The Strange Case of Dr. Galileo
Of scientific revolutions
Happy New Year to those reading this and many thanks to those who regularly read, review and rebuke my enthusiasms from time to time. I mostly write to clarify my own thinking on an issue and am deeply indebted to those who appropriately critique those thoughts.
The past ten years have been a maelstrom of weirdness for my family and I am hopeful for 2025 as well. In 2015, when I gratefully accepted an appointment from the Canadian government, a friend, taking into account my checkered employment history, congratulated me on finally landing a job that might not end with a pink slip,
“Congratulations Murray. It will take an act of Parliament to pry you out of this job.”
Four years later I was removed by an act of Parliament. It is a gift. What can I say. Then came covid and then came the final years of Mr. Biden and Mr. Trudeau. So I am hopeful for 2025 and I pray the richest of God’s blessings for all of you. With many thanks for reading on…
Scott Adams offers a good model for worldview. He suggests that differences in apparent values are like a person who has a dream in which his or her partner does something aggravating. The dream is so real that they then spend the next day being angry with their spouse. Our worldview is our dream and sometimes the dream doesn’t match reality resulting in differences in apparent values. He argues that values are, in fact, always the same. It is the dream that is different - just like a worldview.
In 2011, the Nobel prize for chemistry was won by an Israeli scientist called Dr. Daniel Shechtman. In 1982 Dr. Shechtman wrote a paper stating that, based on electron microscopy, he had found a mixture of aluminum and manganese that cooled to a quasi-crystalline (non-repeating) or amorphous form. It took him two years to find a journal to peer review and publish his observations. And then his world blew up. What he was proposing was a step away from the accepted boundaries of materials science. Science is “settled” and this no-name metallurgist was offering a nonsensical revision to the accepted understanding of the natural world.
For his willingness to step into the dark, he lost his research funding and had to find employment with a new institute. No less a person than Nobel laureate Linus Pauling stated that,
“Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense, there are no quasi-crystals, just quasi-scientists.”
Ouch.
By 1992, other researchers started to find the same strange, non-repeating, non-crystalline structures as Dr. Schechtman. He wasn’t such a quasi-scientist after all. (And Linus Pauling walked back his critique.) Today quasi crystalline metals are being researched for use in light weight, high strength solids.
In 2014, I listened to the keynote address given by Dr. Shechtman at a conference that was named in his honour. I expected that he was going to rip the scientific community for the way he had been treated. Much to my surprise, he was very gracious and stated that his treatment was necessary for the development of science. The scientific method requires repeatability to justify departures from current dogma. And this makes sense. The body of knowledge that directs the development of science and technology is like a large ocean liner whose direction cannot and must not be changed quickly. Rapid changes in scientific sureties result in a cognitive whiplash which slows rather than accelerates scientific advances.
In his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn addressed the issue of scientific advances which he called paradigm shifts and noted that science advances quickly with a dramatic departure from the current dogmas, establishes a new stasis and waits for another plucky, usually young scientist to challenge the status quo and propose a new theory or insight which upends a previously accepted understanding. Such challenges are subject to significant pushback because older scientists won’t easily accept an upstart lab rat challenging everything they built their careers on unless there is a lot of experimental support for the new understanding. And that is the way it should be for the reasons given above.
What surprised me in all this was how often the scientific community ostracizes those with non-orthodox views only to have those views subsequently become the new orthodoxy. The conference I attended was held every two years and each conference honoured a different scientist who, like Dr. Shechtman, had attempted to change a paradigm. William Briggs addressed this ”eat your own” tendency in a recent Substack article (The Lesson Scientists Never Learn),
“Scientists are raised hearing the stories of stalwart heroes of the past who stuck to their ideas, come what may. What usually come-what-may meant was hersterical screeching and calls for book burnings. Remember the hand-washing guy? Hounded. The drifting continents fellow? Scorned. The meteor man? Loathed.”
And this brings me to the strange case of Dr. Galileo.
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Galileo Galilei was dreadfully persecuted by the Catholic church for his belief that the sun and not the earth was at the center of the solar system. His heterodox views were counter to the church teaching that the Garden of Eden and thus the earth was at the center of the universe. For his heresy he was hounded by the church and put under house arrest by the pope.
At least this is what we are taught to believe. I think the truth is a lot more interesting and more congruent with the treatment of Dr. Shechtman.
Galileo accepted the Copernican views of planetary orbits that had been postulated earlier by Nikolaus Copernicus in his posthumous 1543 book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies. Did Copernicus publish posthumously for fear of a papal excommunication? Maybe. Copernicus was noodling the earlier Greek heliocentric view of planetary orbits as he recalculated the geocentric, Ptolemaic Tables that had first been published with the Almagest in the 2nd century AD. Ptolemy had placed the earth at the center of the universe, I suppose, because it was convenient to his calculations. Earlier Greeks had placed the sun at the center of the Solar System, but their calculations were no more accurate than his. For 1300 years, the Ptolemaic system worked quite well. Unfortunately, the Ptolemaic Tables had to be periodically and laboriously recalculated to improve their attenuating accuracy. Such a recalculation was not for the faint of heart.
Even though Copernicus put the sun at the center of the Solar System, he was still wedded to the notion that the perfect shape was a circle and therefore planetary orbits must be circular. He continued to use nested orbits with an epicycle fudge factor to account for the apparent retrograde motion of the heavenly bodies and to improve the predictive accuracy of his heliocentric theory.
Galileo, who was born twenty years after the death of Copernicus, agreed with his predecessors views. The sun is at the center of the Solar System. The earth moves around the sun and planetary paths are circular because circles are the perfect shape. Were these views heretical? Was Galileo at the cutting edge of science? Was the Catholic church a monolithic entity that strove to pass all science and philosophy through its canonical grid and destroy those who offered heretical views?
In the 12th century the works of Aristotle were rediscovered in Europe and, among some clerics such as Thomas Aquinas, the Aristotelian philosophy had great purchase. The new Aristotelian (versus Platonic) ideas and philosophy kicked off a movement called Scholasticism which, to some historians, created a scientific cul-de-sac that lasted for almost 500 years. I am quite fond of Aristotle and so bristle at this characterization, but it is not a fight that will put money in my pocket, so I do not engage. It is argued that Aristotle applied deductive rather than inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is the basis for the scientific method. As a result, the progress of science was delayed until Francis Bacon upset the world of science in the late 16th century.
Aristotle, you see, looked at things and considered what he was seeing by asking a lot of philosophical questions such as,
what is the purpose of this thing?
why is it the way it is?
what are its uses?
can it be improved?
By looking and asking such questions, he deduced conclusions about what he was observing. What he did not do was say,
I wonder what would happen to this thing that I am observing if I put it in a glass vessel and added a bunch of acid to it? If X happens then I can conclude A but if Y happens then I can conclude B. I will induce conclusions based on the results of reproducible experiments.
And it is too bad that he didn’t let his mind wander down this road because he has been held to account for that oversight for the past 500 years.
What does this have to do with Galileo? Aristotle’s writings powerfully influenced the thinking of Thomas Aquinas who was the intellectual giant of the 12th and 13th centuries. Aquinas was a member of the Dominican order of monks who, under his influence, became an important source of scientific philosophy. The Dominicans were Aristotelian because their hero Aquinas was Aristotelian and they held slavishly to the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion because it was based on the philosophy of Aristotle. The Dominicans may have been a subset of the Catholic church, but they were a powerful subset. Were there other points of view from other subsets of the Catholic church? Others in the church, notably the Jesuits, accepted Galileo’s unproven heliocentric, Copernican hypothesis because it fit their observations of the world better than Ptolemy’s geocentric hypothesis.
Galileo’s problem was not that he took on the dogma and power of the Catholic church. His problem was that he was “loud and proud” in how he baited and debated with the Dominicans. The argument was getting too loud and the Pope, who was a friend of Galileo and likely was friendly to the Copernican view, was getting complaints from the powerful Dominicans. He asked Galileo to tone it down.
Galileo responded to this request by writing a biting satire directed at the pope. Included in Galileo’s allegorical tale was a character known as Simplicius, an ill-disguised representation of the pope. Who was not amused. It didn’t help Galileo’s cause that he also wrote a book of Biblical interpretation that was well outside his field of study and, because he did not follow the Tridentine rules of interpretation, was not, for legitimate reasons, well received.
Galileo’s problems arose because, as a scientist, he was promoting ideas that undercut the scientific, Aristotelian orthodoxy of his day. Aristotle taught that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything moved around it. As luck would have it, Ptolemy’s Tables, based on Aristotle’s geocentric view of the solar system were remarkably accurate. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. The Dominican priest-scientists were not willing to give up on their scientific dogma without overwhelming proof and they were ready for a fight. Galileo took on the big dogs and they didn’t like it. It was an argument between scientists and not between scientists and theologians.
Galileo was put under house arrest for the forfeiture of the peace, and he was allowed to continue his scientific studies. With “peer review”, he was also allowed to publish his work. As Alfred North Whitehead put it,
“Galileo suffered an honourable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his own bed”.
Was Galileo persecuted by the church for challenging the superstitions of a Medieval institution? Or is it possible that, like Dr. Shechtman, Galileo was punished for loudly challenging an accepted scientific dogma with insufficient evidence to prove his case. Like Dr. Shechtman, his exoneration came at the hands of another scientist – in this case Johannes Kepler.
Kepler, born seven years after Galileo in 1571, accepted the view of Copernicus, Galileo and the Jesuits that the sun was at the centre of the Solar System. What he did not accept were Copernicus’ epicycles and the error inherent to this fudge factor. He argued that “God would not make a mistake” and looked for other reasons for the apparent retrograde motions of the planets. He finally found his solution in elliptical rather than circular orbits. Another dogma of science lay gasping on the laboratory floor. His work resulted in a stable theory which yielded accurate, predictive results. Was this a one-off Scientific Revolution or a Kuhnian paradigm shift / scientific revolution?
The next time someone tells you that Galileo is the poster boy for the bigoted persecution of an outmoded Medieval institution and that science and faith are in opposition, consider the possibility that Galileo was experiencing the necessary inelasticity of scientific paradigm shifts and he was neither the first nor the last scientist to be disciplined by his peers.
Further, ask yourself why the inductive scientific method only developed within the Christian worldview? Is it possible that a rational, creative, loving God can be best known by studying his rational Creation which exists because of scientific and moral laws? Alfred North Whitehead again,
“The greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement was the inexpugnable belief that… there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind… it must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.”
Even under house arrest Galileo testified to his faith in Christ and his allegiance to the church. He died a Christian and was unaware of any tension between his science and his faith.
In the schema of Scott Adams, those who see this tension are like the angry spouse whose dream does not comport with reality.