The Fabric of the Heavens

by Stephen Toulmin, June Goodfield

Surveys the evaluation of man's scientific knowledge regarding the theories and principles of astronomy

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Physics, History Of Science, Astronomy, Philosophy

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another book assigned to my undergraduate readings. This book covers an aspect of one of my most feared academic subjects - Physics. Particularly astronomical physics. The introduction is fairly smooth but if you don't know some of the key aspects of physics(ie. Euclidean space, Newton's principles and a slew of other things) the book is a ticket to being lost. I enjoyed the biographical writing but had to crawl through the sections that talked about math and physics with the aid of Google.

[Liam Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This pelican book is a history of astronomy which is very good at turning back the clock, and inviting the reader to consider schoolboy science once again as the grand mysteries that they once were. The book is, in this way, reminding us moderns of how much we intellectually take for granted, and take for "obvious": such facts that are in fact no more plausible on the face value than competing pictures of how the world may work:

Since Galileo and Newton, dynamics has been made a branch of mathematics, and we no longer stop to question whether this can be legitimately done. In the complex equations of mathematical dynamics we assume that the way a body moves depends on how heavy it is, rather than (say) on its colour or its chemical make-up. Furthermore, dynamics - the science which explains why bodies change their position and motion as they do - is for us quite independent of other theories of change. Suppose some object we are studying alters its position, its shape, its material make-up, its colour, or its vital activites. We assume that each of these alterations is of a distinct kind, and we look to specialists in different sciences to explain them. We no longer see any but the most far-fetched analogies between (for example) a motor-car accelerating, a man growing old, a pool of water evaporating, and a dye fading. Dynamics, physiology, physical chemistry, and the rest, all have their own distinct subject-matters, explaining the processes which are their concern in terms of quite different sets of principles. P. 19

After covering the pre-theoretic eons of Mesopotamian astronomy, the authors recount ancient Greek developments with an appreciation for their diverse , creative pictures of the world's workings, inside and out; which added the crucial dimension of the all-encompassing "theory" to earlier practices of mere observation and recording.

Should we criticise the Greek philosophers for this? Was it a failure on their part, not to have adopted earlier the practice of severe criticism in the light of controlled observation which is the heart of modern science's "experimental method"? In case one is tempted to be scornful, two things should be said. First, you can start asking which of two automobiles performs better - which has the better acceleration or petrol consumption - only when the rival cars are assembled and in working order; the Greek philosophers, rather, should be compared to those men who first envisaged the possibility of motor-cars, and who worked out for us the original tentative designs.Their theories were still only on the "drawing board".

Secondly, among the Greeks science was a purely intellectual enterprise. One which was not undertaken with any technological end in view, and which in this direction yielded only the slightest fruit. (...) The Babylonian astronomers had their noses kept forcibly to the ground by the practical demand for accurate prophecies and predictions. By contrast, the very fertility and freedom with which the Greeks speculated is connected with the fact that so little hung upon the soundness of its results. Suppose they had to pay for wild generalization, or unsound theorizing (...) then they might well have proceeded more cautiously. And if their originality and imagination had been shackled in this way, it would have been very much to our loss. p. 68

As they remind us here, though true conclusions are what scientists want, given limited evidence, a pure scientific sensibility must sometimes reject true hypthoses:

We really need not be surprised that the Greeks remained skeptical about Aristarcho's [helicocentrism]: rather, we should congraulate them on their good sense. In judging them as scientists - as rational interpreters of Nature, that is - the important thing surely is not to ask how many conclusions they reached which we still accept, but rather how far their conclusions were supported by the evidence then available. In so far as they allowed their judgement to be influenced by the weight of the evidence, they can be said to have thought scientifically. In the light of subsequent developments, we can dispose of their arguments for the geocentric theory. But, as matters stood then, they had equal scientific justification for rejecting Aristarcho's helicentric speculations. p. 138

The book does not recount beyond the modern picture of Newton, and only briefly touches upon some "the new horizon" of contemporary mysteries/discoveries in astronomy which are necessarily reduced in their scope and many times more specialized. The milestone of Newton marks the end of a significant moment in intellectual history: a sort of eclipse of readers by Knowledge, an intriguing development which the authors put so:

It would be hard to exaggerate this change in the efficiency of scientific communication. Whereas the pace of scientific advance had depended earlier largely on the concentration of scholars in one and the same place, from now on men living at a distance from one anotherc could collaborate effectively. Before 1500, one can hardly speak of mathematical or scientific advances ever becoming "common knowledge": important insights were achieved at one place and time, only to be lost again in the next century, and scholars working in different cities took as their starting points quite different bodies of knowledge. From about 1550 one can fairly assume that anyone writing about, say, planetary dynamics has read most of hte existing material directly relevant to his work. Only in the twentieth century, when the stream of scientific publications has turned into a flood, does this cease to be a reasonable assumpotion; the age of original papers and books is being rapidly replaced by the age of "abstracts." p.202

The book was quite difficult for me in parts, but I was helped and not hindered by the authors, who write very clearly for the lay reader, yet not without passion either. It balances the philosophical questions with the nitty-gritty numbers to build a vivid picture of the particular mysteries that absorbed great minds of the past in their different eras. Taken all together, their unanswerables and ours, the book gives a great deal essential to consider when we ask "where are we?."

[Steven Yaskell · Rating 4 out of 5]

What the Toulmin-Goodfield team did here in part, as I found to my personal astonishment, was to show how the human mind began to comprehend deep space through time when most persons could not imagine the end of their own kingdoms.

That Eudoxus, for one, comprehended the distance to the sun as perhaps a few hundred thousand miles must've been an astonishing revelation at a time when most in Greece couldn't figure out how far the next kingdom's capital was - and without the aid of Arabic numeration, either.

They attach things like this to our current understanding of distance in space. If you'd ever been afraid of distance like I was, traveling across the middle states in the darkness of night driving to see relatives in Iowa once as a child - this book will explain why, in part. My mind that night widened such that I could at least not fear something as vast as a Light Year - or, c. 13 trillion US miles.

Has anyone, or thing, we know traveled that far from earth? Perhaps some can envisage a radio signal heading that far. The expansion of the human mind in such parameters finally led, as the authors assert, to an acceptance of dynamism in nature from the statics most academics of the ancient past insisted was the actual truth.

Note very well that this expansion is NOT generally sprinkled evenly, in space and time, in all directions, within the minds of all persons. We live among the most modern and the least modern at the same time.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those great old fashioned classics in the history of science. Superb. Its strongest point is its deep research and sympathy for now outmoded points of view that were by no means unreasonable for their time. I also recommend reading about the medieval background to Renaissance and 17th c science.

[Abraham Lewik · Rating 2 out of 5]

This delivers a well-calibrated view of the march of civilisation, with focus to certain abstract patterns. It undermines a naive view of the Dark Ages, it ignores the Far East, the Near East is mentioned a few times. An excess of explicit trials diminished my pleasure, however perhaps you want to test yourself with certain methods of old physical equations.