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.

"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?

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.

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.

Big Science and the American Cutting Edge?

Target Chamber

Lawrence Livermore Lab

(Image from Newsweek)

Somewhat recently, I posted an entry on a talk by one of my former Berkeley professors in the history of science, John Heilbron, who reported on the rise of 'Big Science' in the United States for UC Berkeley's 2006 Bancroft Centennial Symposium in his lecture on "Big Science and Big Bridges."

As things turn out, the torch for big science in the US that was originally lit by Ernest Orlando Lawrence may be passing from America, say not merely a few experts, but some very large-scale science is still going on with the partly government-funded fusion project in the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab, as Daniel Lyons reports for Newsweek in "Could This Lump Power the Planet?" (November 14, 2009):

Big technological breakthroughs require taking big risks. They always seem hopeless and expensive -- until they work. Sequencing the human genome seemed impossible until thousands of researchers around the world got it done -- in 13 years, with $3 billion in government funding, plus investments by private companies. Like the genome project, fusion energy is something that requires a long-term sustained effort. This isn't like creating the next version of the iPod, or a new application for Facebook. These are scientists operating at the very edge of our knowledge about how to manipulate tiny particles of matter.

If fusion works, it's the ultimate green energy source. But NIF has other goals, one being to help scientists gain greater understanding of the universe itself; for example, they will be able to study conditions that exist inside stars.

Given all that, even if NIF fails -- if the whole place turns out to have been a $3.5 billion fiasco -- it seems to me that the risk will have been worth taking. The NIF team still will have made lots of smaller breakthroughs in laser design, optics, and materials science. They will have advanced the state of laser science. Then they will go looking for money to build an even bigger laser so they can try again.

That sounds good. Even if it fails, it succeeds! But what about those naysayers who argue that the torch of technological innovation -- whether government-funded or privately financed -- is passing from America? Here's what Fareed Zakaria reports for the same Newsweek issue, writing in his article "Is America Losing Its Mojo?" (Nov 14, 2009):

[T]wo studies of global innovation have been released this year, both comprehensive, and both relying entirely on government statistics and other hard data: one produced by the Boston Consulting Group, the other by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. In both, the United States does considerably worse, coming in eighth in the BCG study and sixth in the ITIF one.

Like a star that still looks bright in the farthest reaches of the universe but has burned out at the core, America's reputation is stronger than the hard data warrant.

How depressing. Only apparently shining brightly, our enterprising American core is already burnt utterly out. But we might manage to re-ignite that core even without a laser beam from the National Ignition Facility -- if we can just learn from the example of Israel, as Dan Senor and Paul Singe show in "Soldiers of Fortune," Newsweek (November 14, 2009), opening with a question:

How does Israel -- with fewer people than the state of New Jersey, no natural resources, and hostile nations all around -- produce more tech companies listed on the NASDAQ than all of Europe, Japan, South Korea, India, and China combined? How does Israel attract, per person, 30 times as much venture capital as Europe and more than twice the flow to American companies? How does it produce, for its size, the most cutting-edge technology startups in the world?

Hint: It ain't because Israeli Jews manipulate the world's markets through a secret hierarchy of Zionist elders intent on world domination. Quite the opposite of a hidden hierarchy, Israel offers a society with a culture of open discussion, even in the military:

It creates an openness to challenging, debating, and probing -- even of one's superiors -- that permeates the Israeli startup scene; it helps produce unconventional solutions to tough business problems. Nati Ron is a lawyer in his civilian life and a lieutenant colonel who commands an Army unit in the reserves. "Rank is almost meaningless in the reserves," he says. "A private will tell a general in an exercise, 'You are doing this wrong; you should do it this way.'"

Well, I wasn't in the military during my year in Jerusalem, but I noticed much the same attitude in the seminars that I attended while doing postdoctoral work at Hebrew University's Mt. Scopus campus. I'd say that we need more of this bold, assertive attitude in the States (and throughout the world), so long as the whippersnapper has the expertise . . . or even if the whippersnapper has none, for how better to learn than by asking sharp questions and properly challenging authority?

And if you're wondering, by the way, why I'm getting so much information from Newsweek this fine day, here's the scoop. My wife has a subscription to the Korean edition, and Newsweek has been kind enough to send along the English edition as well . . . unasked. I don't know why Newsweek is doing this generous thing, but I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and count its teeth.

Though I suppose that one ought to check the belly of the beast, just in case of a Trojan horse . . .

John L. Heilbron on Contingency in Science and Religion

John L. Heilbron

(Image from You Tube)

Back in 2005, John Heilbron sent me a copy of his article on Jean-André Deluc (1727-1817), "Jean-André Deluc: Citoyen de Genève and Philosopher to the Queen of England," Arch. Sci. Soc. Phys. Hist. Nat. Gen. 58, 75–92 (2005). Here's how John introduces the hero:

The paper begins (§1) with Deluc's liberal politics and exact science in Geneva, proceeds to his move to England (§2), outlines his application of geology to Genesis (§3), and ends with his attempt to unify his Calvinist religion, descriptive science, and increasingly reactionary politics into a program for the salvation of Europe (§4).

John has long maintained an active interest in the relations between science and religion, and given the ironic turn of his mind, he has noted the way in which science's historical development has been both resisted and assisted by religion -- despite the wholesale hostility claimed between science and religion by such earlier historians of science as John William Draper (A History of the Conflict between Religion and Science) and Andrew Dickson White (A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom).

After reading John's paper, I sent back to him my impression of the ironic lesson to be learned from Deluc's role as learned scientist and as Protestant advocate:

Would . . . [the case of Deluc] support the old warfare school in the history of science, or weigh against it? Deluc would seem an exemplar of one who saw no conflict between correct science and true religion, yet he was fighting those who used science against religion, and his own contribution of precision in measurement seems to have led, eventually, to the rejection of a young age for the continents . . . and thus of the earth.

John thought that this was "Exactly right." I added:

I remember once that you asked me what was wrong with too much of an emphasis upon the errors of a man like Decartes, which I was somewhat guilty of at the time that we were discussing the Cartesian system -- more broadly, why we should avoid Whig interpretations on the history of science. I replied: "Because we don't know where we're going." You seemed satisfied with my reply (one of the few occasions).

Again, John expressed perfect agreement:

Exactly right again. My current circumstances (living in a village of 175 people and a pub in remote Oxfordshire) though not as exotic as yours are still not what I would have expected when we had our conversation about Descartes.

There is a contingency to life that can serve to inspire both hopeful enthusiasm and dreadful anxiety -- if one is susceptible to intense emotions -- but applied to the study of history, whether of liberal politics in England after the 17th century or of science in the West since the scientific revolution, that same contingency ought to render us humbler in judging the 'mistakes' made by our predecessors in what might be called "intellectual history" and more open to the unexpected in looking at the vexed issue of science and religion in historical development.

By the way, I've located a couple more presentations by John -- both on history and science, and both providing a big picture -- in two Hitchcock Lectures at UC Berkeley: "Physics and History: Forged in the Baroque" and "Physics and History: Fractured in Modernity."

John Heilbron: "nimis cupiditas cognoscendi"?

Linus Pauling

(Image from Oregon State University)

In looking yesterday for the video interview of John Heilbron by Harry Kreisler, I came across another interesting video featuring John, this time of a lecture, "Remarks on the Writing of Biography," given in 1995 at a conference dedicated to Linus Pauling. In that talk, John remarks (somewhat with tongue in cheek):

Biographers may be particularly prone to what Saint Paul called nimis cupiditas cognoscendi -- that is, too great a desire to know.

My Latin isn't very good, but the English translation that John provided didn't immediately strike a chord of memory despite some overtones in Paul's warning words about interesting oneself in human knowledge:

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. (Colossians 2:8, King James Version)

A Google search for "nimis cupiditas cognoscendi" turned up only John's talk. Perhaps I'm exhibiting this condemned intellectual sin, but I'd like to know where this expression came from. I've managed to find the English expression "too great a desire to know" in Kempis's Imitation of Christ:

Rest from too great a desire to know, because therein is found great discord and delusion. Learned men are very eager to appear, and to be called learned. There is much which it profits the soul little or nothing to know. And foolish indeed is he who gives his attention to other things than those which make for his salvation. (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated by EM Blaiklock, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979) page 24)

Another translation offers this:

Shun too great a desire for knowledge, for in it there is much fretting and delusion. Intellectuals like to appear learned and to be called wise. Yet there are many things the knowledge of which does little or no good to the soul, and he who concerns himself about other things than those which lead to salvation is very unwise. (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated by Aloysius Croft and Harold Bolton (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1940))

This passage appears in Kempis's second chapter, which opens by quoting Aristotle's famous words from the initial line to his Metaphysics: "Every man naturally desires knowledge." Kempis then goes on to cite Augustine's warning about knowledge, which places Kempis's own warning squarely within the lengthy Christian tradition that put restrictions on curiosity. Indeed, a search for "curiosity" in Kempis's Imitation reveals many warnings against it. However, I lack a Latin copy of Kempis and therefore cannot check the original behind "too great a desire to know."

But maybe this is barking up the wrong tree anyway. Perhaps John meant not "nimis cupiditas cognoscendi" but "nimis cupidus cognoscendi"? I don't think that Saint Paul said that, either, but the second-century writer Apuleius did, in Book Two of his wonderful novel The Golden Ass, which tells how Lucius follows his overeager curiosity into a world of trouble wrought by his transformation into a donkey as punishment for his inquisitive ways, characterized by Lucius as "nimis cupidus cognoscendi quae rara miraque sunt," i.e., "too great a desire to know what is rare and miraculous." Apuleius doesn't have quite the cachet that Saint Paul has, but Augustine did stoop to cite him on the dangers of curiosity, so I think that we can allow him entrance here in John's lecture as the probable source behind what was quoted as "nimis cupiditas cognoscendi."

Future biographers writing on The Life of John Heilbron will undoubtedly thank me for clearing this up . . . especially if I can get John himself to supply a comment to this blog entry.

John Heilbron on Dirac: "interest only in the numbers"

Paul Dirac

(Image from Wikipedia)

On the 14th of this month, I posted an entry that focused on three curious intellects, including the mind of Paul Dirac, and I quoted a review by Louisa Gilder, "Quantum Leap," of Graham Farmelo's recent biography, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom.

In my heart of hearts, I still have a soft spot for the history of science, and vividly recall reading John Heilbron's biography of Max Planck, which I read and discussed with John himself since he was one of my professors at Berkeley, so I sent John a note about the Dirac book:

You might be already aware of this review and the book, too, but just in case you've not seen either, I've pasted the review and a link below.

I'm reminded of your book on Max Planck, which likewise brings a rigorous man of science alive. Dirac seems a whole lot odder -- some suggestion that he might have been autistic, it seems.

John replied:

Thank you very much for the reference, which my wife also fished out of the torrent of information that passes me by every day.

I once lectured to an audience that included Dirac. I showed a few tables that illustrated something or another, easily the dullest part of the talk. He showed interest only in the numbers.

When I first met John, I thought that he himself was interested mostly in the numbers. He had been working on a doctorate in physics when he switched over to history of science under the influence of Thomas Kuhn (who included an acknowledgement to John in his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). But John turned out to be much more than a numbers man, as his book on Planck shows.

In fact, John is the man who informed me of how I could switch my dissertation topic from history of science to early Christianity while still, technically, remaining a doctoral student in his program . . . though that may have simply been his most opportune moment for getting rid of me since I was clearly not best suited for history of science. At any rate, I've forever been profoundly grateful to the man.

For an interesting interview with John, see the You Tube video on "Science and History," from the series Conversations with History, hosted by Harry Kreisler, in UC Berkeley's Institute of International Studies.

Mere Curiosity

Hans Blumenberg

A Curious Man

(Image from Suhrkamp Insel)

I believe that I mentioned in this blog a couple of weeks ago that Warren T. Reich had asked me to participate in his work on the history of care, focusing upon curiosity in the sense of what Hans Blumenberg called "The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity" in his great tome, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.

I agreed to take part in this endeavor and so wrote an email to one of my old Berkeley mentors, John Heilbron, who now lives in a very small British village with only one pub but still manages to produce great works in the history of science:

Greetings from Jeff Hodges. I suppose that you're getting accustomed to my bolts out of the blue.

I hope that you are doing well, and I suppose that you've un-retired two or three times by now, despite your wife's wishes...

Your onetime mentioned desire that I become a scholar (a remark dating back to 1983 or thereabouts) might finally be coming to fruition. I had been asked by a Korean scholar to act as a respondant at an international conference last week, and one of the speakers was Warrren T. Reich, the man who founded the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, and his was one of the papers that I had to respond to.

I suppose that I must have learned some intellectual rigor, academic discipline, and research skills from the history-of-science program, for in Reich's reply to my response, he stated, "Professor Hodges' response to my paper was the finest that I have ever heard at any conference that I've attended." I was astonished, to say the least, for Professor Reich is 75 years old. I guess that I just happened to say the right things.

Anyway, he has asked me to participate in a research project on the history of "care" -- specifically, Care: A History of the Idea and Its Practice. Because I had mentioned the term "curiositas" and its treatment in Hans Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Reich wants me to deal with the theme of curiosity and its relation to the developement of modern science. He also wants me to keep an eye to the project's larger theme, i.e., the history of "care."

I recalled from a seminar (perhaps the one that we held in Bancroft Library, a seminar in which Rebecca referred to Galileo as "dropping his balls"), that you once mentioned that "care" and "curiosity" are etymologically related. I believe that Blumenberg had also noted this in his book, but what I'm 'curious' to know is if you could suggest a bibliography relevant to this topic.

Don't go to any trouble, of course, and my role in this project is just one among 75 researchers, though I'd be a "Senior Research Scholar," which sounds honorable enough. If you're especially interested in knowing about the project, I could forward you the description that was sent to me on "Curiosity, Science, and Modernity."

At any rate, you might be interested in knowing what I'm up to these days.

John must have been out-of-village, for I didn't hear from him for over a week even though he's ordinarily very prompt. Here's his eventual reply:

Many congratulations on your performance as commentator and its results. Too often commentators just want to show off and say nothing useful to the speaker or the audience.

I don't know of a bibliography of care/curiosity. For curiosity/wonder in early modern science there is the not-so-good book by Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, which will give you some orientation. I would not be surprised if care/curiosity had an entry somewhere in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Other clues might be found in historical dictionaries like the OED. You might begin by reviewing the meaning of "curiosus" in Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary.

Take care.

Well, those are some places to start, and I have John's ironic blessing and will indeed take 'care'. I suppose that the paucity of information is a good sign that much remains to be done. I've already checked Amazon Books for what it has on the book by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, which turns out to be titled Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. I've written a note to myself on this book:

Lorraine Daston is Director of Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and Katharine Park is Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science and Women's Studies at Harvard University, so the authors are reputable scholars.

However, John Heilbron, historian of science and one of my mentors at UC Berkeley, mentioned this book but characterized it as "not-so-good."

I've only seen it at Amazon, where I had access to its table of contents and index:

Table of Contents:

Chapter 3: Wonder Among the Philosophers (page 109):

The Philosophers against Wonder (page 110)
Curiosity and the Preternatural (page 120)

Chapter 8: The Passions of Inquiry (page 303)
Ravening Curiosity (page 305)
Wonder and Curiosity Allied (page 311)

Index (page 502): curiosity:

9-10
definitions of: 397, n. 57; 434, n. 12
Enlightenment rejection of: 303-16; 258-58; 356
and magic: 396, n. 51
medieval attitudes toward: 92; 122-25
seventeenth-century attitudes toward: 218; 273-74
terminology for: 434, n. 7

From what I've seen of the book at Amazon, it would appear to link curiosity to wonder and the older sense of the object of curiosity as something 'odd' -- more an object of wonder as presented in the tradition of "paradoxography" than as a phenomenon to be investigated, a 'curiosity' (though I gather that part of the book is a history of how attitudes toward curiosity changed and became more positive).

Anyway, this is part of my initial foray into the obscure, liminal territory of 'curiosities' -- that rare realm of remarkable wonders that surpass our reason. One question for me is how curiosity changed from a willful distraction from things serious to a serious faculty that we should care about and for.

Curious readers are invited to respond...