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HoST
Fall 2011 Week
of 11/15-11/17 |
Back to HoST Fall 2011 Syllabus Email me: host@mifami.org |
Assignment 11
A Scientific Revolution: Part II
–Galileo and Newton–
Galileo's Finger: Museo di Storia del Scienza in Italy
Updated: 11/16/11 1:03 PM
REFRESH
ME
For Tuesday
1-Read pp.
223-240 in McClellan and Dorn: Chapter 12, ÒThe Crime and Punishment of
Galileo." Refer to the
additional materials posted below as you read this.
2- Read Jardine,
Lisa. Ingenious
Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution: Anchor Books, 2000. Excerpt
on extensions of Harvy-esque techniques. Jardin_IngeniousPursuitExcerpt-Beyond_Harvey-988KB.pdf
This reading is short and rather morbid.
For Wednesday
1-Read pp. 249-253 and
256-266 in McClellan and Dorn: Chapters 13, ÒGod said, ÔLet Newton Be!Ó Refer
to the additional materials posted below as you read this.
2- Read this short (one
page) fictional free association: Newton-Reverie-1666ish.htm. This is an example of a way you might
approach an essay assignment, except with some citations added.
For Thursday
1- No assignment. Yeah!
2-
3-
Citations for the above readings and
audio:
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.
Me being weird.
Short Essay Option: Write an approx. 600 word, single-spaced essay
(about 1 full page of single-spaced text). Remember, you all still have one short essay to write....
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.
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.
Here is the specific line: "any
man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
Donne as a young dapper fellow.
John Donne (1572-1631): Here is
the poem: Meditation
17: Bell Tolls. It's short.
Interesting
Sciencey News
–If you run across an
interesting story, let me know–
Google
X-Top Secret Lab of Crazy Ideas
This article describes a
division of Google that focuses on the really out-there ideas.
It employs people like you. Problem is, it's top secret. Who do you send your resume to?