Deconstructing the Dialogue! Galileo's MASTERPIECE: On Two Chief World Systems

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Hi everyone, this is a little bit of a departure from what you might have become used to here on my podcast, the Impossible Podcast. I welcome you, or I welcome you back to a discussion which I hope you will find quite illuminating. And that involves perhaps the greatest, most influential book in my life, and that is Galileo's Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems. This book, more than almost any other, had a dramatic influence on my life, on my career, on my worldview and my perception of the craft that I practice as a scientist, and even influenced me to be a better writer, a better communicator, and to do my best to really contribute to the great canon of scientific literature. I reread this book recently, and many of you may have discovered that from watching the interview I did with Michael Knowles on the Prager University Book Club, and I'm thinking of calling this segment of the Into the Impossible Podcast, Book Scope, or Book Collider, or Great Books, because there are several books that were very formative upon me in my youth and continue to influence me to this day, so much so that the writing of Galileo in particular has dramatically influenced my career, as I say, but also in my writing, as I recount in Chapter 3 of my book, Losing the Nobel Prize, a story of cosmology, ambition, and the perils of science as high as honor. I'm going to read to you a passage where I first introduced Galileo, and then I'm going to take you through the three really most important aspects of Galileo's dialogue book, highlighting from the wonderful, excellent translation, really unparalleled translation, by Stillman Drake, who is a professor also at the University of California, this one at the University of California, Berkeley, and I'll read over the next several days, no, hours, I'll read different selections of his, and kind of give you some of my thoughts as to why I think they warrant such merit and such note, and how I think you'll benefit, even if you're not a scientist, you'll learn a tremendous amount. Galileo was a virtuoso, he was a poet, he was a true renaissance man, he had a deep and abiding faith both in mathematics and in religion, in God, and I think his story is a uniquely human one that resonates throughout the ages, as have been depicted in many different fora, such as Bertolt Brecht's play, The Life of Galileo, I think it's called, innumerable books, including one just in 2020 by my friend Professor Mario Livio, wrote a book called Galileo and the Science Deniers, in which case he makes the case, that the world in which we inhabit is not so different between that and nowadays in Galileo, what he faced hundreds of years ago, 400 years ago. The dialogue is coming up on its 400th anniversary, that'll be in 2032, so a mere 12 more years to go, and it's as readable as ever, so I'll read passages from that, I'll give you three major takeaways that I get on Galileo the scientist, Galileo the philosopher, Galileo the human being, and the forces that subjected him in all those different venues, and how he is a lesson and a model for many of us scientists, but also a cautionary tale as to what we should avoid to do, and I don't just mean the so-called imprisonment, the trial, the torture of Galileo, we'll debunk that myth later on, but I want to kind of highlight why Galileo's plight was in part due to his human nature, and his desire as a scientist that could not be separated from the political forces that were at work at his time and in his age, and some of his personality quirks that come to light only much much later, but I want to do it as a scientist, as an astrophysicist, because I think I have a special kinship with fellow astrophysicists, and I hope you'll indulge me if you are interested in Galileo as I am, and noting that there are no great audiobooks for the dialogue, and even any of really Galileo's books, there are no modern audiobooks, I would love to be connected with anyone out there who would like to work with me on making a proper translation, not a translation, a proper recording of this audiobook, this version by Galileo, but by Stephen Jay Gould's series that was based on the translation by Stillman Drake, which has as a foreword, I'll read parts of it, from none other than Albert Einstein, who was deeply influenced by Galileo. Few people know Galileo was really the first to think about relativity, relative motion of observer and source, and Galileo influenced Einstein tremendously. So I don't know how long it could be split up over many episodes. Again, I want to encourage people, if you're interested, to reach out to me here on YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, at Dr. Brian Keating, D.R. Brian Keating. Let me know if you're interested in maybe partnering together to bring Galileo's voice to the ears of a modern generation, seeing as those of you who are listening obviously enjoy listening to long-form podcasts. And of course, this book is quite long. It's 539 pages, Galileo's own text, and then there's the introduction by Albert Einstein that's worthy of transmission, of recording too, if I can find a good partner to record an audiobook. Again, reach out to me, please. But for now, let's start with the influence in my book, Losing the Nobel Prize, when we first meet Galileo. And it's chapter 3, I call it, A Brief History of Time Machines. And that's because I view telescopes as time machines. So this actually goes back before the dialogue, back to Galileo's first major book that led to international celebrity, and that was Sidereus Nuncius, or the Starry Messenger, in which he introduced the discoveries that he had made, and the new theories that he was beginning to put forth in favor of Copernicanism, in favor of heliocentrism, based on the observations with a telescope that he perfected, even though he didn't invent it. There's some lore that he invented it, he did not. I'll talk about that at some point. And maybe we'll do another discussion like this on Sidereus Nuncius, because that also had a tremendous influence on me. But that's almost more of a lab notebook or observation log. What's unique about that book is that it has Galileo's own hand drawings and paintings and washes of the moon's surface, the moons of Jupiter, their positions, etc. And that's an incredibly unique and rare and expensive book. The dialogue came later, and it's much more lengthy and works out the philosophy behind Galileo's support of the Copernican system, as it stood in opposition to the conventional Ptolemaic or Aristotelian peripatetic, as he calls it in this book, worldview. And I will explain what the meaning of that was and why it's so important in my mind that we explore it. Because it is, as I said in my interview with Michael Knowles and Prager University, it is the first, maybe the best, work of science writing as literature. So it's written with a beauty of prose, of poetry, and verse. And it's making these incredibly complex arguments, some of which are not correct and not really worthy of too much study, other than for the fact that the writing is so delightful. And it's really a work of art in terms of literature, as I have said, and as none other than Stephen Jay Gould said in his introduction. But let me turn back to Brief History of Time Machines, playing on Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time. I say, the journey we're about to embark on will take us back to the very beginning of the universe. But reading this story requires a very special pair of glasses, a set of lenses first used by none other than Galileo Galilei on a balmy night in June in 1609. That evening, Galileo did something no one had done before. He looked up through a tube that was destined to become a biblical bludgeon. He had come to the tube in a rather nefarious way, committing academia's cardinal sin, plagiarism. His friend, Paolo Sarpi, had recently told him about a new device invented by a Dutch spectacle maker that could make distant objects appear closer. Remarkably, even though he had not seen the Dutchman's device, Galileo not only reproduced it, but built several more with vastly improved performance. Soon, his perspiculum, perspective tube, or spyglass, would become the shortest lever ever to move the earth. It was a simple invention, really, two glass lenses within a flimsy lead tube. Each lens had one flat side. One of the lenses was bowed out on one face, squashed like a lentil. Indeed, the diminutive legumes' Latin name is the origin of the English word lens. Lentil means lens. Or lens means lentil-shaped. The other lens's reverse face was concave, bowed in. Each lens was about five centimeters in diameter. The one closer to the object under study, the objective, was at arm's length from the eyepiece, which, unsurprisingly, is where you put your eye. The combination of those lenses placed the perfect distance apart magnifies distant objects, giving you perspective. In the span of one remarkable week in June, Galileo perfected the device. Soon afterward, he increased its magnification to 30 power, up from about what Sarpi had explained was about three power. He got rid of troublesome artifacts and added an adjustable tripod to stabilize the scope, since its magnification also amplified the wobble of the user's hands. And so one thing that Galileo did is he actually reduced or stopped down the aperture of the telescope. You can see one behind me back there. Telescopes nowadays, you don't use the full width of the objective lens. You use a reduced portion of it, and that's an innovation that Galileo perfected to get rid of what are called optical aberrations. So it's kind of counterintuitive, paradoxical. You reduce the size, effective size, but you magnify, in some sense, the good qualities of the lens that you've built. It was very difficult to get these lenses, and only one survives, and there's a picture of it in my book, which shows the only remaining lens of this type at Galileo's, and that's still in existence, that Galileo actually used. So it was a serious scientific invention that was used for scientific purposes. So I make a joke that Galileo trusted basically no one, and that in a version of the current TV show called Shark Tank, he went out and pitched this device to investors, especially the Venetian Doge. So in a Renaissance version of the television show Shark Tank, he demonstrated the telescope that he had perfected to prospective patrons. Eventually, he pitched it to the Venetian Doge and sent it. They bought it, several copies in fact, and granted him a lifelong lectureship in Padua. They also doubled his salary. As a professor, I'm awestruck by Galileo. Not only did he instantly secure tenure, but his department chair also doubled his startup funding. But it was the shortest tenure track was not the thing that we envy most. It's that he was the first person to use this device to unlock telescopic vision for the very first time. The culmination of Galileo's discoveries in Siderius Nuncius really revolves around these observations. I'm showing a picture from my book on page 33, where I show the sketches Galileo made of the Jovian satellite system. He had correctly identified that on succeeding nights, there was a pair of stars, and eventually four stars. He called them Medician stars. After his funding source, the Medici family, Cosimo Medici in particular, he sketched out what he was seeing night after night, and eventually was led by making vast tables to see the periodicity of these tiny points of light around the giant orb Jupiter, which he could see for the first time in human history with his telescope. He was noting that they varied around it in periodic fashion. They did so with what he concluded must be the effect of a small miniature solar system, which was centered on Jupiter, not on the Sun, not on the Earth. For the first time, this overthrew the dominant paradigm that the Earth is the center of the entire universe. In fact, it showed not that the Earth was going around the Sun, but it did make clear that there were other points in our solar system that could rightfully claim their place as central to the orbit of objects, satellites around them. In this case, we now know them as the Galilean moons, not the Medici stars. Galileo correctly summarized, surmised rather, that we were seeing a tiny solar system on edge, that if you look from above, you'd see these four moons orbiting around Jupiter, whereas we have one moon. Jupiter has actually now over 60 moons, and other planets have more than one moon too. In fact, Earth is the only planet that has a moon, but only one moon. Other planets like Venus and Mercury have no moons, and then all the other outer planets have more than one moon, including Mars, which has two moons. And so Earth is sort of unique in that way. It's also unique in that the moon of the Earth is exactly the same apparent diameter as the Sun as viewed from the surface of the planet. There's no reason for that. It's just a happy coincidence that allows us to have beautiful total solar eclipses, some of which I've witnessed in my life too now so far, and I hope to witness another one at least from America in the year 2024 from somewhere in the Midwest most likely. I hope you'll join me and stay tuned for more information about that. But the moon figures mightily so in the Sidereus Nuncius, but unfortunately for Galileo, it features much less centrally in the dialogue. Instead, the cause for much of the commotion in this book revolves in the dialogue, revolves around Galileo's insistence that the Earth is orbiting around the Sun as the Jovian moons orbit around Jupiter, and that the Sun is instead roughly stationary or is the central point about which the Earth rotates. Now remember, when Galileo was doing all of this, we didn't even have clocks. There was no such thing as a timepiece, no Apple Watches. And so because of that, it was very difficult to keep accurate time measure, and it was very difficult to show things were completely uniform and periodic, but it was a great puzzle to make use of things that could tell time, because most of the observations Galileo makes in this book have to do with, in the dialogue I'm speaking of now, have to do with the dynamics of things as they change as they progress in time. We'll encounter balls rolling down inclined planes. That's the bane of the existence of most college students when they first take physics, and that usually leads them to take physics, that branch of physics called mechanics, the last class in physics they take, which I think is a great shame, and I'll talk about my philosophy of how we should actually go deeper and teach the deeper matter that surrounded the Galilean discoveries in the dialogue. And later in his next book, his final book, called The Discourse on Two Chief Sciences, we'll talk about that maybe at the very end, and maybe someday we'll read that together. But for this book scope, book collider, whatever we're going to call it, I want to begin, and there'll be a couple of readings. First of all, this is very inexpensive. You can get this paperback edition. I'll give you a link, an affiliate link on Amazon, for which I'll be grateful to accept a couple of pennies for everyone that buys it, just full disclosure. But it's really worth it. This copy is incredibly marked up, and I want to begin the discussion by giving two other resources. So first one will be, obviously my book, Losing the Nobel Prize, has a lot of great information about Galileo, what it's like to be an observational astronomer, and how you use these telescopic tools, and how we often fall victim to the desire to confirm our particular hypotheses that we're investing so much of our life into understanding, and that's a phenomenon called confirmation bias, and it's something that I personally have been subjected to, some of my best friends have been subjected to it. It happens whether you're a theoretical physicist, a cosmologist, an experimentalist, what have you, and no one is immune from it, and so it's something we constantly have to be on guard of. The other aspect of the other free resource is going to be, there'll be a Wikipedia page I'll point to, which is a great kind of structure, it's going to give me the summary kind of outline of the points that I want to highlight. It gives the background details, the different main characters in the real world, and that were subjecting Galileo to the ultimate fate in which he was subjected to. So I will give you that information in the show notes, in the links below on YouTube, or in the show notes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll even put a link to it on my webpage, briankeving.com, that you can make use of, and we'll illustrate it with some really spectacular diagrams from the maestro as he was referred to, Galileo Galilei. So again, unfortunately, you cannot download an audiobook version of this. I love audiobooks. I would love to make an audiobook, so again, please reach out to me if you're interested in it. So if you want to follow along, you can first go to the Wikipedia page, and it's called the title of the page is Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, and it's a great capsule summary. So we'll just go through that first, and then I'll go through each of the chapters. There's really only four main chapters in the entire book, and before we even get to that, I want to read selections from the introduction from Albert Einstein, and some of the commentary by the translator Stillman Drake, who is just a heroic scholar of Galileo. It turns out he did such tremendous work on helping humanity understand what Galileo really meant, in a book that's almost 400 years old, to have the best translation come, you know, 350 years after his death, is pretty amazing, and it really is a testament to Stillman Drake. And one of the nice things about the Drake edition, which is why I suggest you get it, click the link, buy it, is that he's got all sorts of little gutter notes or, you know, margin notes that we'll go over. Some of the ones that are more prominent stick out in my mind as really encapsulating what is so interesting and important about this book, and it serves as highlight, extensively footnoted at the back of the book, with some commentary from Stillman Drake himself. But he was such a genius, this Drake, and he has so many other good books that you can get, including the Siderius Nuncius. Some people will correct me, I'm sure. But I really hope that you'll take advantage of it and get a copy of this book. So I want to go over the Wikipedia, which is of course free, and put to context the structure of the book, how it was prepared, and I think Wikipedia does a good job of this. So this page, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, you'll see this picture at the top. We'll talk about that picture, it's very important. And the picture, sorry, the page starts off, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Dialogo Sopra i Due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo, is a 1632 Italian language book. All of this is incredibly important. The dialogue, the name that we call it, it's called the dialogue. It's a little bit longer in Italian, but first of all, note, it's written in Italian. That becomes very important, as we'll explain, because Galileo was actually forbidden to teach Copernicanism, teaching meaning speaking in terms that an ordinary student can understand, which was speaking in Italian, not Latin. His first book, Sidereus Nuncius, is Latin for starry messenger, and that was okay, but in the 1616 period, he was forbidden to teach it, which meant to write in a language other people could understand and promulgate Copernicanism. He ignored that, maybe forgot about it. Some say he might have even been framed, and actually that he never received such an injunction. But it's very, very curious to learn more about it and to understand what Galileo might have been thinking. So right off the bat, the title of the book, Dialogo, that's in Italian, not in Latin, which would have been permissible. And the second part is that that was not Galileo's original title for this book. He actually originally intended to title the book with what he thought was the most convincing evidence for the Copernican system. His original title was that smash-sounding title that would obviously be a must-read, and that was On the Flux and Reflux of the Earth's Tides, of the Oceans. And he wanted to do that because he thought that evidence that we'll get to in the fourth day of this great dialogue, which takes place over four days in a mansion in Venice, is where the setting is. It's really delightful to think about these three characters over four days, and they talk about going out for some brews or whatever they're going to drink, and it's really cute the way Galileo structures it. But again, the title originally would not have caused any sensation to our ears right now, because On the Flux and Reflux of the Tides, I don't know how many people would pick that book up. Also because that argument is the least convincing. In fact, it's probably the worst argument for the Earth's motion, as we'll describe. So the Pope and the Inquisition really did Galileo a favor, at least for posterity's sake, by forcing him to title the book as they did. So this book is an Italian language book by Galileo Galilei comparing the Copernican system with the traditional Ptolemaic system. It was translated into Latin as Systema Cosmicum in English, the Cosmic System, in 1635. So just three years after publication, Galileo didn't pass away until 1642, and so he lived quite a long time under, as we'll find out later, house arrest. The book was dedicated to Galileo's patron, Ferdinando de Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who received the first printed copy on February 22nd, 1632. In the Copernican system that Galileo is going to advocate for, the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun, while in the Ptolemaic system, everything in the universe circles around the Earth. The dialogue was published in Florence under a formal license from the Inquisition. They permitted him to do it, but in 1633, Galileo was found to be vehemently suspect of heresy. That's kind of unusual based on this book, based on the dialogue, which was then placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, from which it was not removed until 1835, so 200 years after his trial and after the book, after the theories it discussed had been permitted in print in 1822. Again, almost 180 years after publication. In an action that was not announced at the time, the publication of anything else he had written or ever might write was also banned in Catholic countries. So it's, of course, incredibly fascinating what happened outside of this book, and I think it bears repeating that this book has come to personify, if you will, the epic battle between science and religion, or God and science, setting him up as diametrically opposed, whereas Galileo would think nothing of the sort. He was a pragmatist in some ways, he was sort of naive in other ways, politically speaking, of course. So over the next couple of hours, we're going to get into the structure of the book, the different days in the book, the translation notes by Stillman Drake, the forward by Albert Einstein, and so I hope you'll stay tuned. I hope you'll subscribe and like and comment. Let me know what you want to hear in particular about this wonderful book, and I look forward to getting your feedback, and hopefully this will be the first of many adventures, or maybe it'll be the last. So for now, signing off, and look forward to an illustrated, annotated, Keating's eye view of one of the greatest books in scientific history, Galileo's dialogue concerning the two chief world systems. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.