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For the Week of 11/5/08 |
Assignment 10
Galileo & Newton, and friendsÉ
It is Tuesday night and you
finally have gotten this far in the assignment pageÉÉ
Tuesday! Guess where you should be right
now! You could read your
assignments while waiting in line.
Tuesday is the election.
If you want the right to
complain for the next 2, 4, or 6 years, this is the ticket.
Read McClellan and Dorn: Chapters 12
and 13 (11 and 12 in older editions), ÒThe Crime and Punishment of GalileoÓ and
ÒGod said, ÔLet Newton Be!Ó
Look at all the other material I
have posted below.
Write an essay relating to the
readings and try to draw upon as much from previous class readings as you
can. E.g. Compare Galileo and
Newton to Ptolemy and Aristotle or Ibn TufaylÉ
Galilean materials:
View movie of Medician moons: GalileoMediceanMoonspseudoanimation.pdf
[67KB] To make this work, view it in Acrobat (or similar) in single page view
(not scroll view) and hit the next page button over and over again. ItÕs not a good animation, but it
represents what Galileo had to work with.
I have no evidence that Galileo ever made a flip-card animation similar
to this one. These drawings appear
inline in his text (see image below) and cannot work as an animation the way
they are arranged on the pages. In
fact, I am unaware of any flip-card animations existing until the 19th
century, but this in no way means that similar animation techniques didnÕt
exist earlier. I have never looked
into it. Feel free to explore this
question.
Pages
from GalileoÕs
Sidereus nuncius (1610)
This is
a photograph taken through a Galilean-style
telescope
of Jupiter and its largest moons. (I enhanced the contrast.)
Newtonian materials:
Dark
Side of the ...
This is
a diagram from NewtonÕs Opticks from 1704.
I have
added some interpretive images and a new title.
Newton
drew this for a French ed. of Opticks. It says,
ÒLight doesnÕt vary color when refracted.Ó
Nec
variat lux fracta colorem. More literally: Light doesnÕt
change when broken into color.
I
colorized it to for clarity. Some of the light from the hole in the
window-covering on the left (focused by that big lens) is intercepted by the
prism, and some of it continues on to hit the lower part of the screen. The
prism emits a rainbow. The
red-part of the rainbow then passes through a hole in the screen and into
another prism where it is not broken up anymore, proving thatÉ
Nec
variat lux fracta colorem – Light doesnÕt change when broken into color
Read this.
From
NewtonÕs Opticks,
1st ed. 1704. Read
this.
Above
is a diagram from NewtonÕs Opticks (1704) which I have colorized for clarity.
Notice
that he is suggesting that the rainbow is divided into 7 colors
just
as the string of a monochord is divided into 7 intervals, the seven intervals
of our major scale: Do, re, mi, faÉ etc.
Newton
even gives the Pythagorean-style intervals: 8/9, 3/4, 2/3, 1/2É.
Below
I have added to his diagram the profile of a monochord/guitar with the Pythagorean
intervals shown below.
Interesting
triviaÉ (extracted from a paper I once wroteÉ)
Leibniz, the
German/French counterpart to Newton, after having read NewtonÕs Opticks, wrote,
ÒSir Isaac Newton says, that space is an organ, which God makes use of to
perceive things by.Ó [from Clarke,
Leibniz, Newton and Alexander, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence: Together with Extracts From Newton's
Principia and Opticks. Philosophical Classics (New York: Barnes &
Noble, 1956), p. 11.]
What Leibniz was responding to
was this (in the Latin edition of Opticks that Leibniz was reading), ÒUniversal Space is the Sensorium of the Incorporeal,
Living, and Intelligent Being;ÉÓ Newton
had actually corrected this passage by making it clear that he was making an
analogy, but Leibniz somehow had gotten an uncorrected edition.
What Newton means is
this: Perception occurs by exposing
Òsensing substanceÓ [What he calls Òsubstantia
sentiensÓ in
Latin] to the
Òsensible species of thingsÓ [Òsensibiles rerum speciesÓ], which are gathered and brought to the brain where this
Òsensing substanceÓ is located.
This description needs almost no modification to be a Galenic/Avicennic
description of sensory perception based on spiritus animalis, which we have discussed in
previous classes. I find it quite interesting that Newton is still operating on
this theory of perception.
Newton goes on in the corrected
passage to suggest that God, being omnipresent, perceives the entire universe
merely by being present throughout all space. It is not so much that the all of space is GodÕs sensorium,
but that God is everywhere and acts as if [tanquam] He were the spiritus animalis of human perception.
Unlike humans, who need spiritus or Òsensing substanceÓ to connect their souls to the
world, God needs no intermediary for the perception of the world. He is Himself, as it were, the
intermediary, the spiritus. After all,
what do you think the Holy Spirit is?
Put another way: It would be
like saying that God is the machine code (or perhaps the system software) of
the universal computer that we call reality. He permeates everything and is everywhere. Nothing is instigated or caused without
His 0s and 1s. For Him, causing
and perceiving are one and the same activity. Freaky.
Disclaimer: Newton had a rather
radical opinion of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He was secretly an anti-Trinitarian and
a follower of the teachings of Arius from the early 4th century AD,
who proposed that the Son was not coeternal with God but had actually been
created by God in time. This issue is directly addressed in the Nicaean Creed,
which makes the Trinity Òone in being.Ó
It was written very specifically against Arius who was then
excommunicated for his heretical ideas.
The Council of Nicaea (the meeting that wrote the creed) was largely
instigated by the Emperor Constantine and can quite easily be seen as a political
exercise whereby a certain group of theologians seized control and solidified
their power by officially making their adversaries heretics. It is not much of a surprise that the
winners of this controversy were the ones backed by the Emperor Constantine. Christianity in the first couple hundred
years was theologically very diverse, but when the Roman Emperor got involved
such variety was no longer acceptable. Power from the top down became the
structure. After all, the Roman
Catholic Church is Roman, as in Roman Empire.
Newton, an avid Biblical
scholar, and probably several other major players in the later Scientific
Revolution were secretly followers of Arius. Secretly, because even after fourteen-hundred years, Arius
was still considered a threat to both Catholic and Protestant theologians. To be perfectly honest, I have tried to
understand this issue, but have never really figured it out. It is very complicated and esoteric and
seems to be concerned with theological details that I simply donÕt find all
that critical. But this probably
means that I simply havenÕt tried hard enough to understand.
If anybody is interested,
Wikipedia has a pretty good article on Arius and Arianism and the Arian
controversy. I can also hook you
up with more stuff if you want. Just
email me.
I
looked up the word sensorium to try to figure out what Newton meant. It actually is not a Latin word, but an
English word with a Latin root.
Here is
an extract from Samuel JohnsonÕs A Dictionary of the English Language; 4th
ed. (1773)
Sensorium,
Sensory n.s. [Latin]-- 1) The part where the senses transmit
their perceptions to the mind; seat of sense; 2) Organ of sensation
Selected Examples
given by Johnson:
-Bacon: ÒSpiritual species, both visible and audible,
will work upon the sensories, though they move not any other body.Ó
-Newton: ÒAs found in a bell or musical string,
or other sounding body, is nothing but a trembling motion, and the air nothing
but that motion propagated from the object, in the sensorium Ôtis a sense of
that motion under the form of sound.Ó
-Newton from Query
28: ÒIs not the Sensory of Animals that place to which the
sensitive Substance is present, and into which the sensible Species of Things are carried through the
Nerves and Brain, that there they may be perceived by their immediate presence
to that Substance?Ó
Newton supposedly drew a
portrait of Donne on the wall of his domicile in Grantham, while in grammar
school.
Donne wrote the original ÒFor
Whom the Bell Tolls.Ó
ItÕs a nice poem if you need a
break. The whole idea of
collective humanity reminds me of Averroestic or Platonic world-soul stuff that
we discussed several weeks ago.
John Donne (1572-1631): Meditation 17:
Bell Tolls
Here are the citations for the
above works:
Figala, Karen. "Newton's
Alchemy." In The Cambridge Companion to Newton, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and George
E. Smith, pp. 370-486. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Jardine, Lisa. Ingenious
Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution. Anchor Books, 2000.
McClellan, James E., and Harold
Dorn. Science
and Technology in World History : An Introduction. Baltimore, Md.: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Munitz, Milton Karl, ed. Theories of the
Universe; from Babylonian Myth to Modern Science, The Library of Scientific
Thought. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1965.
Back to Syllabus [HoST Fall 2008]
Me – hostf08@mifami.org
News of Note:
Notice how the Copernican
heliocentric paradigm is the only one entertained today.
What is the reason that a
Ptolemaic/Platonic/Aristotelian-Geocentric model is not even considered?
Madrigal-Wired-2008-Nearby
Solar System Looks Like Our Own at Time Life Formed
This article courtesy of Gregory
Hollin
Scientists
Record Music of the Stars
People still think this is worth
pursuing.
First: Sound cannot travel
through the ÒvacuumÓ of space, therefore what we are hearing is certainly based
on some other vibratory phenomenon.
Now, when translating generic vibratory information into an audio track,
you have to decide what sort of instrument to play it on. So my question is: Why wouldnÕt it
sound like a Star Trek sound effect?
For that matter why not an 18th-century orchestra or a band
of kazoos?
Here is a really
interesting animation of the heart in action:
http://gizmodo.com/5068073/3d-virtual-heart-so-real-doctors-own-hearts-go-pitter-patter
The second video is particularly
good. This second video is also
available at the following sites:
Here is a link Glassworks site.
Click on ÒPlayÓ to see another movie:glassworks.co.uk/search_archive/jobs/heartworks/index.shtml
Here is the Heartworks site: Heartworks
Exam review materials.
Both of these PDFs
contain more information than I actually lectured on.
This web page, in and
of itself, contains significant review materials.
Galileo-short-version-Review-6.1MB.pdf
and
Newton-short-version-Review-2.4MB.pdf
Posted: 12/5/08 3:27
PM