heavenly bodies

The science blogosphere was all atwitter this weekend over some crackpot posting at Blogs-4-Brownback (politician Sam Brownback, that is), declaring heliocentrism to be a vile, atheist doctrine directly contradicted by the Holy Bible. I'm inclined to think this is some sort of elaborate joke, if only because I balk at the possibility that any carbon-based life form would be capable of such stupidity and/or willful ignorance.  Perhaps my faith in humanity is misplaced, but c'mon: the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around, has been established scientific fact for several hundred years. Ergo, the poster is either yanking our collective chain, or has been neglecting to take his/her prescribed medication for quite some time.

It is true that the notion of a heliocentric solar system runs counter to certain biblical passages. The Protestant reformer Martin Luther helpfully pointed this out back in 1539, when Copernicus' "Little Commentary" -- the predecessor to De revolutionibus -- was making the rounds of astronomy circles. "This fool wants to turn the entire science of astronomy upside down!" Luther blustered. (He was a blustery sort of fellow.) "But as the Bible tells us, Joshua told the Sun, not the Earth, to stop in its path."

That's the kind of wrong-headed thinking that transpires when one tries to use a philosophical/religious text as a scientific treatise. Galileo said as much when he published his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" in 1632, arguing that the Bible should be used to teach people how to get to heaven, not as an instruction manual for how the heavens move. That, as much as anything, is what got him into trouble with the Catholic Church. Jen-Luc Piquant discovered that the anonymous nutcases at Conservapedia -- the new gold standard for willful ignorance and the trumping of scientific fact by fanciful wishful thinking -- insist in their entry on Copernicus that Galileo wasn't really persecuted for his heliocentric beliefs. Hmmm. I guess that whole house arrest thing at the end of his life was a case of self-imposed voluntary exile.

The Conservapedia entry is carefully phrased so as not to overtly espouse heliocentrism, but the contextual framing is clearly designed to sow the seeds of doubt in the mind of the reader (which is why critical thinking and familiarity with the strategies of disseminating effective propaganda are so very important). So maybe that Brownback blogger really is that stupid. Okay. Assuming the crackpots are correct (just for giggles), heliocentrism is a blasphemous doctrine espoused by atheists to discredit "God's Word." Since verification of the Copernican solar system came about with the invention of the telescope, then it, too, must be a tool for evil. And who invented the telescope? Could it be.... Satan?!?

Well, no, it was actually a German-born eyeglass manufacturer named Hans Lippershey, who owned a shop in the town of Middleburg in the Netherlands in the 1590s. Contemporary accounts report that one day he noticed two small children playing with the lenses in his shop, and heard one exclaim that by looking through two lenses, a weather vane on a nearby church appeared larger and clearer. Lippershey placed a tube between two lenses to make what he called a  kijker ("looker"), and the instrument soon spread like wildfire throughout Western Europe. (Fans of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy will recall that the exiled physicist Mary Malone constructs her own primitive telescope lenses out of a lacquer made from tree sap, fitting them at either end of a bamboo tube, in The Amber Spyglass.) Galileo, natch, was an early adopter, one of many -- including Sir Isaac Newton -- who found ingenious ways to improve on the basic concept to achieve better resolution.

One of my favorite early telescope pioneers is William Herschel. He was German-born, emigrating to England in his early 20s, where he made a comfortable living as a musician and chorister. In his mid-30s, he fell in love with astronomy, and started building his own telescopes as a hobby -- even purchasing equipment for making his own lenses. He turned out to have a genuine gift for optics, and his telescope building became a lucrative sideline: he sold instruments to the king of Spain, to the Russian court, and even the Austrian emperor. But he also used his own instruments to make observations of the night sky. That's how he came to discover the planet Uranus in 1781, the first such planet to be discovered since Antiquity. He became an instant celebrity, and snagged a knighthood and royal pension in the bargain. 

In December 1797 Herschel presented a paper at the Royal Society describing a possible ring around the planet. This claim was dismissed by his colleagues at the time as "clearly erroneous." Even Herschel couldn't confirm that initial sighting; the optics just weren't good enough yet. But last month, Stuart Eves of Surrey Satellite Technology Limited presented his own paper at an astronomy meeting in the UK, declaring that because of Herschel's mention of the ring in 1781, the 18th century astronomer should be credited with discovering the rings of Uranus -- a challenge to the accepted view that the official "discovery" came about with a 1977 experiment.

"Herschel got a lot of things right," Eves asserted in a press release. "He has a ring of roughly the correct size relative to the planet, and he also has the orientation of this ring in the right direction." Herschel also described changes in the ring's appearance as it moves around the sun, and noted that the ring is red in color -- something astronomers at the Keck telescope only recently confirmed. So maybe Herschel's optics were far better than any of us realized. As to why folks with better telescopes in subsequent centuries failed to detect the rings, Eves attributes this to the fact that Saturn's rings are actually become darker and expanding (diffusing) over time, an effect confirmed by the Cassini satellite mission. Something similar might be occurring with the rings of Uranus, making them harder to detect.

Herschel was quite the over-achiever. He undertook a painstaking catalog of nebulae, discovered a couple of Saturn's moons, and two for Uranus, and concluded that the the shape of the Milky Way galaxy was a disk. He coined the word "asteroid," too. Herschel wasn't perfect: he believed every planet was inhabited, even the Sun (technically, a star, not a planet), which he surmised was filled with creatures with enormous heads who were protected from the hot atmosphere by a layer of cloud cover. Or something. (I'm surprised Conservapedia isn't all over that, frankly, given their penchant for wrong-headed thinking. Maybe that's where all the angels live!)

In 1800, Herschel took some time away from his telescopic observations to fiddle with a different kind of experiment: passing sunlight through different colored filters. The different colors seemed to pass different amounts of heat, so he took things one step further, and passed sunlight through a glass prism to create the telltale rainbow spectrum of visible light. Then he measured the temperature of each bulb. His results were interesting, to say the least. Not only were all the measured temperatures higher than the controls, but those temperatures increased with each color from the violet to the red part of the spectrum. And when he decided, just for curiosity's sake, to measure the temperature just beyond the red portion of the visible spectrum, it had the highest temperature of all.

Herschel attributed the effect to "calorific rays," and subsequent experiments demonstrated that they behaved just like visible light -- not surprising, since what he'd discovered was infrared radiation. It was the first demonstration that there were types of light beyond the visible spectrum. And infrared radiation spawned not only a host of practical applications, but also an entire field of astronomy. Infrared telescopes can see past the huge amounts of interstellar dust in the cosmos into the very hearts of galaxies.

It just so happens that an infrared telescope featured prominently in astronomy news just this past December, when NASA scientist announced that new observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope suggested that the infrared light detected in a prior study comes from clusters of enormous, very bright objects that lived within the first billion years after the Big Bang. (A billion years is a lot from our puny human standpoint, but the universe was still just an infant by then, maybe taking its first baby steps.) The preliminary conclusion -- by no means a debate that has been resolved in the scientific community -- is that these are either the very first stars, or massive black holes busily engaged in devouring gas and any other surrounding matter and spewing out tons of energy. If the former is true, then the clusters in question may well be the first mini-galaxies, forerunners to our own Milky Way.

Perhaps there are some skeptics among you wondering how astronomers could possibly make this sort of conclusion, even in the most preliminary kind of way. Essentially, they collected hundreds of hours of observational data covering five major regions of the night sky, then carefully removed light from foreground stars and galaxies in the subsequent analysis. This left only the most ancient light. They then studied fluctuations in the intensity of the infrared brightness, which revealed a telltale clustering of objects.

NASA scientist Alexander Kashlinsky compared it to "trying to see fireworks at night from across a crowded city." As a former resident of New York City, I can attest to the fact that it's tough to see any kind of meaningful stars in the Manhattan night sky because of all those bright city lights. Per Kashlinksy: "If you could turn off the city lights, you might get a glimpse at the fireworks. We have shut down the lights of the universe to see the outlines of the first fireworks."

Okay, so how do they know the signal isn't just an artifact from the telescope itself? That's actually a very real possibility, and the scientists had a means of checking for it. For the most recent observations, they took one picture of the sky, then flipped the telescope upside down and took another picture so they could compare and contrast: the pattern should rotate when the telescope did if, indeed, the observed signal was coming from the instrument itself. That didn't happen, confirming that the signals really were coming from celestial objects. Herschel would be so proud.

He'd also be absolutely fascinated by a new study to determine the feasibility of building an enormous liquid-mirror telescope on the moon. LMTs use a rotating dish of reflective liquid, usually mercury, as its primary mirror for collecting light (and the more light you can collect, the more you can "see"), like the Large Zenith Telescope in British Columbia. Roger Angel, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, envisions an enormous LMT bigger than two side-by-side football fields on the moon, capable of collecting 1,736 times more light than the Hubble Space Telescope. Such a telescope would be ideal for infrared observation, too. There's just a few engineering challenges to overcome, like finding a replacement liquid for mercury. The moon's low temperatures would turn mercury into a solid. What's needed is a reflective liquid with low freezing point and vapor pressures so it wouldn't freeze, nor would it evaporate into space. Suggestions, anyone?

Hubble, of course, continues to amaze us, even as it enters its dotage: why, just last week we heard all about the strange ring of dark matter believed to have formed during a massive collision between two galaxy clusters. It gives some serious competition to last summer's announcement of bullet cluster evidence for the existence of dark matter. If there is a heaven -- and I'm sure the Brownback blogger and folks at Conservapedia have no doubt such is the case -- I'd like to think that Herschel is there, smiling at all wonders we've found so far and all the wonders still to come. Hundreds of years after Lippershey first fit two lenses on either end of a tube, I'd say that the Golden Age of Telescopes is still going strong.

Comments

[Gordon Wilson]

That was an interesting blog---you would probably like Neil Stephenson's
Baroque Cycle novels--"Quicksilver" etc. They weave Newton, Leibniz, Hooke and others into a fascinating historical novel/soap--sort of a "Newton meets Pirates of the Caribbean".
Speaking of quicksilver, if you go to your link for the Large Zenith Telescope, the very last photo shows my former undergrad lab partner, Paul Hickson( Now UBC Prof) testing the mirror.

[Sarah in Chicago]

A rule I have come to use when dealing with fundamentalists is "never presume humour or maliciousness when you can assume stupidity". Personally I've just basically arrived at the conclusion that I simply CAN'T overestimate the stupidity of fundamentalists, because each time I lower the bar, we find someone with even more amazing limbo skills of denial.

Of course though, it's not really stupidity. It's that their faith is so insanely strong and right, that it becomes brittle, to the point where any mere mention of ways of thinking other than their own, even if we ourselves cannot even imagine how such would impact them, is considered an insult and a slight against them.

We that view the world rationally and pluralistically have a hard, if not impossible (we can understand such theoretically, but never really 'get' it) reallu grasping an Absolutist mindset because of HOW we view things. They simply don't use the same processes that we do.

It might very well be stupidity, but it could very well be something more insidious.

[Janet Leslie Blumberg]

But Sarah in Chicago, the saddest thing is that the scientists too sometimes grasp at "an absolutist mindset" instead of "a rational and pluralistic one." How do we best work gainst this polarization and teach and exemplify respect and tolerance?

[L. Riofrio]

I hope you get up to Griffith Observatory where they have a replica of Galileo's telescope and statue in a place of honour, overlooking his solar system depicted to scale on the courtyard. Perhaps Galielo's totem saved the observatory from fire.

[Gordon Wilson]

Thats "NEAL STEPHENSON" not "NEIL" in case I have generated any
interest. In addition to the historical novels, he also has a remarkable book on code-breaking called "Cryptonomicron", and a cyberpunk Sci Fi book called "Snow Crash" that has
the funniest first 30 pages that I have read anywhere.

[Gordon Wilson]

Janet: the "absolutist mindset" that you accuse scientists of showing
is just an impatience, to put it mildly, with sloppy thinking that
uses comfortable, but fuzzy buzzwords to justify supernatural conclusions.
Most scientists that I know are anything but absolutists. But they do get
abit rabid when concepts like "quantum" are perverted by postmodernists.

[Janet Leslie Blumberg]

Gordon Wilson says: "Janet: the "absolutist mindset" that you accuse scientists of showing
is just an impatience, to put it mildly, with sloppy thinking that
uses comfortable, but fuzzy buzzwords to justify supernatural conclusions."
Then Gordon, you cite the postmodern use of "quantum" as an example of this. While I deeply understand your impatience and even peevishness, given the Fundamentalist attacks on science, nonetheless this is the rhetoric of a defensive and closed-minded attitude (a "fortress mentality"). Just read what you have said! And I wasn't "accusing" scientists, by suggesting a limitation in the field (among some of its members) that I think curtails the effectiveness and beauty of the scientific enterpise. Several fields of study might suggest that ANY outlook that justifies showing "extreme impatience" at every instance of something that is labeled as "sloppy thinking" is not demonstrating a "rational pluralistic" attitude, but a "rational monolithic" one, reminsicent of the Newtonian Enlightenment. I explore the deep similarities in the way Fundamentalists construct their positions and the way hard rationalists among the scientists do, and trace both back to the early days of science when very absolutist truth-claims were first being made in the West. These hard-line religious and scientific camps know little about the history of Christianity or the hhistory of science and very little of the philosophical depths of religious or of scientific thought. If you are open to exploring this, I invite you to my website where a conversation on these topics has been going on: at www.deepgraceoftheory.com. But I have to warn you, I am a literary theorist and a theist! I also love science and have studied and taught the history of physics for many years....
I agree with you scientists about the wrongheadedness of creationism, for example. But when many scientists justify lumping ALL religious thought together with Fundamentalism, and when they know very little about postmodern theory when they condemn it, I have to speak up for pluralism in the disciplines and ways of knowing. We need to have the honesty and the interest to listen respectfully to voices outside our own field of expertise. What really strikes me is that the physicists of the Einstein/QM hey-days were so aware that their new paradigms changed the truth-claims of science and changed and limited our understanding of the nature of reality (Bronowsky, Bohr, Heisenberg). But today the physicists have back-pedaled for political reasons (or are less broadly educated, as in the case in our universities in general), and seem (perhaps unwittingly) to deny any change in the status of scientific explanation from Newtonian times. Since I've worked in theory of knowing all my life, to me this seems to be simply an understandable lack of training in epistemology, which postmodern thought is all about. (For example, many scientists seem to think that postmodern thought suggests "scientific truth is merely socially constructed." This is not at all where cultural studies is going. This also involves a huge and unsupportable generalization -- "postmodern thought" -- and a deep misunderstanding of what cultural studies is all about.) I wish there could be genuine interdisciplinary conversation on this and my weblog is devoted to it. Sorry to go on for so long, but if you start at the beginning of my posts you'll see how shocked and disillusioned I was by the shallow and even hate-filled responses of participants on physics blogs to any form of theism at all. A historical perpsective on all this current rancor could introduce more light and understanding. Notice the interview with Richard Dawkins at 3 quarks daily (which I recently discussed), when he says he believes that something "awe-inspiring" and "transcendent" is out there behind the physical universe. It just isn't "God," he says!! Scientists are filled with awe and a sense of the sacred about the elegant formalities of the universe they study. There is so much there, held in common with deeply religious or spiritual people. This current warfare before science and religion is really tragic. But we make a huge mistake to become MORE hardline and fundamentalistic ourselves in response to these pressures. Sorry to go on for so long on someone else's blog! Forgive me, Jennifer.

[Janet Leslie Blumberg]

SORRY -- I don't know why my posts are appearing twice!

[Gordon Wilson]

Janet: It is almost funny that you accuse scientists of being "less broadly educated". It is, to me, obviously the opposite. Despite evidence to the contrary, when I was doing undergrad honors physics and math, I took the Honors English requirement course, and ended up getting the first year English prize...I say this not to brag, but to show that many scientists have
broad interests. I find most in the humanities have basically a grade school understanding of science because they lack any math skills.
As far as theism and post-modernism go, I do admit that you are arguing with a brick wall. I totally agree with Sam Harris, Dawkins, and Steven Weinberg, among other enlightened thinkers ( including Sean Carrol). I think that
Alan Sokal had a good read on post-modernism...

[Gordon Wilson]

I suppose this isnt fair, but what-the-hey:
http://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
or look up any paper by Luce Irigaray for enlightenment.

[Janet Leslie Blumberg]

Maybe none of us today are as broadly educated as people like Jacob Bronowski and Niels Bohr were. (I was comparing us to THEM, not scientists to humanists.) I was thinking especially of the Bronowski episode in The Ascent of Man, called "Knowledge and Certainty." (There's also some Feinstein book, I think, with a double-page spread called "Eight Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics." I wish I had it these days. Does anyone recognize this?) It seems to me that all around the internet (and certainly in the political realm) there are these enclaves of absolutism denouncing anyone who disagrees with their line. I'll look at Sokol. But I know most scientists misinterpret postmodern thinkers because their way of thinking is focused differently. It's as hard to read them as it is to do advanced physics, no wonder they don't understand one another. But why do they not even want to understand one another? I wish I could and keep trying to explain where the disconnect lies.

[Janet Leslie Blumberg]

Okay, I knew the name was familiar. You're referring to the hoax article accepted for publication in a cultural studies journal. But you know, it's actually a great reference and I'm going to write on it -- thanks. The opening three paragraphs set up this rigid polarization between the (outdated) scientists who believe in "an external world," "scientific law," and "the scientific method" and on the other hand, these trendy and triumphant postmodern thinkers, such as "the feminists and poststructuralists," who believe their critiques have "demystified" and debunked all of that. What a false dichotomy. And "no external world"? (Perhaps the journal was so happy to get a real live physicist who seemed to be writing in their area that they excused the naivete and extreme reductionism of this opposition, which is after all fairly representative of what some scientists think the critiques do boil down to...)

[Gordon Wilson]

I'm afraid we are never going to agree---your ideal of "pluralistic" thinking is not what drives scientific discoveries and progress--it is the "monolithic"
focus that is required. Newton said he made progress by thinking about one idea constantly. We dont need to get away from the way Newton did science, and we dont need innumerate humanists to tell scientists what they actually are doing. Postmodern dreck is postmodern dreck, whether it is in music, literature, or, ( forgive the theistic blasphemy), God help us, postmodern "scientists" and their epistemological "interpreters".

[Gordon Wilson]

BTW there are 8 interpretations of QM in the book, "The Ghost in the Atom" edited by Paul Davies, and JR Brown--transcripts of BBC interviews with 8 prominent scientists like Wheeler, Bell etc.

[Janet Leslie Blumberg]

The notes to the Sokal article are hysterically funny! Good job! Gordon, you made my day with that link!
I agree that within a way of knowing, monolithic focus can be fine, as long as it is submitted to the rest of the disciplinary community for review and development. The problem is with any way of knowing claiming to have the one monolithic method for thinking rationally for itself, to the exclusion of the other legitimate ways of knowing, addressed to other aspects of reality, and having other methodologies.
The relationship between the scientist and physical reality HAS changed from what it was in Newton's day, because of advances in methodology, and this is fascinating, and we would all benefit from more epistemological humility. It's not really science's job to notice this change, but science needn't be offended by it either. Science has to deal with the cultural uses that are made of it, just like faith has to, unfortunately, or just like lit theory has to.
Finally, I do have to confess that as a poststructuralist thinker myself, the deconstructive bandwagon in the U. S. often made me pretty sick. My son has had to endure at university some useless classes filled with shallow postmodern tripe. But the great thought is nonetheless very important and doesn't deserve to be lumped in with the deriviative stuff.

[Jeff]

I don’t see much difference between the actions of the church in Galileo’s time and the actions of the present scientific community when a new idea for defining the universe is proposed. Have you ever tried to publish or present an idea that runs counter to certain passages in today's scientific bible?

Jeff

“The universe's most powerful enabling tool is
not knowledge or understanding
but imagination"

[gordon]

Jeff: You dont know what you are talking about. Jennifer---EO Wilson once commented that Stephen J Gould used the "squid defense"-- when attacked, disappear in a cloud of ink.
Enough of my time spent on this. I find both your ideas frightening.

[Jeff]

The Church found Galileo’s ideas frightening not because they did not have merit but because they went against the beliefs of the establishment. This resulted in considerable delay in scientific progress.

Can you be 100% sure the only reason why you find our ideas frightening is because they have no merit or could some of it be because they go against the beliefs of the establishment.

Jeff

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Well, I've been traveling, and ill in the process, with only sporadic email access, so have only just returned to the blog to find Gordon storming off in a huff. I'm not sure what idea of mine he finds "frightening," but we hope he comes back some day...

As regards the faith/science conundrum, clearly I enjoy poking fun at fundamentalist nonsense as much as anyone, but I do recognize that they are a tiny, highly vocal subset of the broader Christian/religious community, and it's a bit unfair to paint all professed "believers" with the same brush. Some are actually quite rational and sane. :) Galileo, for instance, and Isaac Newton, who never let their personal faith sway themn from what the scientific evidence told them. My take is generally, "Keep your religion out of my science, and we'll get along just fine." It's when religion tries to masquerade as something it's not, when the bible is used as a textbook instead of literature, that problems inevitably arise.

SNOW CRASH, BTW, is a fantastic book, one of my favorites in the sci-fi genre, although for some reason I had trouble getting into Cryptonomicron (or however it;s spelled). Poeple keep raving about it, so I suppose I should give it another shot, along with the Baroque trilogy. The concept is certainly the sort of thing I'd like; maybe it was the execution that made me struggle.

[Jeff]

"Science without religion is lame.
Religion without science is blind."

Einstien

[Gordon Wilson]

Oops, sorry Jennifer--your ideas are fine--I meant Janet's ideas of
pluralistic thinking and having "monolithic" research "vetted" by the disciplinary communities... Sorry I confused your names...
I happen to believe we need more focused people like Newton and Galileo and
Herschel, and many fewer "meta-analysts" like post-modern deconstructionists.
Also, I think that Stephen J Gould was silly writing about Science and Religion as non-overlapping magisteria---clearly, he was an atheist and was
trying to appear politically correct as it is unacceptable to be an atheist in the United States.

[Gordon Wilson]

Last post for now--btw Jeff, spell Einstein correctly or you score
many points on John Baez' crank index. Also, Einstein was a pantheist
leaning towards atheism and many of his quotes have been misconstrued, as for example have Stephen Hawkings' ( eg " For then we would know the mind of God" at the end of " A Brief History of Time." Hawking is an atheist with a mischievous bent, but I am sure that that quote gets used by IDers and their ilk.

[Jeff]

Dear Gordon

My apologizes to you, our readers, and Einstein.

I agree with you that we need more focused people like Newton and Galileo who based their theories on experimental observations of instead abstract mathematical equations like the string or quantum theorists.

Jeff

http://home.comcast.net/~jeffocal/

[Gordon Wilson]

Jennifer: I keep getting drawn back into this discussion ---you may need
the stage hook soon. Jeff: once again, I think you are wrong. Scientists dont base their theories on experimental observations. The theory comes first, almost "a priori" as an attempt to EXPLAIN some aspect of reality ( often using abstract mathematical equations), then it is checked against observations. It must be a rare case when a scientist takes a bunch of empirical data, and then cooks up a theory. For a good view on this
read David Deutsch, "The Fabric of Reality".

[CCPhysicist]

1) The masses in a 2-body system revolve around their common center of mass. For the earth and the sun, this point is inside the sun. For the earth and the moon, this point is about 2/3 of the way between the center of the earth and its surface. In both cases the simplest description is to say the smaller object revolves around the larger one.

2) It is a fact that Creationists, particularly young-earth Creationists, include persons who reject other parts of science that run up against their interpretation of Scripture. This can include the constancy of the speed of light, heliocentrism, and/or much of the physics related to radioactive decay rates. I can say this because I have talked to them, in person. Brownback's specific set of beliefs in this area remain unclear, but that blog is unsurprising.

3) Item 2 might help you understand why the Conservapedia leaves an inaccurate impression of what Galileo was persecuted for, and by whom. [I say inaccurate impression because he *was* persecuted for not obeying the Church ... having been ordered to not say the Earth moved, whether in accord with Copernicus or for any other reason.]

4) The Conservapedia misrepresents the issue of epicycles. Copernicus did use additional epicycles, but that was to describe more detailed data than Ptolemy had used a millenium earlier. An equivalent Ptolemaic system would need even more epicycles than Copernicus had used, just as it takes an infinite number of them to obtain what you can get from an ellipse.