What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution

by Lawrence Lipking

The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has often been called a decisive turning point in human history. It represents, for good or ill, the birth of modern science and modern ways of viewing the world. In What Galileo Saw, Lawrence Lipking offers a new perspective on how to understand what happened then, arguing that artistic imagination and creativity as much as rational thought played a critical role in creating new visions of science and in shaping stories about eye-opening discoveries in cosmology, natural history, engineering, and the life sciences.

When Galileo saw the face of the Moon and the moons of Jupiter, Lipking writes, he had to picture a cosmos that could account for them. Kepler thought his geometry could open a window into the mind of God. Francis Bacon's natural history envisioned an order of things that would replace the illusions of language with solid evidence and transform notions of life and death. Descartes designed a hypothetical "Book of Nature" to explain how everything in the universe was constructed. Thomas Browne reconceived the boundaries of truth and error. Robert Hooke, like Leonardo, was both researcher and artist; his schemes illuminate the microscopic and the macrocosmic. And when Isaac Newton imagined nature as a coherent and comprehensive mathematical system, he redefined the goals of science and the meaning of genius.

What Galileo Saw bridges the divide between science and art; it brings together Galileo and Milton, Bacon and Shakespeare. Lipking enters the minds and the workshops where the Scientific Revolution was fashioned, drawing on art, literature, and the history of science to reimagine how perceptions about the world and human life could change so drastically, and change forever.

Genres: Science, History Of Science, European History, Nonfiction, History

333 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 29, 2014

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lipking’s What Galileo Saw is a book about imagination, the literary side of science. As in his other works, the author covers the grand sweep of intellectual and literary history. Less clear is his concept of science, though as a Grand Master of Chess, he must know some math, not on display here. Unclear what sciences Prof Lipking took as an undergrad at Western Reserve in the early fifties, or as grad student at Cornell in the later fifties.
I have spoken at Harvard Center for Astrophysics* on Renaissance astronomy, prepared largely by my undergrad pre-med courses in science--physics, chemistry and biochemistry. Preparing to speak, I read much of Copernicus and found his spherical geometry challenging, though my HS geometry got me a National Merit Scholarship.
Lipking can write very lively, as when Copernicus is first published by his astronomer and fan Rheticus, introduced by a Lutheran pastor as mere, inoffensive hypotheses, “Thus the revolution entered the world on tiptoe”(166). Unsurprisingly, our author has won many academic awards like the Guggenheim, Wilson and Newberry.

As for analyzing Galileo, imagination doubtless enters into science, though more clearly into literature. Galileo had a literary side: notably, he wrote sonnets. But many Renaissance Italians in other specialties also wrote literary works, like the historian Machiavelli’s great play, Mandrake.

Giordano Bruno also wrote a hilarious, almost modern comedy, but Lipking does not mention it. Rather, he summarizes Bruno on the soul, following Frances Yates, somewhat dated. Lipking confines Bruno to the theo-philosophe stereotype that prevents Italian directors from performing the humor of Candelaio. Both those directors and Yates ignore Bruno’s witty satire; his play reflects his mockery of every authority he critiqued like Prof. De la Faye** in Geneva, or he debated like Dr Underwood at Oxford University, or Callier at College de Cambrai, Lutheran Pastor Gilbert Voet at Helmstedt, and Dr Heidenreich at Wittenberg (famous for its earlier Danish student, Hamlet). It is natural for an authority like Lipking to take the side of the authorities Bruno opposed.

Lipking’s doubt about the Scientific Revolution (and the Austrian Weidhorn’s attesting Galileo the “Person of the Millennium”) concludes the book, “If it [Scientific Revolution] did not exist—and perhaps it did not—its place would have to be filled by another story”(219). Ahh…that other story has been written: Great teachers are killed. Galileo was not, perhaps because of his temperate avoidance of the Papal condemnation. Giordano Bruno, like Socrates, was killed.


* My talk was recorded by my fellow speaker, neutron star expert and McGill Professor Sebastien Guillot. It can be googled: "Giordano Bruno Harvard Video."

**Bruno published a correction of twenty points in a De la Faye lecture; and, the Geneva Professor sued the Italian for defamation. Bruno was jailed Aug 4, 1579, and released four days later, agreeing to destroy the "libel diffamtoire." (My "Worlds of GB," p.66).

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

When the mercurial Viennese prodigy Hugo von Hofmannsthal stepped away from poetry, he wrote a short story about a poet talking to Francis Bacon. The character expresses his despair at how language recedes from him, fragmenting into non-meaning. He is unable to even speak words, especially abstractions such as Geist (and what is a German writer without this word?) Critics tend to interpret this story as a predecessor of postwar critiques of language: Beckett and Celan, Wittgenstein and Adorno. But what does it have to do with Francis Bacon?

Something crucial and important happened to the human mind in the seventeenth century. Weber called it Entzauberung (unmagicking): the replacement of a mysterious, supernatural world with a rational and mechanical one. Lawrence Lipking begins this fascinating, multidisciplinary work with an analysis of Milton's On the Morning of Christ's Nativity. As Christ comes to the world, the mountains moan, nymphs mourn and protective spirits flee. He is to reign over an emptier, quieter kingdom. For Milton, as a Christian and an admirer of Galileo, this is clearly a good thing; yet as a poet he still feels a wistful sense of what has been lost.

Lipking's book is about what changed when Galileo looked through his telescope and discovered that the moon was bumpy (not smooth as Aristotle had claimed), that Jupiter had moons and that Venus had phases like our moon. Together with Brahe and Kepler, and Bacon and the Royal Society, he had instigated the scientific revolution (by now an almost meaningless term). From early on this had been cast in a Weberian light both by its detractors - the Romantics who saw scientific progress as draining the world of imagination, as early as Warton's History of English Poetry which juxtaposed "judgement" to "imagination", the former yielding "much good sense and good criticism" but silencing "true poetry" - and by proponents, who saw these scientific pioneers casting a candle of truth into the shadows of superstition.

For Lipking, both of these narratives ignore the imagination present in the worldview of these early modern thinkers. Galileo cast horoscopes, Newton studied Kabbalah, and Kepler was committed to a model matching the distance between the exactly six planets to Pythagorean harmonics and the five Platonic solids. God had created the world with this perfect symmetry, and Kepler had read his mind. (He also wrote a book trying to explain the underlying reason for snowflakes to have exactly six sides, but gave up. The answer took three hundred years: it is a macroscopic manifestation of the way hydrogen and oxygen atoms bind in ice molecules. Kepler would probably not have been keen on atoms, preferring Platonic forms over Democritus' materialism.) It was almost accidental that noticed that the squares of the periods of the planets are proportional to the cubes of their distance from the sun, a fact that would be crucial for Newton.

In his short essay To the Planetarium Walter Benjamin acknowledges (while ultimately rejecting) this duality:

Kepler, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe were certainly not driven by scientific impulses alone. All the same, the exclusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained a portent of what was to come. The ancients' intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance [Rausch]. For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest from us...This means, however, that man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights.

For Benjamin, unmagicking also entails alienation (another Weberian term), loss of Gemeinschaft.

Consider the cuckoo. In early English myth, the cuckoo was a common poetic figure, singing joyously to welcome spring

Svmer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wde nu—
Sing cuccu!

and telling fortunes:

At this day in some Countreys when a man heareth first the Cuckoe, hee asketh her how many years hee shall lyve, and then after the quæstion hearkeneth to the nomber of the reiterated voices vttered.

(Strong Wicker Man vibes here!) It also more famously symbolised marital infidelity. "A long-standing poetic tradition held that the first birdsong of spring would determine the lover’s fate. A lewd cuckoo foretold jinxing and jilting; a nightingale’s warble promised true, sweet love." As myth gave way to natural history - dry factual descriptions - anthropomorphic animals mostly disappeared from poetry (although compare Marianne Moore's near encyclopedia-like animal poems). Lipking summarises forcefully:

Today cuckoos rarely herald the spring. Recently, while visiting the English countryside, I was unable to find anyone who had heard one. In fact, according to ornithologists, the numbers of both cuckoos and nightingales have declined more than 60 percent in the last forty years—victims of climate change and the loss of habitats in Africa and breeding grounds in Britain. Hence birdsong slowly departs from poems; we frighten away the nightingales, and perhaps some day soon none will be left to sing. The disappearance of things always haunted Rainer Maria Rilke; and more recently, in the ambiguous phrase "After Nature", W.G. Sebald implied that descriptions of the natural world now register an emptiness where things used to be. Even the spring might be changing. If so, the poetry of the world will have to learn a new language.

Another point of overlap is the definition of life. Paracelsus, a pioneering Renaissance doctor (and also a Neoplatonist and Hermeticist) believed in what was later termed vitalism, the idea that life is ineffably different from non-life, and permeates most of the objects in the universe (including stars and planets, as Aristotle taught). Descartes' dualism didn't refute this, but massively narrowed the scope of the living, making the soul a "ghost in the machine" of a clockwork body, and animals no more than robots. The period of the scientific revolution effected the change from animism to mechanism, hermeticism to experimentation. (The Talmud has a great take on the futility of experimentation.) Monotheism's battle to drive agency from stars and trees and wooden idols - "they have mouths, but they speak not, eyes have they, but they see not" - reaches its apotheosis when even human life is revealed to be chemical processes, the "life sciences". The term biology first appeared in 1802, presumably what Foucault means when he says that living beings were first invented in the nineteenth century.

Roughly the second half goes into deeper analyses of specific texts and people and didn't captivate me as much. One is on the ending of King Lear, one on Descartes' pivotal "dream", one on Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica and the idea of error, and two on Newton and Hooke. The final chapter is about the sceptical response to the new natural philosophy from some otherwise modern thinkers: Montaigne, John Donne, Robert Burton. (Donne's religious imagination is a match for any scientific challenge: "At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow/Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise/From death, you numberlesse infinities/Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe".) Lipking's conclusion is uncertain: having lost the triumphalist narrative of scientific revolution, we have not yet found its replacement. Are we able, as Francis Bacon, to imagine a new House of Salomon charting humanity's path through the next few centuries, and can we restore the cosmic Rausch? Even as Perseverance touches down on one of the planets Galileo saw through his telescope, we are no closer to an answer.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What people saw then, what people see now, depends on the kind of story they might choose to tell.”

This quote, taken from the preface, is a good summary of Lipking's argument in this interesting and original look at the period known as the Scientific Revolution – running roughly between the publications of Copernicus' heliocentric theory (1543) and Newton's Principia (1687). He sets out to show that the discoveries that were made in this period were interpreted through the prism of the existing 'imagined world' while at the same time, and on into the future, contributing to its gradual change – a process he suggests is continuing to the present day. To make his case, he expands beyond science to look at literature and philosphy, showing the interconnection of all three in interpreting and re-interpreting the new discoveries.

Some of this is fairly well covered ground, especially the beginnings of the religion v. science debate – the resistance of the Church to anything that impinged on existing doctrine, the attempts of many scientists to fit their discoveries into the contemporaneous religious view of creation, and the failure of some to do so, leading to accusations of heresy.

But what is much less familiar, to me at least, is Lipking's argument that artistic creativity had as great an impact as rational thought in driving and making sense of the new revelations in all the major fields of science. To argue his case, Lipking spends as much time analysing the work of poets, writers and philosophers as he does looking at the achievements of the scientists. Starting with Milton, he shows how poetry and philosophy dealt with the passing of old myths in favour of the new science – sometimes with regret and nostalgia, but also helping to formulate a newly 'imagined world' to take account of the discoveries. He takes extracts from Shakespeare, Donne, and Wordsworth, amongst others, and convincingly shows how symbolism in poetry changed over time, as poets took account of the realism that science had introduced into views of the natural world. This is done in depth, usually using well-known passages, and I found it made me see them afresh with much more awareness of their historical context. And he also shows how philosophers such as Descartes and Bacon contributed to the creation and interpretation of the 'imagined world' in which both science and art operated.

Milton was well informed: he had met Galileo and seems to have looked through telescopes and read some recent astronomy books. Apparently the angel Raphael had also read them. He answers Adam's questions about the universe, in book 8 of Paradise Lost, with a brief version of Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, comparing Ptolemaic or geocentric explanations with Copernican heliocentrism. But unlike Galileo he does not take sides, and in the end discourages Adam from choosing...

But Lipking also argues that art was essential to the progress of science, partly as I've already mentioned by imagining the world anew, but also because scientists themselves were obliged to be able to draw and write in order to disseminate their findings. He also highlights the distinction between the ability to see and the ability to perceive, suggesting that the latter was as important in science as in art. For example, he points out that some people couldn't see what Galileo saw when he looked into the sky, even using the same equipment, suggesting that part of the reason for this is that our perceptions are governed by our expectations. Galileo and the other scientists were open to the possibility that existing perceptions were wrong, so were able to 'see' past them. But he also shows that, having made their discovery and built a new 'imagined world' around them, many of the scientists then took just as entrenched defensive positions as the ones they had helped overturn.

As a final strand, Lipking looks throughout at how the Scientific Revolution itself has been perceived over time, showing that its story has also been re-imagined by succeeding generations. He draws attention to the fact that many of the scientists who are today revered as the forerunners of rational thought held some views that would now seem to us to be superstition: for example, Newton's obsession with alchemy. And he also discusses some of the great discoveries of the period which have subsequently been disproven or, more often, proven to have been misinterpreted. Overall, the book gives a good reminder that the scientific certainties of each generation might only last until new information becomes available – or until a new world is imagined around them. The thrust is forward, but not always in a straight line.

This is a complex book which I feel requires the reader to have at least a basic understanding of the major scientific advances of the period - that is, to understand them in general, rather than in scientific, terms – since Lipking seems to make the not unreasonable assumption that interested readers will have an existing level of familiarity with them. Some knowledge of the poetry, plays and philosophers of the period would be helpful too, though I felt Lipking explained and illustrated these aspects more fully as he went along. Personally, I found I was struggling from time to time through lack of background knowledge, especially on the questions of philosophy – hence the loss of 1 star for me, though I suspect it would be a five-star read for someone coming to it better informed. But for the most part I found the book both fascinating and thought-provoking, full of ideas that are still very relevant when looking at how scientific advances are treated today.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Cornell University Press.

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[Doctor Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was interested in this book because of the question the title itself suggests: what did Galileo see? Not literally what were the images he saw through his telescope — we have his drawings as evidence of that — but what did it mean to him, how did he interpret what he saw?

The mythology that has come down to us is that what Galileo saw was the confirmation, if not the revelation, that the heavens were not populated by perfect, unblemished spheres of light. He saw the Moon like we see it — spotted, rough, undeniably imperfect, maybe beautiful in its own way but not the “heavenly object” that the Church had prepared us to see. And what happened was the birth of modern science, a blow against superstition and a struggle that we still fight today.

But Lipking wants us to think a little more closely, especially about Galileo’s historical and intellectual context. The seventeenth century is often taken to be the century in which the scientific revolution bloomed, and it certainly was an amazing century — Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Descartes, Bacon, . . . We might forget that this was also the century that began with Shakespeare, gave us Milton, Locke, Hobbes — poets, philosophers, . . . writers and thinkers of all sorts. Not everyone was a scientist.

I’ve always had difficulty thinking of the seventeenth century as one thing — it seems like a collection of almost unconnected lanes — the lanes occupied by Shakespeare and the poets, political philosophers like Hobbes and Locke, early modern thinkers about the nature of knowledge and the methods of science like Bacon and Descartes, and scientists themselves like Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton. But Lipking’s message is that those lanes don’t really exist — all of these thinkers, writers, and researchers lived in a much more common intellectual world.

He does not give us a tightly focused study of Galielo’s observations. What he does instead is fill in the landscape of the seventeenth century mind, one that would no doubt see very different things through Galileo’s telescope than we see in retrospect. That mind blended spaces of mathematics, physics, and astronomy with theology, astrology, alchemy, and poetry, all as ways to see the truth about our world and ourselves.

For us now, the Moon that appears in poetry is quaint and metaphorical. For the mind of the seventeenth century, poetry was itself revelatory of meaning. Poetry gave us something different from theories and facts, something that rivaled science for truth.

Lipking doesn’t offer a simple answer to the question of what Galileo saw, and the book is not a discussion of that moment of looking through the telescope. Instead he paints the broader picture of the seventeenth century, to help us see that it wasn’t as single-minded a march toward science against superstition as we are prone to see it today. And whether we call astrology and alchemy errors, the theology of the church superstition, or the poetic world of Milton a flight of fanciful imagination, those things, in the here and now of the seventeenth century, were real and valid and world-infusing.

Lipking’s book is not so much an explicit argument for one position or another as an exposition of the intellectual landscape in which Galileo, and others, lived. Galileo, from this perspective, is not an ahistorical genius — he is, like anyone, a person of his time. Understanding what he saw requires that we understand what a person of his time brought to his experience. To look through the telescope then and to look through it now are two very different experiences.

[Clare O'Beara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an intensely researched book which looks first at poetry written in the early 1600s before progressing to Galileo and his telescope. The times surrounding the scientist are explored from the point of view of the arts such as philosophy and poetry, with explanations as to why this made it harder for critical thinkers to overcome accepted dogma.

The style of writing and lack of focus on Galileo himself, are the reason that I believe this book will not suit many readers, which is why I am not giving it more stars. We do get reproductions of the first sketches of the lunar surface; and any book which explains the start of the scientific revolution is to be commended.

I received a copy from Net Galley for an unbiased review.

[James Henderson]

The concept that artistic imagination and inventiveness influenced the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century just as much as logical reasoning is examined in What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution. The conventional understanding of the time as a purely logical and forward-thinking advance toward modern science is called into question by the book. According to Lipking, scientists had to rethink the universe and their role in it as a result of the new discoveries of the time, such as Hooke's microscope and Galileo's telescope.
According to Lipking, the Scientific Revolution itself has been "re-imagined" over time, with new generations narrating the advancements in science. He emphasizes that the road to modern science wasn't a straight line because many of the renowned scientists of the time continued to hold views that are now regarded as superstitions (such as Newton's interest in alchemy). The book's essays, which can be read independently, emphasize how different individuals and communities perceived and reacted to these new discoveries.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m so happy I found this book. I found it fascinating.

[Sarah-Hope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lawrence Lipking’s What Galileo Saw is a demanding and interesting read. What Lipking is trying to get at is the role of imagination in the scientific revolution. What kinds of worlds did Galileo or Kepler, for example, have to imagine as a result of their observations? Can we observe their imaginations at work in detailed readings of their illustrations that accompanied their scientific writing? Lipking assumes his audience has a solid background in the history of science and familiarity with the different approaches that have been taken in recent biographies of the scientists he discusses. Most readers will have to move through this book slowly, but the effort will be repaid with new ways of understanding how imagination can lead to revolution.