A History of the World by Andrew Marr

Author:Andrew Marr
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: World, History
ISBN: 9780230767539
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-09-26T22:00:00+00:00

And Yet It Moves

A day in August 1609: in one of the most gorgeously decorated rooms in the world, the Hall of the College in the Doge’s Palace in Venice, a voluble, red-bearded man caused a sensation. He handed to the Doge, ruler of the Serene Republic, surrounded by his counsellors and naval commanders, a leather-covered tube. After a hubbub of questions and answers, all these men then rushed out of the palace and across the square to Venice’s great church, the Basilica of St Mark, and climbed up to the top of the tower. The Doge squinted down the tube. One by one, in turn, so did the rest. On the mainland, miles away, shimmering buildings appeared before their eyes. On nearby islands, the Doge and his men saw people entering their churches; out at sea, galleys still more than two hours’ sailing time from Venice could be clearly observed. What they had here was a wonderful military and practical tool. The man who brought it would be richly rewarded.

He was a Pisan mathematician, now lecturing in Venetian territory, called Galileo Galilei. Galileo had stolen the idea from a poor Hollander, who had made his way down from Flanders, where spectacle-makers had invented the telescope, and who had hoped to make a fortune for himself in Italy. But Galileo, working hard on the lenses, improved the gadget hugely. Shrewdly, he had given the telescope to the Doge as a present. Then he went back to his workshop in nearby Padua and made even better ones. It was not long before he turned one of them upwards, to the night sky.

Galileo was already known as a loud-mouthed, exuberant, greedy character who liked to challenge conventional thinking. His work was mostly practical; he advised rulers on ballistics, fortifications and the pumping of water. He had invented a military compass. But he was also known for questioning accepted thinking in the Christian world about nature, then dominated by Aristotle’s explanations formulated almost two thousand years earlier. In one of his books, Galileo had a follower of Aristotle ask who could be mankind’s guide if the Greek sage were to be abandoned. His interlocutor retorts: ‘Only the blind need a guide. Those with eyes and those with a mind must use these faculties to discern for themselves.’1 These two sentences express perfectly Galileo’s enthusiasm for practical, experimental science.

The great breakthrough in challenging the old orthodoxy concerning the Earth’s place in Creation had come sixty years earlier when a German–Polish polymath called Nicolaus Copernicus had published On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. Many churchmen, Protestants as well as Catholics, had been shocked. Yet the idea of the Earth moving round the sun had not been immediately rejected by the Catholic Church, even though it contradicted the accepted view that God had placed sun, moon and planets on separate shell-like outer spheres to guide and help mankind. To start with, the possibility of the new thinking being accommodated to the Bible was debated. Not for long, though.

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