FROM THE ARCHIVES: PUCKISH?

Deciding the World Does Not Revolve Around Galileo: a review of GALILEO'S MISTAKE: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation Between Galileo and the Church By Wade Rowland (MICHAEL MASSING, July 11, 2003, NY Times)

The gripping story of Galileo's trial before the Roman Inquisition is one of the defining narratives of Western civilization. The spectacle of the aging astronomer being forced, under the threat of torture, to recant his belief that the Earth revolves around the Sun has seemed to many to mark the moment when the Age of Faith gave way to the Age of Reason and to embody the Catholic Church's enduring hostility to unfettered inquiry and expression.

Not for Wade Rowland. In ''Galileo's Mistake'' he contends that just as it is the victors who write the history of wars, so have anti-Catholic writers produced an authorized version of this event, portraying Galileo ''as a lonely champion of enlightenment and the church as a blind, despotic power.'' In fact, Mr. Rowland maintains, in this epic confrontation between scientist and church, it is the church's position that seems more defensible. [...]

In conventional accounts it was Galileo's insistence on the Copernican worldview that riled the church. Mr. Rowland demurs. For him it was Galileo's insistence ''that there is a single and unique explanation to natural phenomena,'' based on observation and reason, that made all other explanations, including those based on biblical revelation, useless.

This in Mr. Rowland's view was Galileo's mistake. Mr. Rowland puckishly argues that science is no more reliable than religion in describing the universe. Scientific observations, while commonly thought to be based on empirical reality, he writes, are actually ''filtered through layers of subjective impression''; scientific ''facts'' about nature are not ''pre-existing truths'' but ''human constructs.'' [...]

In describing the trial Mr. Rowland depicts Galileo as vain and egotistical and the church as embattled and lenient. While traditional accounts stress the threat of torture Galileo faced, Mr. Rowland dismisses this as a mere formality. Yes, he writes, Galileo was placed under house arrest, but at least he wasn't burned at the stake. As for Pope Urban VIII, Mr. Rowland asserts, his papacy faced extraordinary challenges, and ''it would be an unfair commentator who would not concede that he had acquitted himself reasonably well in the circumstances.''

Mr. Rowland finds it paradoxical that the key issue in the trial -- Galileo's insistence on the mechanistic interpretation of the universe -- went unmentioned. Yet perhaps it wasn't mentioned because it wasn't really central. From Mr. Rowland's own account, it seems clear that the Vatican went after Galileo and not Copernicus because the church had grown more repressive and because Galileo had more aggressively sought to promote his views.

Mr. Rowland actually may understate the case--I haven't read the book yet, so am not sure--because, not only was Galileo wrong about the utility of reason in explaining reality, subsequent observation has tended to demonstrate the Church was also correct about the geocentric Universe. For example:

Cogito Ergo Sum:

I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it not follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But [suppose] there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case too I undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.

Samuel Johnson's refutation of Berkeley:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."

Evolution:

Anyone who has read the Selfish Gene will know the canonical history of modern biology starts with the rejection of group selection. Organisms are not selected for the good of their groups, but for the good they can do their genes. That seems to be the insight from which everything else springs; and it looks theoretically rock solid. If organisms appear to be acting altruistically, they must really be acting for the good of their genes.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle;

Heisenberg realized that the uncertainty relations had profound implications. First, if we accept Heisenberg's argument that every concept has a meaning only in terms of the experiments used to measure it, we must agree that things that cannot be measured really have no meaning in physics. Thus, for instance, the path of a particle has no meaning beyond the precision with which it is observed. But a basic assumption of physics since Newton has been that a "real world" exists independently of us, regardless of whether or not we observe it. (This assumption did not go unchallenged, however, by some philsophers.) Heisenberg now argued that such concepts as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we observe them.

Schroedinger's Cat:

In 1935 the Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger proposed a thought experiment that has titillated philosophers and appalled cat lovers ever since. [...]

Schroedinger devised the cat experiment to illustrate just how radically the quantum realm differs from the macroscopic, everyday world that we inhabit. He himself had shown that a particle such as an electron exists in a number of possible states, the probability of each of which is incorporated into an equation known as the wave function. In the case of an atom of radioactive material, for example, the atom has a certain probability of decaying over a given period of time.

Based on our "classical" intuition, we would assume that there are only two possibilities: either the atom has decayed, or it has not. According to quantum physics, however, the atom inhabits both states simultaneously. It is only when an observer actually tries to determine the state of the atom by measuring it that the wave function "collapses," and the atom assumes just one of its possible states: decayed or undecayed.

Schroedinger reasoned that such probabilistic behavior could exist in the macroscopic world as well, even if we are rarely aware of it. He imagined a box containing an atom having a 50 percent likelihood of decaying in an hour, a radiation detector, a flask containing poison gas and a cat. When or if the atom decays, the Geiger counter will trigger a switch that causes a hammer to smash the flask, releasing the gas and killing the cat. When the experimenter opens the lid of the box and peers inside after an hour has passed, he or she will find the atom either intact or decayed and the cat either alive or dead. But according to quantum mechanics, during the period before the lid is opened, the cat exists in two superposed states: both dead and alive.

Fermi's Paradox:

Over the past five years more than three dozen stars like the sun have been found to have Jupiter-mass planets. And even though astronomers have found no Earth-like planets so far, we can now be fairly confident that they also will be plentiful. To the extent that planets are necessary for the origin and evolution of life, these exciting discoveries certainly augur well for the widely held view that life pervades the universe. This view is supported by advances in our understanding of the history of life on Earth, which have highlighted the speed with which life became established on this planet. The oldest direct evidence we have for life on Earth consists of fossilized bacteria in 3.5- billion-year-old rocks from Western Australia, announced in 1993 by J. William Schopf of the University of California at Los Angeles. These organisms were already quite advanced and must themselves have had a long evolutionary history. Thus, the actual origin of life, assuming it to be indigenous to Earth, must have occurred closer to four billion years ago.

Earth itself is only 4.6 billion years old, and the fact that life appeared so quickly in geologic time--probably as soon as conditions had stabilized sufficiently to make it possible--suggests that this step was relatively easy for nature to achieve. Nobel prize?winning biochemist Christian de Duve has gone so far as to conclude, "Life is almost bound to arise ... wherever physical conditions are similar to those that prevailed on our planet some four billion years ago." So there is every reason to believe that the galaxy is teeming with living things.

Does it follow that technological civilizations are abundant as well? Many people have argued that once primitive life has evolved, natural selection will inevitably cause it to advance toward intelligence and technology. But is this necessarily so? That there might be something wrong with this argument was famously articulated by nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. If extraterrestrials are commonplace, he asked, where are they? Should their presence not be obvious? This question has become known as the Fermi Paradox.

Multiverse Theory:

How seriously can we take this explanation for the friendliness of nature? Not very, I think. For a start, how is the existence of the other universes to be tested? To be sure, all cosmologists accept that there are some regions of the universe that lie beyond the reach of our telescopes, but somewhere on the slippery slope between that and the idea that there are an infinite number of universes, credibility reaches a limit. As one slips down that slope, more and more must be accepted on faith, and less and less is open to scientific verification.

Extreme multiverse explanations are therefore reminiscent of theological discussions. Indeed, invoking an infinity of unseen universes to explain the unusual features of the one we do see is just as ad hoc as invoking an unseen Creator. The multiverse theory may be dressed up in scientific language, but in essence it requires the same leap of faith.

At the same time, the multiverse theory also explains too much. Appealing to everything in general to explain something in particular is really no explanation at all. To a scientist, it is just as unsatisfying as simply declaring, "God made it that way!"

In essence, science--quite unintentionally--propounds a view that we live in a Universe where reality is determined by reason, experimentation and observation, but that we are the only beings capable of such. It is not just a geocentric universe but a homocentric universe. It's hard to see why Galileo should not have been scourged for leading mankind into such dangerous error. (7/30/2003) Posted by Orrin Judd at January 9, 2005 7:00 AM