Variant on a Franklinish S(h)ort of Wisdom

Has-Been Franklin

Google Images

Ben Franklin was his own BF (and his own worst enemy)

Surly to bed
and surly to rise
made for a
squeamish,
screamish
surprise.

Ed Cetera . . .

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.

No Such Thing as Chinese Medicine?

Chinese Medicine Diagram
Photo by Tom Mooring/Flickr via Creative Commons
Slate

Alan Levinovitz, assistant professor of Chinese philosophy and religion at James Madison University, has written an intriguing article on 'Chinese medicine' for Slate: "Chairman Mao Invented Traditional Chinese Medicine" (Slate, October 22 2013 [H/T Seouldout]). According to Levinovitz:

[T]here was no such thing as "Chinese medicine." For thousands of years, healing practices in China had been highly idiosyncratic. Attempts at institutionalizing medical education were largely unsuccessful, and most practitioners drew at will on a mixture of demonology, astrology, yin-yang five phases theory, classic texts, folk wisdom, and personal experience.

Levinovitz is obviously perpetuating Orientalist stereotypes of the sort exposed by Edward Said, right? Wrong! He's merely doing what skeptical Chinese have themselves done -- engage in logical, empirical critique:

After all, that's what Wang Qingren did during the Qing Dynasty when he wrote Correcting the Errors of Medical Literature. Wang's work on the book began in 1797, when an epidemic broke out in his town and killed hundreds of children. The children were buried in shallow graves in a public cemetery, allowing stray dogs to dig them up and devour them, a custom thought to protect the next child in the family from premature death. On daily walks past the graveyard, Wang systematically studied the anatomy of the children’s corpses, discovering significant differences between what he saw and the content of Chinese classics.

And nearly 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Wang Chong mounted a devastating (and hilarious) critique of yin-yang five phases theory: "The horse is connected with wu (fire), the rat with zi (water). If water really conquers fire, [it would be much more convincing if] rats normally attacked horses and drove them away. Then the cock is connected with ya (metal) and the hare with mao (wood). If metal really conquers wood, why do cocks not devour hares?" (The translation of Wang Chong and the account of Wang Qingren come from Paul Unschuld's Medicine in China: A History of Ideas.)

More recently, there's Lu Xun's skepticism:

In 1923, Lu Xun, China's most famous man of letters, reflected critically on his father's visits to a Chinese doctor, visits that bankrupted the family and failed to produce results. "I still remember the doctor's discussion and prescription," Lu wrote, "and if I compare them with my knowledge now, I slowly realize that Chinese doctors are no more than a type of swindler, either intentional or unintentional, and I sympathize with deceived sick people and their families."

Those were skeptical Chinese, but I can offer a critique of traditional Chinese medicine published in 1932 by the Korean novelist Yi Kwang-su in his book The Soil, selecting from a passage where a certain Mr. Yun turns to traditional doctors to cure his son, In-seon, but begins to disbelieve in the traditional medicine:

Mr. Yun then invited a famous traditional doctor who was said to have studied twenty years at Jiri Mountain. This doctor prescribed deer antlers and certain roots, such as mulberry, that had to be decocted and imbibed. In-seon took the medicine, but became red and hot over his entire body. He grew delirious, spoke senselessly, and laughed spasmodically . . . . In the reception room were still some . . . doctors of traditional medicine with official governmental titles like jinsa, or sagwa. They were debating the five natural elements in the Chinese art of divination and the sixty combinations of Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches to decide on how to change the direction of the sick person's head every day, from which direction the water for the concoction had to be drawn, or at what time the concoction had to be performed and so on.

These men took care of their concoction personally, sitting beside the fire and ordering a housemaid standing nearby to assist. She was forever being ordered to light the pipe tobacco and bring it over . . . . Mr. Yun . . . . turned . . . to the traditional doctors . . . and reprimanded them, saying, "Of what use is that medicine?"

The doctors again started to debate the cause of the disease, but without knowing what they were talking about and just mouthing traditional medical terminology.

From outside, the boiling of the medicine pot grew audible, and the vapor with its peculiar odor came seeping through the pot's paper cover . . . . The ginseng and deer antlers having provided no beneficial effect, In-seon died . . . . After watching his eldest son die, Mr. Yun charged into the reception room and drove out the doctors . . . , the daoist masters. "Fools, what do you know? You killed my son!" (Yi Kwang-su, The Soil, translated by Sun-Ae Hwang and Horace Jeffery Hodges, Dalkey Archive Press, 2013, 13-15)

Yi Kwang-su would appear to agree with his character Mr. Yun, as much of the rest of the novel makes clear. As for Levinovitz, he's exaggerating in his claim that Mao invented traditional Chinese medicine, but if you read Levinovitz's article -- and read it generously -- you'll see his point, for Mao supported systematization of traditional medicine even though he didn't believe in it and himself used Western medicine.

Read the article to find out why.

Science and Humanities . . . Together!

Professor Choe Jae-chun
Photo by Kim Myung-sub
The Korea Herald

Professor Choe Jae-chun, interviewed by Oh Kyu-wook in "An evangelist of science, humanities convergence" (The Korea Herald, August 8, 2013), reminds me why I chose history of science for my graduate degrees:

Choe's talent crosses disciplines. The renowned animal behavior expert, ecologist and bio-sociologist has built a career far beyond the stereotypes of a scientist.

He first came to prominence in 2005 by introducing Korea to the concept of consilience -- linking together principles from different disciplines -- after translating "Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge" (1998) by Edward O. Wilson, the doyen of sociobiology, under whom he studied at Harvard.

Trumpeted as a map to a Theory of Everything, Wilson's magnum opus describes the synthesis of knowledge from different fields and gave a fresh impetus to interdisciplinary studies in Korea's academia in which high walls divided natural, social and human sciences, blocking collaboration and progression.

I'm totally in favor of cross-disciplinary communication, even collaboration when possible, but the risk is that one discipline will attempt to dominate (and guess which one when sociobiology's one of the disciplines!). At its best, however, the cross-disciplinary effort is uplifting:

Choe was named a junior fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows and taught at the University of Michigan from 1992 to 1994. He said his three years in Michigan were among the best times of his life.

"There were about 12 junior fellows, all with different backgrounds, when I was there. We had lunch together every Wednesday, and every time we discussed different subjects."

"One day we brought up the question of why the middle class exists. We couldn't finish the discussion after lunch and continued it until 2 a.m. the next morning."

He said he realized the importance of integrated studies while discussing more than 200 subjects with his fellow scholars.

"I really miss that time. I wish we could do the same thing here," he said.

Although I never took part in a discussion that lasted fourteen hours, I've often participated in long, wide-ranging conversation on various topics, both as an undergraduate student in Baylor University's Honors Program and as a graduate student in UC Berkeley's History of Science Office, so I know very well what Professor Choe misses.

Sometime, perhaps, Professor Choe Jae-chun can preside over long conversations at Ewha Womans University, where he teaches, and if those conversation take place in English, I would hope to be there among the discussants . . .

Lincoln and Equality

Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln

Google Images

When I was a Fulbright Fellow in Germany back in 1989-90, I read Euclid's Elements because I had time, and I tried to understand them, even resorting to straight-edge and compass to assist my effort, but the going proved rough, and in grinding my way through that particular text, Ptolemy's Almagest, and a modern textbook on astronomy, I eventually ran out of time, as well as grant money, and just focused on John's Gospel and Gnostic texts instead of trying to master all of classical antiquity, my ultimate aim.

I wasn't as smart as Lincoln.

As I know from my reading on the man, the self-educated Lincoln taught himself Euclid . . . and understood it with clarity. In Stephen Spielberg's recent film, Lincoln, the screenwriter Tony Kushner understands that Lincoln understood Euclid, and has him state:

Euclid's first common notion is this: Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. That's a rule of mathematical reasoning. It's true because it works, has done and always will do. In his book, Euclid says this is self-evident. You see, there it is, even in that 2,000-year-old book of mechanical law. It is a self-evident truth that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

Kushner, however, who put these words in Lincoln's mouth, didn't quite understand Euclid, for the Elements was not about mechanical law. It was about geometry, mathematical law. It also wasn't about that assertion in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." But none of that matters to inspired creative writing. Kushner can connect them to make a point, that white men were men, as black men were men, and both being equal to men were equal to each other.

I'd also have made the same, creative links using the word "equal" that Kushner made if I'd been writing the screenplay.

If I were as smart as Kushner . . .

Creative Collisions and Collaborations

Telstar 1
Photo:
Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc.
and
 AT and T Archives and History Center
New York Times

Walter Isaacson, in his article "Inventing the Future" (New York Times, April 6, 2012), reviews Jon Gertner's recent book in the history of science and technology, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. From what the review tells us, Gertner's account of Bell Labs' knack for innovations would appear to offer support for some of Jonah Lehrer's ideas that we've recently looked into:

The lesson of Bell Labs is that most feats of sustained innovation cannot and do not occur in an iconic garage or the workshop of an ingenious inventor. They occur when people of diverse talents and mind-sets and expertise are brought together, preferably in close physical proximity where they can have frequent meetings and serendipitous encounters.

Recall that Steve Jobs intentionally redesigned the Pixar company's layout to ensure that employees would come into contact by chance and inadvertently exchange ideas that changed ideas? He had a precedent in Bell Labs:

Bell Labs concentrated on helping the military during World War II. But in the middle of the war, Bell Labs began moving to a new campus in Murray Hill, N.J., and [Bell Labs research director, Mervin] Kelly began to create interdisciplinary teams that threw theorists and engineers together into the same work spaces. "By intention, everyone would be in one another's way," Gertner writes. Among the teams was one doing solid-state research. It included [physics theoretician William] Shockley and [physics experimentalist Walter] Brattain. Kelly recruited John Bardeen, a very quiet theorist, to join the group, but there was no vacant office, so Bardeen decided to share space with Brattain, the experimentalist. This was a smart idea. Gertner describes how innovations came not just from new theories but from linking them to advances made by the lab's experimental chemists and metallurgists who were creating a revolution in materials. "Indeed, without new materials," Gertner writes, "Shockley would have spent his career trapped in a prison of elegant theory."

As Gertner points out, collaborative work was essential, and not only for generating new ideas:

"If an idea begat a discovery, and if a discovery begat an invention, then an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product (or process) meant for widespread practical use. Almost by definition, a single person, or even a single group, could not alone create an innovation. The task was too variegated and involved."

The hardest trick, as Steve Jobs points out, is figuring out how to sustain an organization's creativity, and Isaacson notes that Gertner's book looks at this point:

Steve Jobs once said that the most difficult and important thing to create was not an innovative product but a great organization that could continually create innovative products. That required joining creative people with product designers and great engineers so that imagination and technology could be connected. For much of the 20th century, Bell Labs played that role. It showed the value of having theoreticians, researchers, developers and engineers all huddled together. "People had to be near one another," Gertner writes. "Phone calls alone wouldn't do." Mervin Kelly even created branches of Bell Labs at the phone company's factories so that the theoreticians and scientists could be closely involved with the manufacturing workers.

From my own job at Ewha, where we expat instructors exchange ideas on better teaching, I know by experience the importance of people working together to work better. This hasn't always been easy for me since I'm a bit of a loner, but it's usually been for the best.

Intellectual Diversity and Fruitful Discussion

Jonah Lehrer

Firekid

Jonah Lehrer is a really smart guy (as you can see by checking his website), though I think I've mentioned him in just a single blog entry prior to this one. I bring him up now because I'm using an article of his in my Academic English course. Not that I chose the article. The one responsible for that was a colleague who also has an M.A. in the history of science, which means that we have interests in common, so we both liked Lehrer's article "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up" for Wired Magazine (December 21, 2009). I especially appreciated his description of the sort of discussion that goes on in lab meetings, a process studied by Kevin Dunbar, "a researcher who studies how scientists study things -- how they fail and succeed":

While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit -- researchers solve problems by themselves -- Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn't the presentation -- it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they'd previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.

But not every lab meeting was equally effective. Dunbar tells the story of two labs that both ran into the same experimental problem: The proteins they were trying to measure were sticking to a filter, making it impossible to analyze the data. "One of the labs was full of people from different backgrounds," Dunbar says. "They had biochemists and molecular biologists and geneticists and students in medical school." The other lab, in contrast, was made up of E. coli experts. "They knew more about E. coli than anyone else, but that was what they knew," he says. Dunbar watched how each of these labs dealt with their protein problem. The E. coli group took a brute-force approach, spending several weeks methodically testing various fixes. "It was extremely inefficient," Dunbar says. "They eventually solved it, but they wasted a lot of valuable time."

The diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem at a group meeting. None of the scientists were protein experts, so they began a wide-ranging discussion of possible solutions. At first, the conversation seemed rather useless. But then, as the chemists traded ideas with the biologists and the biologists bounced ideas off the med students, potential answers began to emerge. "After another 10 minutes of talking, the protein problem was solved," Dunbar says. "They made it look easy."

When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That's because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. "I saw this happen all the time," Dunbar says. "A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they'd be getting a little defensive, and then they'd get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they'd finally understood what was important."

What I glean from this is that not only are problems better solved through discussion, they are best solved through discussion among individuals with different strengths who are free to challenge each other, and are free to do so even at the expense of harmony, indeed especially at the expense of harmony. The importance of this sort of discussion has significant implications for education, especially in Korea, where the educational system still aims at producing identical students intent on getting the top mark on a single exam that determines one's educational future.

Well, not entirely, and Korea is changing, but one doesn't often encounter open discussion, not a diversity of views. I'm interested to see what my students think about this article . . . if I can just get them to discuss it.

"Conversation Galante"?

Ineffable Moon

Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

(Image from New York Times)

Back in the early 1980s, when I was safely ensconced in history of science at UC Berkeley, I recall a conversation with Bruce Wheaton -- one of the instructors who worked with John Heilbron at the Office for the History of Science and Technology -- about why the moon looks larger on the horizon than at its zenith.

Now, Bruce was a smart guy, and he knew more about the history of technology than just about anyone I knew -- if, by "history of technology," one means an internalist history of the subject. In fact, I sat through his lectures on technology when I worked as one of his teaching assistants and learned a great deal about machines. He was quite gifted at making the technical details clear and excellent in demonstrating how one technical device led to another through improvement of some mechanical aspect or other, or through combining devices to form a new, more complex device -- almost as if the machines were evolving through alternately continuous and punctuated styles of evolution. I found myself unexpectedly fascinated, and I half-expected to finish the semester capable of building my own car!

But Bruce could at times be hermeneutically inaccessible.

To my question concerning why the moon looked larger at the horizon, he replied, "It doesn't. If you measure its diameter, you'll find that it's the same."

"I understand that," I assured him. "What I want to know is why the moon looks larger."

"It isn't larger," he countered.

"I know," I said, perhaps a bit more curt than necessary, "but why does it look larger?"

"It doesn't," he insisted.

After a couple more whirls on hermeneutic circles of this sort, I was ready to get off that conversational roller coaster. Bruce could keep his mathematically invariable moon, but I'd stick to my qualia-ridden impression and hope for an answer to my query someday.

The late 1960s band Creedence Clearwater Revival claimed that "Someday Never Comes", but someday came yesterday when I read Alison Gopnik's article "Consciousness: The Great Illusion?" (May 20, 2011), a New York Times review of a recent book by Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. In her review, Ms. Gopnik speaks of consciousness and notes that some aspects of consciousness can be explained:

For example, why does the moon look so much larger when it's at the horizon than when it's overhead, at the zenith? This is a question about conscious experience -- about how the world looks to us -- not about behavior and brains. And there is a clear and convincing evolutionary explanation.

The visual system wasn't designed to deal with objects that are thousands of miles away. It was designed to accurately judge the size of close, evolutionarily relevant objects like apples. As an apple moves closer or farther away, it will project a larger or smaller image on my retina. But I don't see the apple expand and contract. I see an apple with a concrete, stable size. This is because my brain evolved to combine information about the size of the retinal image with information about distance to create a single, constant visual experience.

The retinal image of the moon is always about the same size. But the horizon looks farther away than the zenith, perhaps because we see that other objects are in front of the horizon while the zenith is unoccluded. The brain determines that the horizon moon must therefore actually be larger than the zenith moon. And, voilà, the rising moon looks much bigger.

Drawing upon Humphrey's ideas, Gopnik adds:

So we actually have a good and interesting naturalistic explanation for this particular feature of our conscious experience and many others like it. But it seems that we can't explain the most important thing: Why does the moon look like anything at all? What explains that ineffable je ne sais quoi, that irreducible magic of experience? That big, beautiful moon doesn't just feel like the outcome of a cool calculation. And it isn't looming up at just anyone, but at me, the equally ineffable and irreducible self.

That's more qualia, the utterly ineffable kind. I can just about almost nearly grasp what she's referring to, though not effing quite . . . so as for this nearly effable moon, "It may [as well] be Prester John’s balloon," after all, if anything specifically particular at all.

Now, why is that, Bruce? And where is your own ineffable self these days?

Niall Ferguson's Civilisation: The West and the Rest -- Christian Values and Western Success?

Yongle Emperor, Ming Dynasty

Seated in Dragon Chair

National Palace Museum, Taibei

(Image from The Monthly)

Niall Ferguson has a new book out that I really ought to read, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Allen Lane, 2011). It's one of those big-picture histories that I like to mull over. I've noticed that several blogs emphasizing religion have drawn attention to the book and have cited Dominic Lawson's review in The Sunday Times (27 February 2011). Unfortunately, I can't access the review without a subscription, so I have to depend upon the kindness of strangers, and one kind stranger, ABroad with a View, posted a couple of useful quotes in her blog entry "Agree or Disagree, Thought-Provoking Nevertheless . . ." (February 28, 2011), so I'm posting them here (with missing parts borrowed from other online sources, e.g., The Iona Blog):

Ferguson offers this moment of revelation on the part of a scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences: "We were asked to look into what accounted for [the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of] the West all over the world. [We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective.] At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. [Next we focused on your economic system.] But in the past 20 years we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion. Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubts about this."

Ferguson naturally, offers the empirical follow-up to this theorising. The most entrepreneurial city in China, Wenzhou, where the free market is given full rein and where the state's influence is minimal, is also home to almost 1,400 churches -- half a century after Chairman Mao boasted it was "religion-free". One of its most successful business leaders, Hamping Zhang, argues that an absence of trust had been one of the main factors holding China back; but he feels he can trust his fellow Christians because he knows they will be honest in their dealings with him."

Well, those are interesting excerpts, but I'd like to see more to be able to judge fairly. The issue has been heatedly argued among historians, and especially historians of science. Hans Blumenberg developed a rather powerful argument in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age that only through overcoming Medieval Christian theology's voluntarist concept of God and rehabilitating human curiosity did the West manage to succeed so powerfully.

I doubt that Ferguson even accepts the Chinese view as the Chinese scholar expressed it (and I'll address that further in a moment). From Malcolm Turnbull's review in The Monthly, "Cry Freedom: Niall Fergusons Civilisation: The West and the Rest" (March 2011), which ignores the issue, I'd guess that Ferguson doesn't take the general view especially seriously (as I'll explain further below). Turnbull interprets Ferguson's main theme as the importance of freedom:

[I]f there is one thread that emerges from this most interesting book it is the golden thread of freedom. Societies that encourage freedom of competition, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and do so in a way that secures and protects private property, will be stronger and more prosperous than those that do not.

Does Christianity generally encourage freedom? I doubt that one can successfully argue that it always has, though whether Christian suppression of freedom has been consistent or inconsistent with authentic Christian values remains a matter of debate. Ferguson apparently notes the threats sometimes posed by piety, for Turnbull again reports:

In 1575, as the Enlightenment was taking hold in the West, a fine observatory, equal to the best in Europe, was built in Istanbul. Yet five years on, at the behest of the mullahs, it was demolished; it was not until 1868 that a new observatory was built. As Ferguson writes: "The legacy of Islam's once celebrated House of Wisdom vanished in a cloud of piety." Once again, it was a lack of freedom that saw Islam turn its back on science, and a commitment to freedom in the West that resulted in the establishment of scientific academies in the seventeenth century -- hubs in a new network of investigation and knowledge.

Apparently, European disunity accounted for its success in pulling ahead of the Islamic and Chinese civilizations and conquering much of the world:

Ferguson puts it down to competition -- the fractious, divided state of Europe with roughly 1000 independent polities in the year 1400 still had around 500 polities two centuries later.

In short, the political fragmentation that characterised Europe precluded the creation of anything remotely resembling the Chinese Empire. It also propelled Europeans to seek opportunities -- economic, geopolitical and religious -- in distant lands. You might say it was a case of divide and rule -- except that paradoxically it was by being divided themselves that Europeans were able to rule the world.

But there must be more to the West's success than its mere political division, which could have led to weakness. Europe was politically divided, even culturally divided, but it shared a common civilization, and Europeans thus generally adhered to some common values. Here, then, is where Christianity may have played a general role, but I don't know that Ferguson delves into this broad issue in his book. He does deal with a more narrow, related point. In a summary of an essay by Ferguson in the inaccessible Sunday Times, James Forsyth, writing "How the West became so dominant" for Coffee House: The Spectator Blog (19th February 2011), tells us that there are six "killer apps" (an expression, meaning "very useful software applications," borrowed from the smart phone revolution, I suppose):

1. Competition: a decentralisation of political and economic life, which created the launch pad for both nation states and capitalism.

2. Science: a way of understanding and ultimately changing the natural world, which gave the West (among other things) a major military advantage over the Rest.

3. Property rights: the rule of law as a means of protecting private owners and peacefully resolving disputes between them, which formed the basis for the most stable form of representative government.

4. Medicine: a branch of science that allowed a major improvement in health and life expectancy, beginning in Western societies, but also in their colonies.

5. The consumer society: a mode of material living in which the production and purchase of clothing and other consumer goods play a central economic role, and without which the Industrial Revolution would have been unsustainable.

6. The work ethic: a moral framework and mode of activity derivable from (among other sources) Protestant Christianity, which provides the glue for the dynamic and potentially unstable society created by apps 1 to 5.

As we see, number 6 treats Christianity, but not the entirety of this religion. Rather, Ferguson follows Max Weber in stressing the so-called Protestant work ethic. But it's only one of the six, and Ferguson would likely scoff at emphasis upon merely a single one of them. For those readers interested in learning more about these "killer apps," go to "Niall Ferguson on the six 'killer apps' of Western civilisation," hosted at Intelligence Squared, where one can sign up to join and watch Ferguson give a lecture on these six apps, or not sign up but listen to an audio of the same.

Ferguson's larger point about the six "killer apps" is that anyone can download and use them, and he does note, in his lecture, the rapid growth of Protestant Christianity in the non-Western world, even quoting the scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, mentioned above, who identified the West's religion, Christianity, as the central 'app,' but Ferguson clearly uses this quote to support his point about the Protestant work ethic.

I don't therefore think that Ferguson would identify Christianity generally as the reason for the success of the West. During the question and answer period after the lecture on the six "killer apps," Ferguson emphasizes the role of the Protestant Reformation in separating church and state and in promoting literacy, along with the work ethic, of course, as crucial to the West's success.

He might therefore even consider pre-Reformation Christianity to be a drag on the West's development, but I guess that I'll need to get and read Ferguson's book.

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.

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.

The Literary Galileo . . .

Ruggiero Rescuing Angelica

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

(Image from Wikipedia)

Galileo was often jousting quixotically with Ptolemy's epicyclical windmills, various sly coiling serpents, and other antiquated revolutionary objects in his guise as knight errant, and the historian of science John Heilbron notes that in Observations on Sunspots, Galileo employs "a far-fetched allusion to the stars" to adopt the role of the knight Ruggiero, a Saracen (i.e., Muslim) convert to Christianity in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso who rescued Angelica from a dragon, I gather, and gains her Ring of Reason, though I've not read much of Ariosto's masterpiece and am not certain of these details, nor of their order (cf. Heilbron, Galileo, pages 191-192).

That ring, anyway, would perhaps have served Galileo well in his intellectual jousts . . . except that reason was hardly sufficient in a time when science wasn't supported by scientific institutions, and that Galileo thought of himself less as a 'scientist' anyway than as a philosopher, and as a poet.

By the time Galileo wrote his works The Assayer (1623) and Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632), he was even less interested in writing science -- though he was also doing that -- than in having a splashy literary impact. Heilbron explains the 'nonscientific' character of these two 'literary' works by Galileo:

And what 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 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. (Heilbron, Galileo, 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 often doesn't seem very scientific to us now.

He does, however, come across as more interesting, partly because his clever wit made him many powerful enemies and thereby undermined the very cause for which he jousted . . .

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 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.

Is Nothing Sacred?

Leonard Mlodinow and Stephen Hawking

Photo by Judith Croasdell

(Image from MSNBC)

Alan Boyle, writing for MSNBC, asks "Is the grand design within our grasp?" By which, he means to say, has the unified theory of everything been found? Do we finally have GUT, the Grand Unified Theory? The theory that puts even God in the place of unnecessary hypotheses?

Well, I don't know, so interested readers will just have to go to the link and see what they think, but I do have a question about something -- or rather, nothing -- that Boyle reports on in the claims of Lawrence Krauss, Leonard Mlodinow, and Stephen Hawking. Boyle especially cites Krauss:

What Krauss finds exciting is that there could be ways to verify that something can come from nothing -- which is the point behind Hawking's claim that God isn't necessary to explain the universe's creation.

Physicists have noted that the positive energy contained in particles and the negative energy represented by gravitational attraction appear to balance out precisely. "Empirically, we can actually have evidence that the universe came from nothing. One of the key things is that the total energy of the universe is zero, which is only possible if the universe came from nothing. It could have been otherwise. It could have been not zero," Krauss said.

The concept of a zero-energy universe and getting something from nothing may sound crazy, but this article from Mercury magazine and this video of one of Krauss' lectures, both titled "A Universe From Nothing," show that the ideas has (have) been percolating among scientists for years. Such ideas are central to "The Grand Design," as well as to the book that Krauss is currently in the midst of writing.

In an interview that Boyle offers at the bottom of the article, Mlodinow adds to what Krauss has said:

As far as God goes, we describe our theory of where the universe came from, and why the laws of nature are as they are. And we show that with this theory, there's no need for a God to create the universe or to create the laws of physics as they are. All of this can come purely from physics, from science, from nature.

Sounds like Pierre-Simon Laplace redux: "Sire, I have not need of that hypothesis," Laplace reportedly informed Napoleon, when the latter asked why God wasn't mentioned in his celestial mechanics.

Anyway, my postponed question is this: What do Hawking and the others mean here by "nothing"? It actually sounds like an unstable something that can fracture into an exact balance of "positive energy contained in particles and . . . negative energy represented by gravitational attraction." As such, this original 'nothing' would appear to have had some sort of ontological status, a 'nothing' that exists.

Is this the only concept of "nothing" that is possible? Wouldn't a more radical concept of nothing insist on absolute nothingness, which does not exist, rather than a 'nothing' that does exist? We're talking metaphysics, not physics, and I wonder if Hawking and his fellow physicists aren't perhaps equivocating on the term "nothing." One might as well claim that 'nothing' is sacred because it is 'Creator' of the universe!

I suspect that my cyber-friend, Bill Vallicella, would have some choice words on this 'scientific' issue. He's already had some thoughts about nothing . . .

"Another Ozark Genius . . ."

Harlow Shapley

(Image from Cosmotography)

Another one in addition to yesterday's LeRoy Tucker, I mean . . .

This other genius is Harlow Shapley, and my cyberfriend Annie Gottlieb shot me an email the other day to inform me that this great astronomer was also an Ozark character who loved storytelling -- a fact noted by the man himself in an interview that Annie had linked me to in the email:

Well, I came from the Ozark country and the Ozark country is full of tall tales, and we knew them. There was a time when I knew more tall stories than probably anybody I've ever met, but I'm sure there have been better ones. But that Ozark country, just east of where we lived, the rough country, was where the hillbillies came from, and in Arkansas. We also had a farm in Arkansas, so we had some contacts. And folklore was one of the things that we knew about.

Shades of Vance Randolph! But the interviewers don't ask him for folktale. They seem more interested in his astronomical work in the context of the story of his own life. Incidently, the entire interview was conducted in two sessions by Charles Weiner and Helen Wright on June 8 and August 25, 1966, respectively, at Shapley's home in Sharon, New Hampshire. It's stored on the website of the Niels Bohr Library and Archives as part of the American Institute of Physics (College Park, Maryland), which I mention just in case anyone might be interested in bibliographical details.

Anyway, like Mr. LeRoy Tucker, Shapley has a powerful memory and a wonderful grasp of detail, and he tells some riveting anecdotes about early 20th-century science in America before it was transformed into Big Science by the likes of Ernest Orlando Lawrence and the fight against fascism, but he lived into the time of Big Science, too.

He even had a 'career' before science, for he dropped out of school with a fifth-grade education, then learned at home for a while from his older sister, and after that worked as a journalist during his middle teenage years, leading a colorful life as a crime reporter in Chanute, Kansas and Joplin, Missouri -- both places on the western edge of the Ozark Mountains, where the Ozarks meet the Plains:

I naturally had "episodes" -- since Chanute was a rough oil mining town; I had the various experiences that a reporter would have, especially if he were agile and got around. I remember two or three little affairs. One was on election night. There were a lot of drunken oil men on the streets. I set about to protect the office, thinking they'd start things there. A policeman came along and we had what we called a duel [take place in front of us]; they shot each other and one of them died. I handled that (age sixteen). It was sort of dramatic for those times, before we had wars where lots of horrible things happened. Another time we were having a political scramble, and my newspaper took one view and another newspaper took another view, and so we got off a good deal of strong language. The worst politician pushed me out of his office and went on talking to others inside. I sat down outside his office and wrote down in shorthand all that was being said. (I had learned shorthand at Chanute.) We just printed verbatim his rough statements four letter words and all. Consequently he wanted to murder me and blow up everybody. It was rather spectacular. For we did the proper thing -- made and printed a picture of my shorthand. Anybody who knew my kind of shorthand could read it. Of course, there was no guarantee that we hadn't forged it all. It was a rather live bit of country journalism for those times. Our man won! We had other little episodes like that. In Joplin it was worse. Joplin was a lead-zinc town and there were many tough characters, usually hanging around the police headquarters. I saw some strange things, some funny things, but we are accustomed to such things now.

They don't make proto-scientists like that anymore! But I wouldn't expect anything less from an Ozark 'hillbilly.' The entire session of the interview is entertaining in this manner, and it's followed by a second session recorded several months later (as noted above). And when you consider that Shapley was 80 or 81 at the times of these lengthy, detailed interviews, his performance is all the more impressive!

Go, therefore, and learn of life and stars and ants . . .