The Science of Shakespeare (32 page)

When scholars like Peter Usher pick over a Shakespeare play line by line, looking for nuggets of hidden meaning that have slipped by unnoticed over the years, they are hardly alone. They are merely the latest in a long line of scholars who have reached as far as plausibility may allow—or perhaps slightly farther—in discerning a hidden meaning in Shakespeare's centuries-old words.
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They have mastered the peculiar blend of art and science that allows one to bend Shakespeare's words perilously close to the breaking point in search of a fresh insight, a novel interpretation. If nitpicking each line of a Shakespearean passage were a crime, the last SAA conference would have to have been held in the Don Jail rather than the Royal York hotel.

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Whatever one may think
of Usher's more extravagant claims, his work touches on a number of areas where the Shakespeare community is—gradually, perhaps—beginning to see things his way: More and more scholars are acknowledging that the connections between Shakespeare and Thomas Digges have been neglected, and that there is
some sort of link
between the characters and setting of
Hamlet
and the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. If his book manages to push a handful of researchers to more closely examine those issues, he will likely be satisfied. If they happen to embrace his other claims, I'm sure he'd be delighted—but he does not seem to be betting on it, or to be in any rush. “I think that good wine sells itself,” he says. “I'm retired, and I'm not in a hurry. After all, the canon has been around for four hundred years; another couple of centuries is not going to make a difference.”

As it turns out, from among Usher's myriad claims about Shakespeare and science one particular idea is gaining traction. It involves astronomy and one of the late plays, and it resonates particularly well with both Scott Maisano and John Pitcher. In fact, it seems that the three men all came upon the same idea, at about the same time, by chance. The play in question is
Cymbeline
, dating from the final few years of Shakespeare's career. It also involves the development of modern astronomy, and the invention of the telescope in particular. That's a subject that we have touched on only briefly, in connection with Usher's provocative claims regarding Leonard Digges, who purportedly used such a device in the mid-1500s. Now we must examine the work of the Italian scientist who quite definitely
did
aim such an instrument skyward, more than half a century later. And so we are ready to meet that
other
great mind who came into the world in 1564.

Answers to the
quiz
: Titles 1, 3, and 8 are fake. Paper number 7, which imagines
Henry IV, Part 2
and
The Merry Wives of Windsor
as taking place in parallel universes, is quite real. As noted in the paper's abstract, it invokes not only quantum theory but also string theory: “I posit that the parallel universe is one that contemporary quantum physics has demonstrated as a logical product of string theory.” The essay notes, with explanations from quantum theory, how the transportation from one universe to another occurs, and it argues that Shakespeare's purpose in the creation of
Merry Wives
was to demonstrate “that female-determined justice against male abuses could indeed ultimately or even simultaneously transpire.” (
http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/abstracts/41.pdf
) The author issued a caveat during the seminar, admitting that Shakespeare may not have been “consciously thinking of string theory” when he wrote the plays.

 

9.     “Does the world go round?”

SHAKESPEARE AND GALILEO

While Shakespeare's birthplace is a major tourist attraction, the house where Galileo entered the world—a four-story, pinkish-brown town house in the northern Italian city of Pisa—is to this day a private residence, marked only by a small plaque and an Italian flag. It stands on a quiet street in a neighborhood known as the San Francesco Quarter. In Galileo's time, the area was home to artists, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. His father, Vincenzo Galilei, had settled there, with his wife, Giulia, just a year before the birth of their first son.

Vincenzo was a skilled musician, teacher, and music theorist. In spite of his talents, money was tight, and he traded in wool to make ends meet. Giulia was an educated woman who could claim a cardinal among her relatives. Galileo was the first of their seven children; as was the custom in Tuscany at that time, he was given a Christian name that reflected the family name—hence the echo-like “Galileo Galilei,” the father of modern science, known to history simply as Galileo.

Vincenzo had hoped his son would become a doctor, and the youngster was duly enrolled in the university at Pisa to study medicine. Instead, he developed an interest in mathematics. He left the university without a degree, although he would later return; it was at Pisa that he landed his first teaching job. To call Galileo a misfit might be too harsh, but from an early age he was known for his argumentative nature. We know that he irked some of the more senior faculty members by refusing to wear the school's official robes, which he considered pretentious (and for which the university docked his pay).

It was also in Pisa that Galileo first became fascinated by motion, and began to investigate the way that objects move in response to a steady force, like the force of gravity (although no one called it gravity at that time). One example of such movement is the swing of a pendulum. Galileo's first thoughts on the matter are said to have been triggered by the sight of the massive chandelier in Pisa's cathedral, gently swaying in the breeze; eventually, he worked out the mathematical formula for the duration of a pendulum's swing. The movement of falling or rolling bodies intrigued him as well. One way to study such motion was to roll different kinds of objects down an inclined plane, carefully measuring how far the objects moved in a given interval of time. He also wondered about the special case of objects falling straight down. Suppose you had a ball of iron, like a cannonball, and another ball of the same size and shape, but made of wood. You might guess that the cannonball would fall faster, just because it's heavier. That's what Aristotle thought. He said that the heavier body would fall faster than the lighter one, with a speed proportional to its weight. That certainly sounded plausible—but Galileo had his doubts. He would later give a detailed argument in what was to be his final book, the
Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences
(1638). Written in the form of a dialogue, Galileo's line of reasoning is voiced by a character named Salviati:

Aristotle declares that bodies of different weights, in the same medium, travel … with speeds which are proportional to their weights [and thus] a stone of twenty pounds moves ten times as rapidly as one of two [pounds]; but I claim that this is false and that, if they fall from a height of fifty or a hundred cubits, they will reach the earth at the same moment.… Aristotle says that “an iron ball of one hundred pounds falling from a height of one hundred cubits reaches the ground before a one-pound ball has fallen a single cubit.” I say that they arrive at the same time.

According to his first biographer, Vincenzo Viviani, Galileo tested his hypothesis by dropping objects of varying weights from the top of the cathedral's famous bell tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Historians, however, suspect that the story may be more legend than fact. (Viviani's account was driven largely by hero worship, and much is exaggerated—a common practice in biographies of the time.) Galileo certainly
could
have performed such an experiment; but he likely had already deduced the answer from his studies of motion on an inclined plane, in which the same principles are at work (in either case, the distance covered increases with the square of the elapsed time). Galileo also studied projectile motion, showing that a cannonball must follow a parabolic path. All of these findings contradicted Aristotelian physics, whose failings were becoming increasingly evident. Rather than relying on ancient wisdom, Galileo favored an experimental approach. At the same time, he was discovering the power of mathematics in describing the natural world. As he would put it in a short book called
The Assayer
(in Italian,
Il Saggiatore
), in 1623:

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

Nature displayed an underlying order, and through careful observation and mathematical representations—what we would today call mathematical modeling—that order can be understood and investigated, and predictions can be made. This combination of experiment and mathematical analysis, taken together, would serve as the backbone of science in the centuries ahead.

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Galileo moved to the northeastern city
of Padua in 1592, and would teach at the university there for the next eighteen years. He was involved with, but did not marry, a woman named Marina Gamba, who bore him two daughters and a son.
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He would later look back on that time as the happiest and most productive of his life. Even so, he struggled financially, especially following the death of his father. Happily, his teaching duties left ample time for tinkering. He was desperate to invent something he could patent—a machine or instrument whose utility would guarantee him some measure of financial security, perhaps by winning the patronage of a prince or duke. “… I have many diverse inventions,” he wrote, “only one of which could be enough to take care of me for the rest of my life … if I can only find a grand Prince who would like it.… Then he could do with this invention and with its inventor whatever he likes. I would hope that he would accept not only the stone but the quarry.”

Galileo invented a primitive thermometer and, more lucratively, a military compass designed to aid artillery officers in battle. (He made money not only by having his assistants mass-produce the instrument in his workshop, but by offering tutorials in its use.) By his early thirties, Galileo had taken an interest in astronomy. When a new star appeared in the sky in 1604—the supernova now known as “Kepler's star”—he delivered a series of lectures on the remarkable object, speculating on its significance; the university's auditorium was filled to capacity for each of his talks. He also corresponded with Kepler, after receiving a copy of the German scientist's book
Mysterium Cosmographicum
(1596). The book was a blend of science, mysticism, and numerology—but it also praised the Copernican model, which Galileo approved of. “It is really pitiful that so few seek the truth,” Galileo wrote to Kepler. He noted that he himself had been “an adherent of the Copernican system for many years. It explains to me the causes of many appearances of nature which are quite unintelligible within the commonly held hypothesis.” It was the first sign that Galileo, too, saw the Ptolemaic model as outdated.

“A CERTAIN FLEMING HAD CONSTRUCTED A SPYGLASS”

Up to this point, Galileo—like all skywatchers since the dawn of history—had only the unaided eye with which to observe the heavens.
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That would soon change. It was in Padua that he first learned of a curious optical device from Holland—an instrument that was said to make distant objects appear nearby:

About ten months ago a report reached my ears that a certain Fleming had constructed a spyglass by means of which visible objects, though very distant from the eye of the observer, were distinctly seen as if nearby. Of this truly remarkable effect several experiences were related, to which some persons gave credence while others denied them. A few days later the report was confirmed to me in a letter from a noble Frenchman at Paris, which caused me to apply myself wholeheartedly to inquire into the means by which I might arrive at the invention of a similar instrument.

As his own testimony shows, Galileo did not invent the telescope. In fact, we can't be sure who did, although credit usually goes to a Dutch spectacle maker named Hans Lipperhey (sometimes spelled Lippershey), who applied for a patent for a telescope-like device in October, 1608. It was an instrument, he claimed, “by means of which all things at a very great distance can be seen as if they were nearby.” It apparently magnified distant objects threefold. That may not sound like much, but even so, the military applications must have been obvious. Still, his application was turned down on the grounds that the design was already well known, and indeed two other Dutchmen are thought to have independently come up with a similar device at about the same time.

Before long, Galileo had improved on the original Dutch invention. Soon he had a telescope—or as he called it, a “perspicillum”—that could magnify twenty or even thirty times, compared with what one would see with the unaided eye.
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Galileo had managed, as Owen Gingerich has put it, “to turn a popular carnival toy into a scientific instrument.” Galileo immediately recognized the potential of this new instrument. But his first thoughts had nothing to do with astronomy; instead, he saw the telescope's value as a military tool. He arranged a meeting with senior Venetian statesmen, leading them to the top of the bell tower at the Piazza San Marco. Galileo urged them to aim the telescope at ships in the harbor. The device worked so well that they could identify ships a full two hours before they arrived in port. The officials were suitably impressed, and offered to double Galileo's salary at the university. In the end, he used their offer as a bargaining chip to land an even better job in his native province of Tuscany. Galileo would soon head for Florence with a lofty new title: In July 1610, he was appointed Chief Mathematician and Philosopher to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. But he was still in Padua when he aimed his telescope skyward, and began to scrutinize the night sky with the new device. What he saw would change the world forever.