The Lying Stones of Marrakech (6 page)

As a brilliant administrator, Cesi knew that he needed more clout among the membership of the Lynxes. He therefore recruited, as the fifth and sixth members of an organization that would eventually reach a roster of about thirty, two of the most prestigious thinkers and doers of early-seventeenth-century life. In 1610, he journeyed to Naples, where he persuaded the senior spokesman of the fading Neoplatonic school—the seventy-five-year-old Giambattista
Della Porta—to join a group of men young enough to be his grandsons. Then, in 1611, Cesi made his preeminent catch, when he recruited the hottest intellectual property in the Western world, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), to become the sixth member of the Lynxes.

The year before, in 1610, Galileo had provided an ultimate proof for the cliché that good things come in small packages by publishing
Sidereus nuncius
(Starry messenger)—little more than a pamphlet really, but containing more oomph per paragraph than anything else ever achieved in the history of science or printing. Galileo shook the earth by turning his newly invented telescope upon the cosmos and seeing the moon as a planet with mountains and valleys, not as the perfect sphere required by conventional concepts of science and theology. Galileo also reported that thousands of previously invisible stars build the Milky Way, thus extending the cosmos beyond any previously conceivable limit; and that four moons orbit Jupiter, forming a miniature world analogous to the motion of planets around a central body. Moreover, Galileo pointed out, if satellites circle planets, then the crystalline spheres, supposedly marking the domain of each planet, and ordered as a set of concentric shells around the central earth, could not exist—for the revolution of moons would shatter these mystical structures of a geometrically perfect, unsullied, and unchanging cosmos, God's empyrean realm.

But Galileo also made some errors in his initial survey, and I have always been struck that standard books on the history of astronomy, written in the heroic or hagiographical mode, almost never mention (or relegate to an awkward footnote) the most prominent of Galileo's mistakes—for the story strikes me as fascinating and much more informative about the nature of science, and of creativity in general, than any of his valid observations.

Galileo also focused his telescope on Saturn, the most distant of the visible planets—and he saw the famous rings. But he could not properly visualize or interpret what he had observed, presumably because his conceptual world lacked the requisite “space” for such a peculiar object (while his telescope remained too crude to render the rings with enough clarity to force his mind, already benumbed by so many surprises, to the most peculiar and unanticipated conclusion of all).

The stymied Galileo looked and looked, and focused and focused, night after night. He finally interpreted Saturn as a threefold body, with a central sphere flanked by two smaller spheres of equal size, each touching the main planet. Following a common custom of the day—established to preserve claims of priority while not revealing preliminary conclusions ripe for theft by others—
Galileo encoded his interpretation as a Latin anagram, which he posted to his friend and leading compatriot in astronomical research, Johannes Kepler.

Kepler may have matched Galileo in brilliance, but he never resolved the anagram correctly, and he misinterpreted the message as a statement about the planet Mars. In frustration (and a bit of pique), he begged Galileo for the answer. His colleague replied with the intended solution:

Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi
.
[I have observed that the farthest planet is threefold.]

I regard the last word of Galileo's anagram as especially revealing. He does not advocate his solution by stating “I conjecture,” “I hypothesize,” “I infer,” or “It seems to me that the best interpretation …” Instead, he boldly writes “
observavi
”—I have
observed
. No other word could capture, with such terseness and accuracy, the major change in concept and procedure (not to mention ethical valuation) that marked the transition to what we call “modern” science. An older style (as found, for example, in Gesner's compendium on mammals, cited above) would not have dishonored a claim for direct observation, but would have evaluated such an argument as a corroborative afterthought, surely secondary in weight to such criteria as the testimony of classical authors and logical consistency with a conception of the universe “known” to be both true and just—in other words, to authority and fixed “reasonableness.”

But the new spirit of skepticism toward past certainty, coupled with respect for “pure” and personal observation—then being stressed by Francis Bacon in England, René Descartes in France, and the Lynxes in Italy—was sweeping through the intellectual world, upsetting all standard procedures of former times and giving birth to the modern form of an institution now called “science.” Thus, Galileo supported his theory of Saturn with the strongest possible claim of the new order, the one argument that could sweep aside all opposition by claiming a direct, immediate, and unsullied message from nature. Galileo simply said: I have observed it; I have seen it with my own eyes. How could old Aristotle, or even the present pope himself, deny such evidence?

I do not intend, in this essay, to debunk the usual view that such a transition from old authority to direct observation marks a defining (and wonderfully salutary) event in the history of scientific methodology. But I do wish to note that all great mythologies include harmful simplicities amidst their genuine reforms—and that these negative features often induce the ironic consequence of saddling an original revolutionary doctrine with its own form of
restrictive and unquestioned authority. The idea that observation can be pure and unsullied (and therefore beyond dispute)—and that great scientists are, by implication, people who can free their minds from the constraints of surrounding culture and reach conclusions strictly by untrammeled experiment and observation, joined with clear and universal logical reasoning—has often harmed science by turning the empiricist method into a shibboleth. The irony of this situation fills me with a mixture of pain for a derailed (if impossible) ideal and amusement for human foibles—as a method devised to undermine proof by authority becomes, in its turn, a species of dogma itself. Thus, if only to honor the truism that liberty requires eternal vigilance, we must also act as watchdogs to debunk the authoritarian form of the empiricist myth—and to reassert the quintessentially human theme that scientists can work only within their social and psychological contexts. Such an assertion does not debase the institution of science, but rather enriches our view of the greatest dialectic in human history: the transformation of society by scientific progress, which can only arise within a matrix set, constrained, and facilitated by society.

I know no better illustration of this central principle than the tale of Galileo's losing struggle with Saturn, for he insisted on validation by pure sight
(observavi)
, and he could never see his quarry correctly—presumably because his intellectual domain included no option for rings around a planet. Galileo did not just “see” Saturn; he had to interpret an object in his lens by classifying an ambiguous shape (the best that his poor optics could provide) within the structure of his mental space—and rings didn't inhabit this interior world.

The great Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens finally recognized the rings of Saturn in 1656, more than a decade after Galileo's death. Galileo, who had wrestled mightily with Saturn, never moved beyond his trigeminal claim, and finally gave up and turned to other pursuits. In his 1613 book on sunspots, published by the Lynxes (with the author designated on the title page as Galileo Galilei Linceo), he continued to insist that Saturn must be threefold because he had so observed the planet: “I have resolved not to put anything around Saturn except what I have already observed and revealed—that is, two small stars which touch it, one to the east and one to the west.” Against a colleague who interpreted the planet as oblong, Galileo simply asserted his superior vision. The colleague, Galileo wrote, had viewed Saturn less often and with a much poorer telescope, “where perfection is lacking, [and] the shape and distinction of the three stars imperfectly seen. I, who have observed it a thousand times at different periods with an excellent instrument, can assure you that no change whatever is to be seen in it.”

Yet just as Galileo prepared his book on sunspots for publication, he observed Saturn again after a hiatus of two years—and the two side planets had disappeared (a situation produced, we now know, when the planet's changing orientation presents the rings directly on edge—that is, as an invisible line in Galileo's poor telescope). The stunned Galileo, reduced to a most uncharacteristic modesty, had just enough time to make an addition to the last chapter of his book. He abjured nothing about his previous observations or about the righteousness of the empirical method in general. He merely confessed his puzzlement, making a lovely classical allusion to the primary myth about the planet's eponym:

I had discovered Saturn to be three-bodied…. When I first saw them they seemed almost to touch, and they remained so for almost two years without the least change. It was reasonable to believe them to be fixed…. Hence I stopped observing Saturn for more than two years. But in the past few days I returned to it and found it to be solitary, without its customary supporting stars, and as perfectly round and sharply bounded as Jupiter. Now what can be said of this strange metamorphosis? That the two lesser stars have been consumed? … Has Saturn devoured his children? Or was it indeed an illusion and a fraud with which the lenses of my telescope deceived me for so long—and not only me, but many others who have observed it with me? … I need not say anything definite upon so strange and unexpected an event; it is too recent, too unparalleled, and I am restrained by my own inadequacy and the fear of error.

After this lengthy preamble on the maximally celebrated Galileo, let me now present the main subject of this essay: the virtually unknown Francesco Stelluti, one of the original four Lynxes, a loyal friend and supporter of Galileo, and the man who tried to maintain, and eventually disbanded with dignity (in 1652), the original Academy of the Lynxes, fatally weakened after Cesi's untimely death in 1630. The previously uncharted links between Stelluti and Galileo are rich and fascinating (I would have said “the links between these Lynxes,” if the pun were not so egregious), and these connections provide a poignant illustration of this essay's central theme: the power and poverty of pure empiricism, and the need to scrutinize social and intellectual contexts, both for practicing scientists (so they will not be beguiled) and for all people who wish to understand the role and history of knowledge (so they will grasp the necessary and complex interdigitation of science and society).

The original Lynxes began with all the bravado and secrecy of a typical boys' club (Cesi, remember, was only eighteen years old, while his three compatriots were all twenty-six). They wrote complex rules and enunciated lofty ideals. (I do not know whether or not they developed a secret handshake!) Each adopted a special role, received a Latin moniker, and took a planet for his emblem. The leader Cesi commanded the botanical sciences as Coelivagus (the heavenly wanderer); the Dutchman Johannes van Heeck would read and interpret classical philosophy as Illuminatus; Anastasio de Filiis became the group's historian and secretary as Eclipsatus. Poor Francesco Stelluti, who published little and evidently saw himself as a systematic plodder, took up mathematics and geometry under the name of Tardigradus (the slow stepper). For his planet, Stelluti received the most distant and most slowly revolving body—Saturn, the subject of Galileo's error!

In their maturity, the Lynxes would provide powerful intellectual and institutional support for the open and empirical approach to science, as promoted by their most prominent member, Galileo. But at their beginnings, as a small club of young men, the Lynxes preferred the older tradition of science as an arcane and secret form of knowledge, vouchsafed only to initiates who learned the codes and formulae that could reveal the mysterious harmonies of universal order—the astrological links between planetary positions and human lives; the alchemical potions and philosopher's stones, heated in vats that could transmute base metals to gold (double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble, to cite some famous witches); and the experiments in smoke, mirrors, and optical illusions that occupied an uncertain position between categories now labeled as magic and science, but then conflated. Giambattista Della Porta, the fifth Lynx, had survived as a living legend of this fading philosophy. Della Porta had made his reputation in 1558, long before the birth of any original Lynx, with a book entided
Magia naturalis
, or
Natural Magic
. As a young man in Naples, Della Porta had founded his own arcane organization, the Accademia dei Segreti (Academy of Secrets), dedicated to alchemical and astrological knowledge, and later officially suppressed by the Inquisition.

By initiating the aged Della Porta into the Academy of Lynxes, Cesi and his compatriots showed the strength of their earlier intellectual allegiances. By inducting Galileo the next year, they displayed their ambivalence, and their growing attraction to a new view of knowledge and scientific procedure.

The election of both newcomers virtually guaranteed a period of definitional struggle within the Academy, for no love could unite Della Porta and Galileo, who not only differed maximally in their basic philosophical approaches to science, but also nearly came to blows for a much more specific
reason vested in the eternally contentious issue of priority. Galileo never claimed that he had invented the telescope from scratch. He stated that he had heard reports about a crude version during a trip to Venice in 1609. He recognized the optical principles behind the device, and then built a more powerful machine that could survey the heavens. But Della Porta, who had used lenses and mirrors for many demonstrations and illusions in his
Natural Magic
, and who surely understood the rules of optics, then claimed that he had formulated all the principles for building a telescope (although he had not constructed the device) and therefore deserved primary credit for the invention. Although tensions remained high, the festering issue never erupted into overt battle because Galileo and Della Porta held each other in mutual respect, and Della Porta died in 1615 before any growing bitterness could bubble over.