The Book Club: Galileo with Brian Keating | The Book Club

[Music] welcome back to the book club i'm michael knowles and for this episode we're going to do something we've never done on the book club before we are going to pry open a science textbook but it's it's much less dry than it sounds this is a very old school science textbook it's not even really a textbook it's a dialogue concerning the two chief world systems by galileo but first in our fast-paced world it is tough to make reading a priority especially when the books are this long is very difficult at least it used to be at thinker.org they summarized the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form you can read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes from old classics like dale carnegie's how to win friends and influence people to recent best sellers like jordan peterson's 12 rules for life if you want to challenge your preconceptions if you want to expand your horizons if you want to sound very very smart at cocktail parties go to thinker.org that is t-h-i-n-k-r dot org no e no time for that start a free trial and put your mind in motion we are going to put our minds in motion talking about the motion of the solar system the motion of the universe and we will do that with an actual scientist my guest brian keating the chancellor distinguished professor of physics at uc san diego and the author of losing the nobel prize brian thank you for being here it's a great pleasure to be here michael brent i also have to thank you you brought me presents you're the first guest to bring me presents including a piece of the moon yes you brought me somehow a p i don't even know did you did you hit your ride with richard branson or something i don't know how it was delivered the old-fashioned way by the united states postal service that's so great you can get your very own samples of the moon if you were an astronaut that would be one way to get it expensive way to get it or you can actually get them online there are actually sources of getting slices of the moon and this is actually apropos of this book because the moon figures greatly in the dialogue concerning the two chief world systems and it sort of uh provides a foil to some of the arguments against that of the protagonist really portraying galileo himself this character salviati but uh i thought it'd be good to just maybe summarize what this book is and and how it had an effect on me as a young scientist and even greater effect as a more mature scientist yes i think that's a good idea because i think there might be one or two people out there who didn't get to finish the whole book maybe at tops three that's right so yeah could you just very briefly describe how the book is uh designed and who the characters are and why galileo got thrown into prison well we'll get into that too so it's an extremely important book in the history of science for many different reasons uh one of which is that it's really laying out the scientific method for the first time to a popular audience this book was written not in latin which was the conversant language for scientist of the day the only language that galileo was permitted to write in he wasn't allowed to teach in italian because that would be communicating to the mass public and the catholic church wasn't ready for that in the early 1600s he was prohibited via a vatican injunction to do so so but in this book he writes for a popular audience and it's really perhaps the first and might be the best example of popular science writing it has no equations of note uh so it's not a textbook like what you would encounter when you come back and get your phd someday yeah perhaps in san diego uh it has no equations no formula nothing complicated it presents some data but but the beautiful thing about this book is that it's literature it's a work of literature uh masquerading as a book about the way the world or really the universe could be arranged and that is really the distinction that's set into motion the scientific revolution which we now kind of take for granted in our technological age but if you ever stop and think about it how do you really know that the earth goes around the sun it doesn't appear that way right things would be different according to our natural notions of how motion and mass and other things work so galileo's responding to that the perception that we feel like the earth is stationary and it appears as if the sun and the stars are orbiting around us you know some more than others here in hollywood right that's right orbiting around each and every one of us well you make this point on the textbook most science textbooks i've read do not have characters they do not have a storyline they do not take so that the book is divided into four days of these conversations and there are three principal characters that's right so the first character is sort of an interlocutor whose job is really to kind of translate between the two other protagonists in the story one by the name of salviati the and he really has the words of galileo these were all three real existing human beings that existed that galileo knew two of whom salvati and segreto had passed away decades earlier when galileo wrote this in 1632 when it was published but there were true people the third person by the name of simplicio aka the simpleton he's you know considered by galileo galilei describes him sort of like an amalgam of a maybe a sixth century you know a scientist and a commentator on aristotle right so far down you say you've got salviati he's the one and there are two other characters we should mention copernicus yes who's saying that the earth revolves around the sun correct and ptolemy the older view who says that the sun revolves around the earth and so those are the two views that are being debated and you've got salviati who galileo agrees with savior the savior right and he's representing the copernican view this the view that we now hold right the earth goes around the sun that's right you've got the interlocutor as you say segredo who's kind of mediating between these guys they both use their real names so how come the guy who's representing ptolemy and really aristotle too they don't call him ptolemy they don't call him aristotle they don't use his real name they use this name of this obscure commentator simplicio uh why did why do they call him simpleton well i think galileo is was known as a brilliant scientist but he had he had immense flaws he had immense uh challenges to his character that ultimately what led to his undoing one of which is that he would do things that were precisely the impolitic thing to do such as take the index's prohibition of copernican work and the logic that goes behind the aristotelian earth-centered view of the cosmos and he would put those in the the very injunction against him he put those in the words of the simpleton namely the pope who would later become pope urban uh who would uh preside over the the holy office or the holy see you know i would say it's like a euphemism like the irs is the money donation service you know you just you just donate your money the holy office yes that's exactly what it was it was the inquisition and yeah and and it true in truth galileo had a lot to uh it was it was very much at fault when it came to the ultimate you know culmination of that story but but maybe before we get there we talk about why this is such a unique work of literature as you say there are no equations not textbook or it's not like any textbook we would see nowadays it's what we would call you know popular science or a trade book meaning that it's meant for the general audience so that's why i think readers today in addition to the scientifically brilliant ideas and logic and philosophy theology the most weighty subjects the ultimate issues yeah that mankind we just don't have as much time to think about anymore and maybe they had more time back then you know there's fewer options on on youtube et cetera netflix university exists but but nevertheless this is so brilliantly captivating that immediately sold out all across the continent galileo was world famous even even in a very early age this almost 400 year old book we have coincidentally we have a first edition here from 1632 correct they they all sold out so it was obviously a friend of ours was able to get there in 1632 grab this copy of the book and it's funny because when the book eventually is put on the list of forbidden books it was too late because the things sold out within three days or something yeah so so i got that from a friend who got it on amazon you know 400 year delivery that's always a little known aspect of amazon that you could get um so this is from a friend who's a collector of these rare books and has first edition copies of it and has generously loaned it to us for today and and this book is so brilliantly displayed it has wonderful illustrations including the cover the front this piece as it's known which depicts these these wonderful characters which uh were later used in another book after galileo was supposedly tortured and imprisoned which didn't really happen he wrote another book also called the dialogue and dialogue format about two different types of science he called it um and that really revolved around what we call mechanics and material science today but the same three characters come back in this work that was published only a few years before he passed away in 1642 or so what makes this book so spectacularly uh important and revelatory for me is that you can be a great scientist and also a great writer and galileo was this brilliant amalgam of all these different traits including the human foibles flaws and peccadillos that we all have and there's a stereotype that scientists are just these geniuses walking wikipedias expert knowledge the science process the scientists i trust you i don't trust other stuff you shouldn't trust me so scientists are the least trusting of other scientists i never mean to say oh what'd you just go oh yeah they're great go to publish it yeah it was your stockholm nobel prize sounds good to me scientists have the most doubt and that's because as you know the word science means knowledge well the only way that you get knowledge is by subjecting it to experimental empirical evidence well what about something like as i've talked about previously the multiverse for which there is no evidence existing currently it doesn't mean there never will be right but to what level should you trust a scientist that's purely speculating on theoretical findings it could be purely theoretical it doesn't mean it's wrong the theory of evolution we have evidence for the theory of evolution right what galileo does so brilliantly here is he presents these two theses obviously he's partial to the copernican the heliocentric uh model of the of the universe but again i ask as the only homework assignment that you'll get on prager university uh this quarter uh maybe you'll get more in future quarters is to think about it what if you were teleported back to 1631 before this book came out and you're trying to communicate all these wonderful discoveries of the past four nearly 400 years how would you prove the most simple postulates of all that the earth is a sphere that the earth rotates on its axis once per 24 hours and that once per 365 and a quarter days it orbits around the sun in motion it sure as heck doesn't feel like that and that's the subject of day one and the first day of this book in the second day they get into a little bit more obscure observations rather than just purely philosophical arguments and the nature of how things fall down and there are things that are attracted to the centers occupied them for the most part in day one and day three they start talking about the composition of the earth the sort of like a magnet and it's maybe it's made of little tiny magnets all kind of congealed together maybe it's not um what is the nature of the surface of the moon if it's perfect it was thought to be perfectly smooth it doesn't look smooth right it looks like it has imperfections in it doesn't it and so uh so galileo had discovered he didn't invent the telescope but he was the first observational astronomer to look through a telescope conceive a scientific hypothesis subject it to tests and refine his model and that's why you shouldn't trust a scientist because at any one of those stages he had great blunders i mean he was really brilliant i always say you know he could have had a great career if he didn't make these blunders einstein had great blunders there's not a serious scientist who hasn't made a serious mistake and with galileo fortunately or unfortunately those mistakes usually revolve around the politics of the day yes not the science this reminds me this trusting scientist because it occurs to me when i think of all these i think well ptolemy is a scientist right and some tycho bride is a scientist and all these other guys and so they get things wrong right there there's a great line in the second day and it this is uh segredo the interlocutor is the one and he's recounting a story which has by the way now become a cliche and uh he's he's uh talking to this guy who's a follower of aristotle and ptolemy right and uh he asked this man whether he was at last satisfied and convinced that the nerves originated in the brain and not in the heart previously they had thought that the nerves come from the heart but now because of science scientific inquiry we know we know it's in the brain so he asks this devotee of aristotle do you are you now satisfied and the philosopher after considering a while answered you have made me see this matter so plainly and palpably that if aristotle's texts were not contrary to it stating clearly that the nerves originate in the heart i should be forced to admit it to be true but aristotle said it so i don't care what i've seen right i believe him over my lion eyes right so i look at that and i say almost everything that uh aristotle said was brilliantly wrong in other words he would say things like a heavier object falls faster than a lighter object yeah and and galileo would say what if you have this heavy object like a book but in midair somehow they didn't say it was a laser beam but they say let's say it breaks apart mid-air now does it fall slower or let's say just a tiny bit of it breaks off so now the tiny bit is lighter than that of course not it's absurd they could have figured that out you know in 300 bc when right when aristotle was was promulgated now he had some interesting ideas uh but it turns out that almost all of them were wrong and so what galileo the physical side physical side i give them a lot more in terms of politics very interesting um but uh but when you look at what galileo i always say if you have the choice between a whether woman who's half right and half wrong or one that's always wrong always choose the one that's always wrong because you'll just do the opposite that galileo used to great effect the ultimate conclusion of this book in day four turns out to be wrong and it actually is only thanks to the pope who enjoined him to not publish the book with his original title which was the spectacular which would do so well in a b testing the original title that galileo wanted was on the flux and reflux of the earth's tides wow where do i get it run away amazon it's blank book but no no but it wouldn't be a blank book but actually it's a chat it's the subject of the fourth chapter about the fourth day which galileo felt was the dispositive conclusion that was inescapable that because the earth has oceans on it and because it spins on its axis as he had proved in the preceding days as it rotates around the sun just as this vodka just as this water sloshes about in this bottle as i rotate and revolve it so too are tides on the earth's surface caused by such a phenomenon right in fact we now know that it is indeed the moon that causes the earth's tide the moon has a gravitational force field that acts on the earth and tugs on the oceans a little bit more and a little bit less on the different sides of it four times a day yeah galileo had the data conclusion was absolutely wrong because it was he fell victim to what we call confirmation bias scientists are very subject to it i've personally been subject to it when you want to prove something so badly maybe it's to get tenure maybe to get a prize or to get attention or maybe because your theory is so beautiful it can't be wrong as einstein used to say yeah uh that you sort of fall in love with it and you discard contrary evidence galileo fell victim to it and ultimately the pope did him a real favor by forcing him to change it to this much more interesting and provocative this is very funny that because people totally it's not that they even misunderstand the galileo incident it's not that they're ignorant of it it's that they know so much that isn't so they know things that just didn't happen so you know in the traditional way the story is told galileo this brilliant guy is totally oppressed by the inquisition and by the catholic church and these awful ladies tortured he's thrown in a prison cell it's you know it's the worst anti-intellectual anti-scholarship thing that's ever happened and that isn't quite true first of all the pope actually helps him because he gets that theory wrong but the pope had been uh sort of pals with galileo right pope urban viii and then how does galileo repay him he names his character simpleton in the book and and there's another great line from the era from another pal of galileo's cardinal baroness who they were very uh i won't say they were tolerant of these sort of scientific inquiries but they weren't you know burning these galileo at the stake or anything like that and baroness famously said that the bible teaches us how to go to heaven not how the heavens go it does not it does not form these rock-solid canonical scientific conclusions about the world and so you can be open to inquiry you say that galileo runs afoul of the inquisition because he was in politic yeah i think i think he had an agenda and i think his uh scientific agenda sort of superseded some of the reason and his interpersonal skills so there's a joke how do you know a scientist is outgoing he looks at your shoes when he talks to you instead of his own so galileo had great flaws he was sort of boorish in his personal life he wasn't the greatest father he had two daughters and a son out of wedlock but he was a religious man he did believe and he considered himself a good catholic which is why the ultimate you know in the ultimate verdict as as you might say yeah uh was that uh he was guilty of suspicion of heresy not heresy itself for which he would have been tortured uh it was sort of done under threat of torture and you can argue if that's the same he certainly was never tortured in the classic sense the he did have to bow down and and kiss the pope's rings etcetera um but given the house we all did in those days right my students but uh but but the point of galileo being they're actually books called you know galileo goes to jail and other myths you know so there's this narrative that was established after this book because of that incident the galileo affair as it's known that really chose to pit this as the first battle between science and god and that galileo you know they imprisoned reason there's another book called on trial for reason suggesting that you know merely because of his ideas now i ask you um there are comparisons made you know et cetera but what if i came up with some idea that we're about to collide with an enormous black hole and you're the pr you're president knowles and uh you're the most powerful ruler on earth um it's it's a question if something could undermine and cause pure panic and uh and and debate and and just because maybe perhaps there's nothing good that can come of it and you know that yeah do you have an obligation to reveal that if indeed you thought it's compatible with somewhat of the catholic church's worldview to to go against what galileo was saying right so i think there are a lot of myths about scientists and there's certainly a lot of myths about galileo and how he was treated ultimately okay but at the very least yeah you've you've convinced me you you you've uh affirmed for me what i what i had uh always known bias because it's confirmation it's because i i always like uh digging in at galileo they didn't throw him in jail for being a scientist they threw him in jail for being a jerk but you say okay he doesn't get tortured that's a total myth but he does go to jail surely so he was uh he was sentenced to house imprisonment and i was uh lucky enough to host a conference in his very prison namely his final villa villa de gallolio outside of florence and it's a small town called archetree which is less than a couple kilometers for the from the convent where his daughters were serving as nuns so they served as nuns uh within within walking distance of their father and they would communicate with him uh he did continue to write books and and see visitors and he was by no means i always say you know bernie madoff would trade jail cells in a second yeah it's sumptuous uh not to say that you know he might not have wanted to travel elsewhere he was also very old he was in firm he had kidney problems probably uh and ultimately he lived about another nine years or so after the after the sentence was handed down but it was by no means a torturous existence he actually as i say wrote books conducted final observations and some of them went into what they consider his most important book a second dialogue between these three wonderful characters called the discourse the disc discussion on two chief sciences you've assigned me now more homework but i have to i have to it's it's so interesting to me that when we talk about science it has become such a politicized term it's now capital s with a trademark sign over the e and you hear these terms like science deny or we're the party of science where we own science and so often those stories are just complete legends fabrications going back probably most notably to galileo where i would suspect that the the people who uh who are always invading against the science deniers they don't know the real story of what happened to galileo yeah it provides a very convenient and and this book galileo uh goes to jail and other myths about science goes through this this you know very complicated interplay between the church and science and uh puts to lie some of the myths about these great characters giordano bruno who is another uh character very held very closely to people for being burned at the stake for postulating that stars were actually other solar systems where planets where people could live for example um but i think you know one thing to give to to give a little bit of upgrading to the catholic church so galileo was never pardoned and actually for me that caused me i was an altar boy in the catholic church at age 12 and i did uh want to eventually go all the way uh which would be becoming a priest and at that time i got my first small telescope not unlike one that's back there and the one homework assignment i would love to give people here even in the middle of la you can see the exact same craters on the surface of the moon that galileo saw you can see the glorious rings of saturn you can see the moons of jupiter and other heavenly objects that inspired galileo towards a love towards an affirmation that there was a higher power which is actually the ultimate conclusion of the book if i may read one or one or two passages that really speak so loudly and speak to his poetic use of language he was not just the dry science professor like isaac newton was um or unreadable as copernicus might be this is the book that really set into motion the future hawkings and cetera of the world the future keatings of the world so he says i do not presume to be able to adduce all the proper and sufficient causes of those effects which are new to me and which consequently i have had no chance to think about what i'm about to say i propose merely as a key to open portals to a road never before trodden by anyone in a firm hope that minds more acute than mine will broaden this road and penetrate further along it than i have done in my first revealing of it he's giving an assignment he's enjoying people to take up the the path that he has started on but continue it meaning he's not the last word and in fact the last word goes to the pope the last word in the book goes to none other than simplicio the simpleton not too often you give the simpleton the last word but you'll indulge me in doing just the same so uh before they break for drinks uh he uh there's a long discourse by by uh segreto um and and simplicio said you need not make any excuses they are superfluous and especially to me being accustomed to public debates i've heard disputants countless times not merely go go angry and excited at each other but even break out into insulting speech and sometimes come very close to blows but he basically say i know if i had asked that god in his infinite power and wisdom could have conferred upon the watery element the tides its observer's super cutting motion by other means of its containing vessels both of which would reply that he capital h could have and that he capital h would have known how to do this in many ways which are undeniable to our minds he's giving the last word to the church right and to probe and and i think it was consonant with his viewpoint i don't think he really he was an atheist by no means there's no evidence for them you know there's another there's another great line god comes up a lot more here than in most science books and it's not it's not merely i think as a sort of gloss for his true atheistic insurance policy you know you've got to give him more credit than that he's a much deeper thinker than that and and he writes this is on day three he says i say that it is brash for our feebleness to attempt to judge the reason for god's actions and to call everything in the universe vain and superfluous which does not serve us because that's that's really a central issue here right man is not sitting at the very center of the universe if galileo's right right and so and and why on earth would would these heavenly bodies not be perfectly smooth why would they not why would they have these imperfections it has no purpose it has no service to mankind and so he says well i think it's look it's a little rash this is this is in the mouth of salviati the guy who's representing galileo says i think it would be brash to just say oh yeah sorry everything that doesn't serve us is vain and pointless and god had no reason to do that and then segreda the interlocutor complicates this a little he says say rather and i think you will be speaking more accurately which we do not know to serve us i believe that one of the greatest pieces of arrogance or rather madness that can be thought of is to say since i do not know how jupiter or saturn is of service to me they are superfluous and even do not exist yes that's brilliant now that is a beautiful complication here and and in a way exposes the arrogance of uh even the people that galileo probably would side with and who now think they side with galileo and you see echoes of this in the modern you know militant atheist movements lawrence krauss's etc that suggest well look at the hubble deep field and which is an image made by the hubble space telescope staring for weeks at a time at a tiny blank spot in the cosmo cosmic wallpaper and discovering that every every place you look there's a galaxy and they'll say well that proves there's no god because there's all this wasted space there's all these wasted galaxies of which you know we know nothing about we can never contact etc but just the same way who would look at jupiter and say oh well those moons are jupiter or the telescope itself oh it's only good for looking up the moons of jupiter yeah that would be so limiting the power of the telescope all the more so to limit the power of god and i'm not here to advocate on behalf or not i don't think it's as simple as saying well galileo believed in god or einstein might have believed in god so i'm going to believe in god we know newton certainly believed in god certainly but it was interesting that people use this this as a cudgel to really go after the biblical authorities and to give them you know some ammunition it's true that they've never formally issued a pardon right to galileo which affected me greatly as a kid but now i'm an adult and now you have to look with a little bit more wisdom which is not what the word science means it's knowledge well even even this issue even the question of the vatican apologizing to galileo only really even became a big one in the mid to late 20th century right okay maybe maybe we were a little harsh on the guy and did you know that the vatican operates a series of telescopes around the world why would they do that i mean a lot of it is you know as the psalmist says the heavens declare the handiwork of god right and wisdom begins with the fear of god now again i'm not advocating on behalf of any religion or even in existence of god i'm just saying it's a question that galileo wrestled with yeah and it behooves us to wrestle alongside of him right and and not to make a caricature out of him not to read the read him as just a silly cartoon that is that actually has nothing to do with his life the way he's normally presented you actually have to dig into the book but it occurs to me uh you have put me at a disadvantage here because simplicio has to end this discussion even uh brian break for drinks on the canal that's right now we will they do much like these characters we will break for drinks on the canal brian thank you so much for being here another book you ought to read is losing the nobel prize you can do that right after you finish the dialogue concerning the two chief world systems in the meantime we'll see you next time i'm michael knowles and this is the book club at prageru thank you so much for watching this episode of the book club on prageru prageru is a 501c3 non-profit organization so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air please consider making a tax deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming thank you very much you