Pioneers of Science Part 8

The six years pa.s.sed away, and the Venetian Senate, anxious not to lose so bright an ornament, renewed his appointment for another six years at a largely increased salary.

Soon after this appeared a new star, the stella nova of 1604, not the one Tycho had seen--that was in 1572--but the same that Kepler was so much interested in.

Galileo gave a course of three lectures upon it to a great audience. At the first the theatre was over-crowded, so he had to adjourn to a hall holding 1000 persons. At the next he had to lecture in the open air.

He took occasion to rebuke his hearers for thronging to hear about an ephemeral novelty, while for the much more wonderful and important truths about the permanent stars and facts of nature they had but deaf ears.

But the main point he brought out concerning the new star was that it upset the received Aristotelian doctrine of the immutability of the heavens. According to that doctrine the heavens were unchangeable, perfect, subject neither to growth nor to decay. Here was a body, not a meteor but a real distant star, which had not been visible and which would shortly fade away again, but which meanwhile was brighter than Jupiter.

The staff of petrified professorial wisdom were annoyed at the appearance of the star, still more at Galileo's calling public attention to it; and controversy began at Padua. However, he accepted it; and now boldly threw down the gauntlet in favour of the Copernican theory, utterly repudiating the old Ptolemaic system which up to that time he had taught in the schools according to established custom.

The earth no longer the only world to which all else in the firmament were obsequious attendants, but a mere insignificant speck among the host of heaven! Man no longer the centre and cynosure of creation, but, as it were, an insect crawling on the surface of this little speck! All this not set down in crabbed Latin in dry folios for a few learned monks, as in Copernicus's time, but promulgated and argued in rich Italian, ill.u.s.trated by a.n.a.logy, by experiment, and with cultured wit; taught not to a few scholars here and there in musty libraries, but proclaimed in the vernacular to the whole populace with all the energy and enthusiasm of a recent convert and a master of language! Had a bombsh.e.l.l been exploded among the fossilized professors it had been less disturbing.

But there was worse in store for them.

A Dutch optician, Hans Lippershey by name, of Middleburg, had in his shop a curious toy, rigged up, it is said, by an apprentice, and made out of a couple of spectacle lenses, whereby, if one looked through it, the weather-c.o.c.k of a neighbouring church spire was seen nearer and upside down.

The tale goes that the Marquis Spinola, happening to call at the shop, was struck with the toy and bought it. He showed it to Prince Maurice of Na.s.sau, who thought of using it for military reconnoitring. All this is trivial. What is important is that some faint and inaccurate echo of this news found its way to Padua, and into the ears of Galileo.

The seed fell on good soil. All that night he sat up and pondered. He knew about lenses and magnifying gla.s.ses. He had read Kepler's theory of the eye, and had himself lectured on optics. Could he not hit on the device and make an instrument capable of bringing the heavenly bodies nearer? Who knew what marvels he might not so perceive! By morning he had some schemes ready to try, and one of them was successful.

Singularly enough it was not the same plan as the Dutch optician's, it was another mode of achieving the same end.

He took an old small organ pipe, jammed a suitably chosen spectacle gla.s.s into either end, one convex the other concave, and behold, he had the half of a wretchedly bad opera gla.s.s capable of magnifying three times. It was better than the Dutchman's, however; it did not invert.

It is easy to understand the general principle of a telescope. A general knowledge of the common magnifying gla.s.s may be a.s.sumed.

Roger Bacon knew about lenses; and the ancients often refer to them, though usually as burning gla.s.ses. The magnifying power of globes of water must have been noticed soon after the discovery of gla.s.s and the art of working it.

A magnifying gla.s.s is most simply thought of as an additional lens to the eye. The eye has a lens by which ordinary vision is accomplished, an extra gla.s.s lens strengthens it and enables objects to be seen nearer and therefore apparently bigger. But to apply a magnifying gla.s.s to distant objects is impossible. In order to magnify distant objects, another function of lenses has also to be employed, viz., their power of forming real images, the power on which their use as burning-gla.s.ses depends: for the best focus is an image of the sun. Although the object itself is inaccessible, the image of it is by no means so, and to the image a magnifier can be applied. This is exactly what is done in the telescope; the object gla.s.s or large lens forms an image, which is then looked at through a magnifying gla.s.s or eye-piece.

Of course the image is nothing like so big as the object. For astronomical objects it is almost infinitely less; still it is an exact representation at an accessible place, and no one expects a telescope to show distant bodies as big as they really are. All it does is to show them bigger than they could be seen without it.

But if the objects are not distant, the same principle may still be applied, and two lenses may be used, one to form an image, the other to magnify it; only if the object can be put where we please, we can easily place it so that its image is already much bigger than the object even before magnification by the eye lens. This is the compound microscope, the invention of which soon followed the telescope. In fact the two instruments shade off into one another, so that the reading telescope or reading microscope of a laboratory (for reading thermometers, and small divisions generally) goes by either name at random.

The arrangement so far described depicts things on the retina the unaccustomed way up. By using a concave gla.s.s instead of a convex, and placing it so as to prevent any image being formed, except on the retina direct, this inconvenience is avoided.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 38.--View of the half-moon in small telescope. The darker regions, or plains, used to be called "seas."]

Such a thing as Galileo made may now be bought at a toy-shop for I suppose half a crown, and yet what a potentiality lay in that "glazed optic tube," as Milton called it. Away he went with it to Venice and showed it to the Signoria, to their great astonishment. "Many n.o.blemen and senators," says Galileo, "though of advanced age, mounted to the top of one of the highest towers to watch the ships, which were visible through my gla.s.s two hours before they were seen entering the harbour, for it makes a thing fifty miles off as near and clear as if it were only five." Among the people too the instrument excited the greatest astonishment and interest, so that he was nearly mobbed. The Senate hinted to him that a present of the instrument would not be unacceptable, so Galileo took the hint and made another for them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 39.--Portion of the lunar surface more highly magnified, showing the shadows of a mountain range, deep pits, and other details.]

They immediately doubled his salary at Padua, making it 1000 florins, and confirmed him in the enjoyment of it for life.

He now eagerly began the construction of a larger and better instrument.

Grinding the lenses with his own hands with consummate skill, he succeeded in making a telescope magnifying thirty times. Thus equipped he was ready to begin a survey of the heavens.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 40.--Another portion of the lunar surface, showing a so-called crater or vast lava pool and other evidences of ancient heat unmodified by water.]

The first object he carefully examined was naturally the moon. He found there everything at first sight very like the earth, mountains and valleys, craters and plains, rocks, and apparently seas. You may imagine the hostility excited among the Aristotelian philosophers, especially no doubt those he had left behind at Pisa, on the ground of his spoiling the pure, smooth, crystalline, celestial face of the moon as they had thought it, and making it harsh and rugged and like so vile and ign.o.ble a body as the earth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 41.--Lunar landscape showing earth. The earth would be a stationary object in the moon's sky: its only apparent motion being a slow oscillation as of a pendulum (the result of the moon's libration).]

He went further, however, into heterodoxy than this--he not only made the moon like the earth, but he made the earth shine like the moon. The visibility of "the old moon in the new moon's arms" he explained by earth-shine. Leonardo had given the same explanation a century before.

Now one of the many stock arguments against Copernican theory of the earth being a planet like the rest was that the earth was dull and dark and did not shine. Galileo argued that it shone just as much as the moon does, and in fact rather more--especially if it be covered with clouds.

One reason of the peculiar brilliancy of Venus is that she is a very cloudy planet.[8] Seen from the moon the earth would look exactly as the moon does to us, only a little brighter and sixteen times as big (four times the diameter).

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 42.--Galileo's method of estimating the height of lunar mountain.

_AB'BC_ is the illuminated half of the moon. _SA_ is a solar ray just catching the peak of the mountain _M_. Then by geometry, as _MN_ is to _MA_, so is _MA_ to _MB'_; whence the height of the mountain, _MN_, can be determined. The earth and spectator are supposed to be somewhere in the direction _BA_ produced, _i.e._ towards the top of the page.]

Galileo made a very good estimate of the height of lunar mountains, of which many are five miles high and some as much as seven. He did this simply by measuring from the half-moon's straight edge the distance at which their peaks caught the rising or setting sun. The above simple diagram shows that as this distance is to the diameter of the moon, so is the height of the sun-tipped mountain to the aforesaid distance.

Wherever Galileo turned his telescope new stars appeared. The Milky Way, which had so puzzled the ancients, was found to be composed of stars.

Stars that appeared single to the eye were some of them found to be double; and at intervals were found hazy nebulous wisps, some of which seemed to be star cl.u.s.ters, while others seemed only a fleecy cloud.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 43.--Some cl.u.s.ters and nebulae.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 44.--Jupiter's satellites, showing the stages of their discovery.]

Now we come to his most brilliant, at least his most sensational, discovery. Examining Jupiter minutely on January 7, 1610, he noticed three little stars near it, which he noted down as fixing its then position. On the following night Jupiter had moved to the other side of the three stars. This was natural enough, but was it moving the right way? On examination it appeared not. Was it possible the tables were wrong? The next evening was cloudy, and he had to curb his feverish impatience. On the 10th there were only two, and those on the other side. On the 11th two again, but one bigger than the other. On the 12th the three re-appeared, and on the 13th there were four. No more appeared.

Jupiter then had moons like the earth, four of them in fact, and they revolved round him in periods which were soon determined.

The reason why they were not all visible at first, and why their visibility so rapidly changes, is because they revolve round him almost in the plane of our vision, so that sometimes they are in front and sometimes behind him, while again at other times they plunge into his shadow and are thus eclipsed from the light of the sun which enables us to see them. A large modern telescope will show the moons when in front of Jupiter, but small telescopes will only show them when clear of the disk and shadow. Often all four can be thus seen, but three or two is a very common amount of visibility. Quite a small telescope, such as a ship's telescope, if held steadily, suffices to show the satellites of Jupiter, and very interesting objects they are. They are of habitable size, and may be important worlds for all we know to the contrary.

The news of the discovery soon spread and excited the greatest interest and astonishment. Many of course refused to believe it. Some there were who having been shown them refused to believe their eyes, and a.s.serted that although the telescope acted well enough for terrestrial objects, it was altogether false and illusory when applied to the heavens. Others took the safer ground of refusing to look through the gla.s.s. One of these who would not look at the satellites happened to die soon afterwards. "I hope," says Galileo, "that he saw them on his way to heaven."

The way in which Kepler received the news is characteristic, though by adding four to the supposed number of planets it might have seemed to upset his notions about the five regular solids.

He says,[9] "I was sitting idle at home thinking of you, most excellent Galileo, and your letters, when the news was brought me of the discovery of four planets by the help of the double eye-gla.s.s. Wachenfels stopped his carriage at my door to tell me, when such a fit of wonder seized me at a report which seemed so very absurd, and I was thrown into such agitation at seeing an old dispute between us decided in this way, that between his joy, my colouring, and the laughter of us both, confounded as we were by such a novelty, we were hardly capable, he of speaking, or I of listening....

"On our separating, I immediately fell to thinking how there could be any addition to the number of planets without overturning my _Mysterium Cosmographicon_, published thirteen years ago, according to which Euclid's five regular solids do not allow more than six planets round the sun.

"But I am so far from disbelieving the existence of the four circ.u.mjovial planets that I long for a telescope to antic.i.p.ate you if possible in discovering two round Mars (as the proportion seems to me to require) six or eight round Saturn, and one each round Mercury and Venus."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 45.--Eclipses of Jupiter's satellites. The diagram shows the first (_i.e._ the nearest) moon in Jupiter's shadow, the second as pa.s.sing between earth and Jupiter, and appearing to transit his disk, the third as on the verge of entering his shadow, and the fourth quite plainly and separately visible.]

As an ill.u.s.tration of the opposite school, I will take the following extract from Francesco Sizzi, a Florentine astronomer, who argues against the discovery thus:--

"There are seven windows in the head, two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth; so in the heavens there are two favourable stars, two unpropitious, two luminaries, and Mercury alone undecided and indifferent. From which and many other similar phenomena of nature, such as the seven metals, &c., which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven.

"Moreover, the satellites are invisible to the naked eye, and therefore can have no influence on the earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist.

"Besides, the Jews and other ancient nations as well as modern Europeans have adopted the division of the week into seven days, and have named them from the seven planets: now if we increase the number of the planets this whole system falls to the ground."

To these arguments Galileo replied that whatever their force might be as a reason for believing beforehand that no more than seven planets would be discovered, they hardly seemed of sufficient weight to destroy the new ones when actually seen.

Writing to Kepler at this time, Galileo e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es: