ReVISIONS (34 page)

Dearest Darling Holy Daughter Suor Marie Celeste,

Joy is the kingdom of the Lord and all his wonders, greatest of which is the news of your convalescence. I have news that your eyes have opened, and I expect you have made an even greater recovery in the time it has taken these words to travel to you. Your recuperation has renewed my faith in the Lord and in His Church, and with my work I will honor all.

Your physician, Delmedigo, as I spoke of last, has visited with me and remains the strange and marvelous fellow I once knew as my pupil. It seems that since he has left my tutelage, he has become recognized as a great biblical scholar, mathematician, encyclopedist, and scientist (I borrow the term from your brother, as I have taken a liking to it). Moreover, I have discovered Delmedigo to be a fellow Copernican. After some pleasantries, both usual and unusual, and while surrounded by the gelatinous oddity of my garden, I put forth the problem of my failed colorimeter experiments to him.

“Most troubling,” he pondered, while standing over the sundial as your brother had not long before. “The baths in each plate favor the red, whether on hot days or on cold, on clear nights or cloudy, under moonlight or in darkness. Yet your reasoning that color and light are like sound, ripples in a pond, rings true.”

“Indeed,” I responded, marveling at Delmedigo's play on words, and wondering if it was play also with me. Still, I know Delmedigo well, and he is not one for idle games.

“It occurs to me,” Delmedigo continued, “that dragging a stick toward oneself in a pond, pushes the closest ripples together, and rarifies those that trail. To sound, this becomes the changes in pitch you have described. To light, as you have surmised, it is color. In a rainbow, the color blue is closest to earth, red the farthest away and possibly most rarified. If your methods and apparatus are true and there is no error, then all these bodies you observe, they move away from this earth? If I am mistaken, then they must all move toward us, no? In any event we can conclude that they move with respect to us in altogether the same way.”

“But the Copernican view describes celestial movements that should display themselves as color shifts in many directions.”

“Then perhaps our interpretation, or our understanding, of Copernican theory is flawed, rather than your apparatus.”

“But this is vexing. My observation of the tides proves that we ourselves must also be in motion.”

Delmedigo pondered a moment. “Yes, but not to our own senses. Perhaps to understand this problem, another perspective must be adopted?” Delmedigo offered this suggestion, as if it were nothing more than a daily tea, then took his leave of me as humbly and as respectfully as he had arrived.

I have much to think on, Sister-Daughter: your recovery, and the awful truth only now becoming apparent to me borne on the wings of Delmedigo's words. You have taken a long journey in your illness, as have I in my experiments and in my faith. Now we must both return. And it strikes me odd that we have been aided, both of us, by pagans, Mohammedans, and a Hebrew. It seems almost silly, not unlike one of your brother's humorous tales.

Mend well, my most beloved intricate and perfect creation. In illness and in health, it seems you provide me more with solution than with problem.

Your most humbled and affectionate lord father,
G.G.

Most Blessed and Beloved Sister-Daughter,

To have your few words reach my failing eyes, even in your unsteady hand has, if I am not mistaken, been my greatest pleasure in this miserable life. Autumn is upon the land once again, stealing from nature its color and from me what remains of my disposition. Within the grace of your words, however, there is summer and sunshine, so my mind does not protest even as my bones do. In exchange for this, your gift, I return to you another, in your service, in that of the Lord, and in that of our beloved Church.

I have deciphered Delmedigo's cryptic observations and I realize now that I did not fail. Vincenzo, my student, and I have captured the colors of countless more heavenly suns since my last letter. They, too, are red and our methods remain sound, but the merciful Lord in his kindness has allowed me to only now see the meaning in all this. Please forgive me, once again as I summarize and simplify.

The redness of the night's stars can mean only that they move altogether away from us (or failing that, toward us, altogether, nonetheless). If our world inhabits a universe of constant motion, then this can only be true if one condition is met: that our world finds its place at the very center of that celestial movement. The Church has been correct all this time, but in a way heretofore unimaginable. Our earth constantly rotates and revolves around the sun, I still believe that, but by adopting a different observation point as Delmedigo suggested, from outside that of our planetary sphere, one may find a position, perhaps one that rotates, from where one is able to appreciate this most intricate dance that places our earth at rest at its center.

I have reviewed my conclusions with the Pope and he has accepted both them and my humble self back to the fold. I have been bestowed with the title of Astronomer Holy of the Vatican, and with a position at the right hand of the Pope, a man who once again calls me friend. In this honor, a pamphlet describing my conclusions will be published in unheard of numbers by the Church itself. And furthermore, it has been agreed that my methodologies and my sciences, as we are now calling them, are to be administered through the Jesuit order and the holy offices of the Church.

I can only give thanks to the Lord for returning you to me, and by making of me a more perfect instrument by which to illuminate his heavens. With the proofs of science at our disposal, the Pope and I are confident we can heal the schism that has developed lately within the Church. We believe also that we have finally found a common language, or even a proving grounds, with which to win over the Hebrews, the Mohammedans, and scores of nonbelievers.

Glory to God and all his creations, foremost amongst them my most gifted daughter, Marie Celeste. Peace and understanding to us all. Amen.

Your most illustrious lord father,
G.G.

Galileo Galilei is famous for many scientific innovations, including the astronomical application of the telescope and his experiments with gravity. He is perhaps most famous, however, for his feud with the Catholic Church over the heliocentric theory of the universe. This conflict ultimately led to Galileo's appearance before the Holy Inquisition, and his sentencing to house arrest for the crime of heresy, under which he served the remaining years of his life. Galileo, nevertheless, remained a devout follower of the Church.

Much of what we know of Galileo, the man, comes from the correspondences of his daughter, Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun. Of Galileo's three children, she appears to have been the most scientifically gifted and is suggested by some historians to have been his sometime intellectual collaborator. Galileo's letters to his daughter, on the other hand, remain lost; only his professional publications have survived. They reveal a brilliant, albeit flawed, scientific and artistic mind capable of great feats of reason that often led to correct conclusions through erroneous means. For instance, Galileo argued that the ocean tides were a result, and proof, of the Earth's rotation, rather than properly attributing them to the moon's gravitational pull. And although his conclusion that the Earth did indeed rotate was correct, the means by which that conclusion was reached remained cogently and elaborately spurious. Even in his support of the Copernican heliocentric theory of the universe, Galileo maintained that planetary orbits were perfectly circular, rather than accepting Kepler's elliptical theory.

A common misconception is that Galileo invented the telescope. Rather, he innovated its use for military and astronomical applications. Given enough time and proper inspiration, and had he not been deprived of the collaboration of his daughter by her untimely death, he might well have gone on to further discovery, invention, innovation, and conclusion. These would likely have remained elaborately conceived and crafted, brilliantly insightful, and, at times, fraught with error.

I.S.