Revisiting the Galileo Affair

Recently, in a talk to a small group of Catholic women scientists, I suggested we need to see events in the 17th century from the perspective of 17^th century history and scientific knowledge.

Indeed, from today’s perspective, it may seem completely antiquated not to know that the Earth is orbiting the Sun, and not vice versa. In the early 17th century, though, there were (at least) 4 models of our planetary system:

• the Ptolemaic system (geocentric),
• the Copernican system (heliocentric),
• the Tychonic system (geo-heliocentric), and
• the Keplerian system (heliocentric, elliptic orbits)

The Galileo affair has indeed often been used as an argument that the Catholic Church was hostile to science and that Galileo was a martyr for science, as it were. This timeline article is intended to set the historical record straight. Based on the scientific knowledge of the time, a heliocentric model was not obvious. While heliocentrism ultimately turned out to be right, Galileo could not present the scientific proofs for it, which came much later. Moreover, Galileo ventured into advising theologians how to interpret Scripture, going beyond his position as a scientist.

A timeline representation of the story is available here (click on the image below:)

Agnes Mary Clerke: Writing on Stars and People

Agnes Mary Clerke

Agnes Mary Clerke (1842 – 1907) was an astronomer and science educator. She was born in Skibbereen, Ireland. Together with her sister Ellen, she received an exceptional level of knowledge, through the Ursuline nuns, and her parents. By the age of eleven, she had read Herschel’s Outlines of Astronomy. At the age of 15, she began to write her own history of astronomy. Agnes’s father owned a 4-inch telescope, and she grew up regularly observing Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons. She and her sister spent ten years in Italy, mainly living in Florence where they studied science, acquired literary skills, and became excellent linguists. In 1877 the sisters went to London where the family was reunited.

Elena Ivanovna Kasimirchak-Polonskaya: studying God’s planets

Elena Polonskaya (1902-1992) is a fascinating woman: she was a renowned astronomer who lost her job in the Communist regime, was accused of espionage due to her missionary activities, put into prison for several months, but later re-instated as university professor. And finally, she became a nun in the Russian-Orthodox Church and taught bible studies and other theological topics. She has an asteroid named after her, but she does not yet have a Wikipedia article in English. Here is her biography.

Elena Ivanovna Polonskaya was born on 21 November 1902 in Selets, in the Volyn province in today’s Ukraine to parents from the Russian nobility. She studied astronomy at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the Lviv University. In 1923, she participated in the first meeting of the Russian Christian Student Movement in Czechia. From 1926 to 1928 she was an active member of this movement and its leader for Poland and Belarus. She acted as editor of the religious political journal “At the Borderline”. She participated in apologetic summer courses in Paris founded by Archpriest Sergei Bulgakov, her spiritual father.

In 1932, she became assistant at the Astronomical Observatory in Warsaw. In 1934, she defended her Ph.D. thesis „On the planetocentric motion of comets“ in Warsaw. In 1936, she married Leon Kazimierczak, an ichtyologist at Warsaw University, and in May 1937, their son Sergei (named after Sergei Bulgakov) was born. During World War II, she worked as Senior Scientist at the Department of Astronomy in Lviv and moved to Warsaw in 1944. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, she became separated from her husband who was brought to a camp near Vienna as war prisoner. In 1945, she made a very bold and crucial decision for her later life: As an Orthodox, she decided to return to Russia, although totalitarian Soviet Union at that time. She first lived in Cherson (in today’s Ukraine) where her son died of meningitis in July 1948. She never saw her husband again, since he was not allowed to enter the USSR.

Christopher Clavius SJ: astronomer, mathematician and educator

Christopher Clavius, S.J.  (25 March 1538 – 06 Feb 1612) was a German Jesuit known for his reform of the calendar, and a mathematician and gifted educator. He joined the recently founded Jesuit order in 1555 and was sent to Coimbra, Portugal, to pursue his studies. On 21 August 1560, he observed a sun eclipse, an event which convinced him to devote his life to mathematical and astronomical study. Following this eclipse observation, he went to Italy later in 1560 and studied theology at the Jesuit Collegio Romano in Rome. He was ordained in 1564. He remained at the Collegio Romano were he began teaching mathematics in the year of his ordination. In fact, except for a period in Naples around 1596 and a visit to Spain in 1597, Clavius was to remain Professor of Mathematics at the Collegio Romano for the rest of his life. He continued with his studies in Theology and became a full member of the Jesuit Order in 1575.

in 1579, he was elected as member by Pope Gregory XIII to the commission to oversee the reform of the calendar. The old Julian Calendar had been established by an edict of Julius Caesar in 45 BC.  Because the system of Julian years and leap years did not correspond exactly to the length of the astronomical year, dates of important Christian feasts had gotten out of alignment with the seasons. This commission adopted the ideas for calendar reform of Aloysius Lillius, with some modifications, and in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII promulgated the new calendar. Catholic countries quickly adopted the “Gregorian calendar,” but Protestant and Eastern Orthodox countries only slowly followed. In 1588, it became his role to explain and defend the calendar reform, and he did so in Novi calendarii romani apologia and subsequent works to counter arguments coming from Protestants, but also from astronomers and mathematicians.

Galileo Galilei was familiar with Clavius’s books, and he visited Clavius during his first trip to Rome in 1587. After that they corresponded from time to time about mathematical problems, and Clavius sent Galileo copies of his books as they appeared. Clavius was and remained a defender of the geocentric system although he was impressed by Galilei’s telescopic discoveries as he wrote in 1611, a year prior to his death.

His true and lasting influence was the adoption of rigorous mathematical curricula in Jesuit colleges, at a time when the importance of mathematics in natural science (then called “natural philosophy”) was widely underappreciated. He wrote widely used textbooks and influenced future generations of astronomers and mathematicians.

Image: Christopher Clavius. Line engraving by E. de Boulonois., Wikimedia

Sources:

Thony Christie, A loser who was really a winner.

Christopher Clavius (1537-1612), The Galileo Project

J J O’Connor and E F Robertson, Christopher Clavius

Stephen M. Barr and Andrew Kassebaum, Important Catholic Scientists of the Past, Christopher Clavius (new on the website of the Society of Catholic Scientists)

Thony Christie, Christopher and the calendar

Maria Mitchell, the first American discovering a comet

“Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.“

Among her many honors, Mitchell became the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1848 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850. She also co-founded the American Association for the Advancement of Women. Today, her legacy lives on at the Maria Mitchell Observatory, named in her honor in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Francesco Denza and the Carte du Ciel

On 07 June 1834, Francesco Denza (1834-1894) was born in Naples. He was a Barnabite priest, astronomer, and meteorologist who immersed himself in solar spectroscopy and founded what later became the Italian Meteorological Society. He renovated the observation deck of the Vatican Observatory, founded in 1888. Vatican staff members realized that participation in the program ‘to map the sky’ would immediately give their young observatory international recognition. Pope Leo XIII commissioned Father Francesco Denza and Father Giuseppe Lais to attend the Astrographic Congress and enroll the Vatican as one of the participating institutions in the international Carte du Ciel project which made a photographic map of the stars.

Scientists reflect on their faith (VIII)

Karin Öberg is a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. Her specialty is astrochemistry and her research aims to uncover how chemical processes affect the outcome of planet formation, including the chemical habitability of nascent planets.
Dr. Öberg left Sweden for Caltech in 2001, where she matriculated with a B.Sc. in chemistry in 2005. Four years later she obtained a Ph.D. in astronomy, with a thesis focused on laboratory astrochemistry. In 2009 she moved to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics with a Hubble fellowship, focusing on millimeter observations of protoplanetary disks, and left in 2012 to join the University of Virginia chemistry department. In 2013 she returned to Harvard as an assistant professor in astronomy and was promoted to full professor in 2017.

Öberg said she rediscovered her Christian faith while in the United States and determined there was no conflict between the religious values she cherishes and her research into how chemistry and physics interact during star and planet formation.  She became Catholic in 2012 and joined the Board of the Society of Catholic Scientists, explaining: “My biggest motivation is for the students so they don’t think they have to choose to live their scientific vocation separate from their faith.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss: Ceres, the bell curve …. and faith in God

 

On 23 February 1855, the German mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 – 1855) died in Göttingen. He ardently pursued a rather vast array of interests, from astronomy to geometry, mathematical analysis to physics, and magnetism to electrostatics. He is noted for formulating the law of the distribution of casual errors known as the Gaussian function or the bell curve. He is sometimes referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum (Latin, “the Prince of Mathematicians”).

In 1795, Gauss entered the University of Göttingen. While there he discovered how to construct a 17-sided polygon with ruler and compass. Gauss left the university in 1798 without a degree. In 1799, Gauss developed the concept of complex numbers and also submitted a dissertation to the University of Helmstedt providing a proof for the fundamental theorem of algebra.  This dissertation won Gauss a doctoral degree in abstentia. In 1801, Gauss completed “Disquisitiones Arithmeticae,” a major volume on number theory.

Allan Rex Sandage: Truth Cannot Contradict Truth

Allan Rex Sandage (18 June 1926 – 13 November 2010)  was one of the most influential astronomers of the 20th century. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1948. In 1953 he received a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology; the German-born Wilson Observatory-based astronomer Walter Baade (1893–1960) was his advisor. During this time Sandage was a graduate student assistant to cosmologist Edwin Hubble. He continued Hubble’s research program after Hubble died in 1953. He is best known for determining the first reasonably accurate value for the Hubble constant and the age of the universe. He is also the discoverer of the first quasar.

In an interview given in 1997, Sandage said:

“There need be no conflict between science and religion if each appreciates its own boundaries and if each takes seriously the claims of the other. The proven success of science simply cannot be ignored by the church. But neither can the church’s claim to explain the world at the very deepest level be dismissed. If God did not exist, science would have to (and indeed has) invent the concept to explain what it is discovering at its core. Abelard’s 12th century dictum ‘Truth cannot be contrary to truth. The findings of reason must agree with the truths of scripture, else the God who gave us both has deceived us with one or the other’ still rings true.”

In 1998, he said:

“It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It is only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence.”  — Allan Rex Sandage, as quoted in Sharon Begley, ‘Science Finds God’, Newsweek (1998)

Ferdinand Verbiest and the First Automobile Vehicle

On 9 October 1623, Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688) was born in Pittem, Belgium. He was a Jesuit priest, explorer, translator and inventor.

In 1658, Verbiest left Europe to go on a mission to China […]. In the Chinese Empire he became known under the name Nan Huairen (南懷仁) and gained himself merits as mathematician and astronomer. Verbiest also worked as a diplomat, cartographer and translator as he spoke Latin, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. Throughout his life he wrote more than thirty books and became close friends with the Kangxi Emperor, who frequently requested his teaching, in geometry, philosophy and music.

Amongst Verbiest’s many interests were also experiments with steam. Around 1672 he designed – for the Chinese Emperor’s entertainment – a steam-propelled trolley which most probably was the first working steam-powered vehicle, realizing ‘auto-mobility’. It is described in Verbiest’s work Astronomia Europea. It was only 65 cm long and not designed to carry human passengers, nor a driver. Steam was generated in a ball-shaped boiler, emerging through a pipe at the top, from where it was directed at a simple, open steam turbine (like a water wheel) that drove the rear wheels. It is not known if Verbiest’s model was ever built at the time. Another of his inventions is a steam engine to propel ships. [1]

Verbiest died in Beijing on 28 January 1688. His remains were buried near those of two other famous Jesuits – Matteo Ricci and Johann Adam Schall von Bell – on 11 March 1688. Verbiest was the only Westerner in Chinese history to ever receive the honour of a posthumous name by the Emperor.

[1] Ferdinand Verbiest: Early Visionary of Auto-motionThe First Automobile Vehicle