbron relates them far better than I could on this blog . . .

Women of the Knight . . .

Geisha Girls

(Image from Wikipedia)

. . . the Lord, the Earl, the Duke, and the King. The world's oldest profession also has its higher ranks the world over, e.g., Geishas in Japan, Gisaeng in Korea, and the Cortigiane Oneste in the Venice of Galileo's time, all of whom were expected to entertain men in more than the most basic sense. I've just learned from yesterday's reading in Heilbron's biography of Galileo about those highly skilled "honest courtesans":

An honest courtesan could sing and play the lute, read and write, and, in some well-studied cases, recite and compose poetry. (John Heilbron, Galileo, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, page 83)

Galileo in fact had three children with a woman named Marina Gamba to whom he never proposed marriage, though he did help her compose poems, and who may have been one of these 'honest' ladies just noted, despite never having quite made an honest man of Galileo (page 84).

I'm learning a great deal about Galileo from Heilbron's book, which is a fascinating synthesis of art and science and a thought-provoking text on the nature of scientific discovery. I begin to see why Heilbron doubts that there is just one scientific method.

More another time . . .

Bluffing with Galileo . . .

The Cardsharps, c. 1594

Caravaggio

(Image from Wikipedia)

In yesterday's post, I sang the virtues of careful empiricism and rigorous logic, values I claimed Galileo had learned from his father, Vincenzo, but Dario Rivarossa called my bluff:

relying on empiricism and rigorous logic

Maybe not that much. See Paul Feyerabend, Against Method.

Chased, chastened, and thereby more chaste, I acknowledged the overstatement:

Also, see Heilbron, further on in the biography. Galileo learned to appeal to empiricism and rigorous logic, and even use them, but he was often bluffing, which he learned from his love of gambling, and acting out in his intellectual battles the part of the proud and adventurous knight Orlando, whom he knew well from Ariosto, having memorized large sections of the poem.

Speaking of romantic heroes, I once danced with Feyerabend's inamorata and had her smiling . . .

Of course, she was also laughing at me as she smiled. But let that be. Today, I want to back up my admission on Galileo's 'more-than-rigorous' empirical rationality:

A calculation by Galileo of the relative frequencies of specific throws with three dice has survived. Its main operative result is that 10 turns up more frequently than 9 once in 108 throws. Only a frequent player could hope to use this information to advantage. As a good gambler Galileo occasionally bluffed by raising the stakes on a losing hand -- a technique he later identified with the propensity of his philosophical opponents to add reckless worthless arguments to bad ones. The criticism better applied to him. His later claims about experimental results and theoretical insights contained a quantity of bluff. (John L. Heilbron, Galileo, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, page 24)

Unfortunately, both Galileo and I got caught bluffing, and we've both now faced our separate Italian inquisitions.

But I'm not currently under house arrest. My wife and I today went out to explore her childhood neighborhood here in Daegu and took an opportunity to peer through the cracks in a gate to see the house where she lived until she began high school. We head tomorrow for Busan, which might put me offline until Sunday, but we'll see what transpires. I might manage to locate an internet connection . . .

John Heilbron on Vincenzo Galilei: Influence on Galileo

Galileo Galilei

Justus Sustermans (1636)

(Image from Wikipedia)

I'm currently reading the Galileo biography that my old UC Berkeley history of science professor John Heilbron arranged to have sent to me by Oxford University Press, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far. Indeed, I learned something interesting just yesterday about one particularly powerful influence on Galileo as an independent thinker:

Among the many cultural gurus who helped develop . . . [Galileo's] taste and character during the four years he lived at home between leaving Pisa without a degree and returning as a professor, the most influential was his father. Vincenzo Galilei was then engaged in defending the modernizing program he set out in 1581 in his Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna (1581). Musical theory needed overhauling, according to Galilei, because the current orthodoxy, as represented by [his teacher, the theorist and composer Gioseffè] Zarlino, did not correspond to practice. Zarlino accepted Ptolemy -- the same deserving Ptolemy whose cosmology Galileo would savage -- and cleaved to him although the simplest experiment would convince an educated ear that modern music did not use the Ptolemaic diatonic scale. Galilei's spokesman in his Dialogue on ancient and modern music is his patron [Giovanni de'] Bardi[, the Count of Vernio, also a composer,] who explains the matter to an astute and inquisitive mutual friend, the practical musician[, and Florentine patrician and composer,] Piero Strozzi. They agree as a condition of the discussion that "we always set aside (as Aristotle says in the eighth book of the Physics) not only authority but seemingly plausible reasoning that may be contrary to any perception of truth." Vincenzo Galilei was a theorist of integrity. He did not just reject authority but showed by "sensory experience and necessary demonstration," as Galileo would say, just where the authority went astray. (John L. Heilbron, Galileo, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pages 8-9)

The passage continues, but I halt here, for I think that we can see where Professor Heilbron is going with this passage. He's foreshadowing the son's intellectual development by demonstrating the father's. Vincenzo Galilei was a man to question intellectual authority, but one who did so with integrity, relying on empiricism and rigorous logic, without which, the questioning of authority is mere rudderless rebellion, irrational and arbitrary.

I'm reading a bit into Heilbron's text in those final words of mine, I admit, so I have yet to see what my old professor himself still has to say about the matter. Anyway, I'm learning a lot -- and wishing that I knew more about music, now that I see how important it was for Galileo.

More another time . . .

John L. Heilbron: Galileo

John L. Heilbron

(Image from UC Berkeley)

This year is the 400th anniversary of Galileo's Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), and in celebration of this date, my old history-of-science professor John Heilbron has published his biography of Galileo, fittingly titled Galileo, though I've only just discovered this fact today by reading yesterday's International Herald Tribune. The historian of science Owen Gingerich reviews the book in that paper, but the same review appeared earlier as his New York Times article "Starry Messenger" (December 24, 2010) and has mostly positive things to say:

Heilbron, an emeritus professor of the history of science at Berkeley, is . . . fine-grained in his approach, leavening his account with wit and irony.

That sounds like Heilbron.

Readers who make it through the occasional eye-glazing geometrical digression in J. L. Heilbron's "Galileo" will not be surprised to find that the author’s extensive output includes a fresh explication of Euclid.

That sounds like Heilbron, too, but it's a good thing. And glazed eyes aside, if only Galileo himself had been as attentive to such detail, or at least more careful in whom he ridiculed and whom he outraged, for he needn't have been placed under house arrest for views that weren't especially unorthodox:

Heilbron . . . makes no big issue of any religious unorthodoxies on Galileo's part beyond his Copernicism, though surely there must have been some . . . . [H]e doesn't see any secret unbelief underneath the public Catholicism, noting in passing that when Galileo, near the end of his life, was under a strict house arrest on charges of heresy, Urban VIII granted him special permission to attend Mass at a nearby church.

Everyone agrees that Galileo was an incorrigible egotist, so full of himself that he repeatedly misjudged his ability to persuade the authorities of his own opinions. His attempt via the Jesuit astronomers in 1615-16 to convince the Vatican backfired . . . . Heilbron [is] . . . sharply critical of Galileo's unnecessary alienation of the Jesuits, and . . . in particular highlights Galileo's scientific fumbles, both in the debates with the Jesuits and later in his controversial "Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems" (1632). As he wryly comments, "It was not Galileo's style to accept corrections from others."

Heilbron himself, for all his formidable knowledge and intellect, never places his own views above the reach of critical reason. As he says in a different context, quoting Ludovico Antonio Muratori: "Humility, humility, humility" (at 49 minutes, 5 seconds into the video). As for Heilbron's views on the Jesuits, I recall from several of our conversations his admiration for Jesuit intellectual rigor. Studying under him was a bit like learning under Jesuits, and his writings are not an easy read:

Heilbron's [biography] has . . . rich . . . scientific detail, and will no doubt become the standard, comprehensive biography. Early in the book, Heilbron has a serious mathematical discussion of Galileo's Paduan period. In one of his most inventive sections, he creates a Galilean dialogue on issues of algebra and geometry. Though not easy to read, it brilliantly expresses the ambiguities and blind alleys as Galileo wrestled with the conceptual difficulty of introducing a non-geometrical quantity -- time itself -- into the proportions. These issues did not find their final formulation until the end of his life, when he raced to complete "Two New Sciences" and smuggle it to Holland for publication.

He creates a Galilean dialogue? Irony of ironies! Heilbron, author of science fiction! Well, he always was an 'instrumentalist' on the issue of truth. At any rate, I must go out and obtain a copy of this lively biography! More seriously, concerning Galileo's use of geometry, if I recall correctly, even Newton struggled to express his hard-won views on the unity of celestial mechanics and terrestrial dynamics not in the calculus that he had invented in developing his views, but in the language of geometrical proportion. I'm no expert on that, however, and may have a faulty memory about the point.

Anyway, hats off to John Heilbron for his new book. I'll raise a glass in his honor at midnight tonight as this anniversary year passes. Let's not forget Galileo, either, as his Sidereal year passes by. "Time just gets away from us," as Mattie Ross says in the penultimate line to her tale in True Grit, but it won't get away tonight without a toast in passing.