JF Ptak Science Books

The Tipping Point of Degeneracy: a Look Back at Robert Oppenheimer's Black Hole that Wasn't his Post War Existence

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1354

Its easy to forget about the pre-Los Alamos Oppenheimer, especially for those who aren't necessarily interested in the history of 20th century physics. I was preparing to write something about a very brief window that seemed to have been opened in the 72 hours or so after the second atomic bomb was dropped....or perhaps from the time of he Hiroshima bomb.  In any event, it was a short period, measurable in terms of dozens of hours, where people--even Robert Oppenheimer--had a sense of a sea-change regarding the bomb and peace, and that perhaps the thing was so terrible and so controllable that it might bring about the end of war.  But the gloom of the reality of the future of the weapon--and the future weapon systems--settled in, and that illusory window was closed, if indeed it was ever actually open, which it really wasn't.  

Not long after this, Oppenheimer was shuttled into the Oval Office to meet for the first time with President Truman--it must've been a worlds-in-collision moment, though it seems Oppenheimer was no quite himself, not quite as filled up as he should've been.  Depressed, I'm sure, after having just gone through a bit of rough business as to who would be controlling the future of the bomb.  Anyway, he met with Truman on 25 October 1945, in there with Truman for a 10:30 appointment, and things did not go well.  Truman "asked" (apparently rhetorically) Oppenheimer his opinion on when the Soviets would develop the bomb.  Oppenheimer simply said that he didn't know.  Truman shot back "never", that the Soviets would never develop the bomb.  I have no idea if Truman believed this or just was pissed with what he thought of his meeting with a "cry baby" Oppenheimer.  Truman evidently told a number of different versions of this story, but one thing was for certain:  he did say that he "never wanted to see that son of a bitch again".

If Oppenheimer wasn't depressed when he went into the Oval Office at 10:30, he was when he was promptly shuttled out for Truman's 11:00 meeting, which was with the postmaster of Joplin Missouri, Mr. Leslie Travis.  My feeling (completely unsubstantiated) was that equal weight was given by Truman to both the 10:30 and the 11:00.But the man was a definite force in the relatively short time he spent in the high community, from the late 1920's to about 1942. 

But just four years before, and the decade or so preceding it, Oppenheimer was a brilliant new force in the American physics community, a  remarkable, brilliant talent with a big insight.  And this is what brought m back to Oppenheimer on the first day of WWII.

People tend to think of black holes as a Stephen Hawking-era phenomenon while the facts of the matter are that they began perhaps hundreds of year earlier, probably with Cambridge John Michell (1724-1793), back in the year of the end of the American Revolution, 1783 (and perhaps before).  His famous experiment (known as the "Cavendish Experiment") was really only rediscovered in the 1970's in Michell's correspondence with Henry Cavendish.  In those pages he hypothesized that there may evolve a star so massive (which he referred to as a "dark star' in Newtonian theory) that light itself might not be able to escape fro it, that the escape velocity for the light could never be reached, and that its phenomenal gravity would make the star impossibly dense.  This was very similar to the dark star hypothesis of Simon Pierre de Laplace in his epic Exposition du Systeme du Monde which was published in 1796. Karl Schwarzchild's 1916 paper using Einstein's relativity paper of the same year discussed the possibilities of singularity (the Schwazchild limit of the diameter of black holes), as did (the beautiful) Subrahmany Chandrasekhar (one of the last men able to know everything) in 1928. 

In hunting for a number of Richard Feynman papers here at the warehouse I happened to find this extraordinary effort by J. Robert Oppenheimer and G.M. Volkhoff in the 15 February 1939 issue of America's greatest journal contribution to physics, The Physical Review.  Here (along with a preceding paper by Richard C. Tolman, issued in the same issue just above Oppenheimer, which were the analytic analysis used by O+V to base their estimates of nuclear forces) was established the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkhoff limit, which stated that if the state of evolution of  neutrons forming a degenerate Fermi gas of extremely dense masses in neutron stars was more  massive than .07 solar masses that it would collapse into a black hole or exotic/quark star; if the mass was below that limit, the star would not collapse due to the degeneracy pressure of neutrons and the strong force.  The black hole part was left really to a second paper of 1 September 1939 (the day that the Nazis attacked Poland and the fighting began in World War II in Europe) when Oppenheimer teamed up with Hartland Snyder to write "On Continued Gravitational Contraction", when the two wrote about the singularity of the event.  the paper met with little appreciation at the time, though the two papers today have lead to some of the most progressive ideas in 21st century astrophysics. (This paper is available at our blog bookstore, here.)

Antique Circles--Astronomical Prints

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1248

Yes, the heavens are made of circles, somewhat, especially if you were observing a three-dimensional figure in two-space, where all spheres are circles.  But here we're making those observations the other way 'round.  In any event, these are lovely images taken from a part of the history of astronomy images here in the bookstore--and I should say that they're all available for purchase from the store as well.  But in the meantime, click away--you'll find that almost all are expandable and mine-able for design elements.

 

Armillary Sphere, 1784.

Distribution of the Nebulae, ca. 1860.

The Moon, ca. 1850.

The Solar System, 1804.

1855.

Jupiter, 1864.

Mars, 1864.

Full Moon, 1836.

Solar System, ca. 1820.

Solar System, 1823.

Solar System, 1808.

Dimension of the planets in comarison to the Sun, 1850.

the Moon, ca. 1810.

the Solar System, ca. 1825.

Partial eclipse of the Moon, ca. 1860.

Total eclipse of the Sun, ca. 1860.

 

Saturn, ca. 1870.

 
1757.

 

Comparative cosmologies, ca. 1760.

The Invisible Influence of the Highly Visible? Comets and Meteors in Astrology

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1176

"When beggars die there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes." - Shakespeare.

"Threatening the world with Famine, Plague and War: To Princes, Death! To Kingdoms, many Crosses; To all Estates, inevitable Losses! To Herdsmen, Rot; to Plowmen, hapless Seasons; To Sailors, Storms, To Cities, Civil Treasons!" De cometis by John Gadbury, London, 1665

It is unusual to me that in the long history of early astrology, some of the greatest elements of the night sky--comets and meteors--are little used, perhaps even unuseful outside of adding flavoring to readings given the time and place of their appearance. They had been seen for milennia--appearing in Gilgamesh and the Book of Revelation for two samples-- as prognostic of future events, John of Damascus and Aritotle and Ptolemy and Albumasar all writing about that quality.

[The Bayeux Tapestry illustrating the appearance of the comet of 1066, later to be known as Halley's comet.]

Comets and meteors didn't really affect anything in the physical world, and in the astrological one their purpose was to perhaps predict a kingly death or the appearance opf warts on women. They were also seen by people like Aristotle to be atmopsheric events, living out their exsitence in close proximity to the Earth, incapable of having any undue affect on Earthly matters.  Meteors would appear and then disappear, comets were surprises and visible for just short amounts of time; the rest of the night sky remained the same, intact and unaltered after their appearances.  They were not understood, though they were seen by some as raging battles between forces of good and evil, personifications of the struggle between the angels of god and the elements of the devil. Meteors and comets were mysterious, unconquerable, unknowable, suspicious elements, and were evidently not useful to the early astrologers.

[Nicolas Le Rouge, Le Grand Kalendrier et Compost des Bergieres, published in 1496 in Troyes. 

The night sky is a mnemonic device, a place to store memory and a holder of the alphabet of myths and beliefs of all, a culture written large across the sky. Meteors and comets were not predictable, and could add nothing insofar as a consistent bit of storytelling was concerned, though they certainly created their own stories in each observed appearance; they could also add punctuation and exclamation to whatever constellation they appeared in. For example if one appeared in a juncture with Jupiter, a major event for royalty would possibly be foretold.   But as a permanent element to the visualization of the night sky, they had little power even though they seemed to be displays of fantastic energy and power in themselves.

[Amrose Pare illustrated the comet of 1528 in his Livres de Chirurgie (in a chapter titled "Des Monstres Celestes"), published in Paris in 1597. Even though Pare was a towering figure and great intellect, he still personified the wandering stars with human faces, with hair and beards, accompanied by swords and shields.  There were many other scholars who saw such things in comets and meteors, not the least of which was Maupertuis, who envisioned the tails as clusters of jewels; many others seeing many other things.

[For some reason the celestial court, divided by sunlight and flanked by two other sources of light, have ofund it expedient to issue comets from the mouths of Heaven Canon.  I'm not sure what's going on in the forground with the fellow working his spade next to the triangular blankness.  the man to his right seems to have been overtaken in fear (as have the group of people visible to the left over the shoveler's shoulder).]

[Halley's comet appears again on the title page of this work by the Hungarian George Henischius, a prfoessor of rhetoric, mathematics and medicine at Augsberg.]

Catechizing the Sky--Writing on the Stars

JF Ptak Science Books  Post  1166

Working on the next installment of cosmological images [and also a continuation of the series on writing systems] I put together a series on naming the stars, ideas providing the mechanics for naming the celestial kingdom, applying an alphabet for relative discussions of the heavens.  The most provocative of them all, I think, belonged to Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), a scholar who took flight in his imagination and who  established a world system which for him created  a harmony between all things that existed and the maker of the universe, and which basically was an attempt to move far past any identification system to a catechize the stars. Postel’s was a communication system between man and the beyond, not a coordinate system.  He incised the stars in his vault of heaven with Hebrew letters which would be the keys to understanding all things–and at the basis of all of this was his conception of a world unified religion which incorporated Christian ideas and values and to which all other religions would transpire. 

There were numerous other attempts to establish divine alphabets, though none so far as I know were inscribed directly on the stars intended to serve as a means of transferring information and insight.  The extraordinarily accomplished (Renaissance man of the Renaissance, physician, astrologer, botanist, occultist, and general fill-in for whatever discipline needed help) Paracelsus’ Alphabet of the Magi also used Hebrew letters supplemented with magical alphabets for divination purposes, though not on the stars.  Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (an astrologer/magician/theologian/occultist, 1486-1535) in the early 16th century came close to the Postel idea with his Angelic Alphabet, though this was used to communicate with angels and again was not incised on the stars themselves.  John Dee’s (a man of many and high accomplishments, a mathematician, occultist, astronomer, astrologer, alchemist and divine, 1527-1608) angelic alphabet was somewhat similar to Agrippa’s; his “Enochian” language used to communicate with angels.


Letters and numbers were of course used on stars but in general were used to identify the magnitude and position of stars in the constellations.  Johann Bayer (1572-1625) applied Greek letters to stars according to their relative luminosity in his revolutionar Uranometia (published in 1603).  John Flamsteed (1646-1719, and who was "The King's Astronomical Observator" and  the first British Astronomer Royal)would come a little later and use an arabic numeral and Greek letter system, which would give the relative luminosity as well as the star’s position from the western-most edge of its constellation. 
                                   
But it was this image by Postel which is the most astonishing, really, attempting as it did to read the heavens and the works of God without ever having to actually see the Creator (a thing most impossible, as stated in Exodus 33:20).

History of Blank and Missing Things: Telescope Tubes

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1127

One of the greatest missing things in the history of astronomy thankfully never came to be.  When the Hubble space telescope was having its very early problems, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D, MD) suggested and pursued the idea for bringing the Hubble down and end the program rather than repair it–for financial reasons, or something, I dunno.  It was an toweringly bad idea that keep itself alive for too long (and was just so bad that NASA I recall had a hard time getting their head around such a bizarre problem-solving approach to a fixable problem)–Mikulski went on to not think about other things, the Hubble was fixed, resulting in a simply astonishing amount of discoveries and data that could absorb astronomers worldwide for generations. (In another part of the wanting-to-make-things-disappear is House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who wondered why exactly in the days after Katrina if we should rebuild New Orleans.  But that’s another story.)  Hubble is still there; so is Mikulski, who now is the champion of “the people’s telescope” and who chairs the committee responsible for NASA’s funding. 

One of the most powerful blank/missing or empty things in the history of astronomy that did come about may very well be Christiaan Huygen’s telescope¹ without a telescope tube. Presented to the Royal Society in 1691, Huygens instrument (also known as an “aerial telescope”) was meant to perform the world’s most powerful optical observational instrument, having a focal length of 122'.  Monster telescopes were not practical at that time given the weight and flexure and movement of what would be a massive multi-hundred-foot-long telescope tube.  And so Huygens came up with the idea of doing away with the cumbersome part of the large telescope.

Huygens was a very smart man, and one of very few people acknowledged in Newton’s Principia (along with “Dr. Hollis” and Christopher Wren, the three referred to as “the greatest geometers of our time”)), a man who Newton found to be “the most elegant of any mathematical writer of modern time”. He was extraordinarily accomplished, almost so as much as the half-forgotten Robert Hooke...Huygens was by far Hooke’s superior in mathematics, but Hooke was probably more accomplished across a wider variety of fields, which is saying mounds because Huygens did about everything..  In any event, Newton found Huygens to be an extraordinary scientist, even though Huygens didn’t really quite ever get Newton’s universal gravitation–a high elevation, perhaps among the highest, coming from the cranky Newton. 


Getting back to the telescope–its missing section was perhaps one of the most important developments in astronomy in the second half of the 17th century.  Its arrangement was very elegant, and simple–the mast held the object glass whose position could be changed with a series of simple pulleys and pulls; the eyepiece was placed on a table, aligned with string and rope.  And that was it.  By the first third of the 18th century, James Bradley was able to construct a telescope of this type with a focal length of 212 feet, and used it to measure the diameter of Venus.

Technology would soon catch up to the Huygens invention, but not really for another 75 years. 

Notes.
See:  “Christian Huygens and the Development of Science in the Seventeenth Century”, by E. N. DA C. ANDRADE, in Nature 162, 472-473 (25 September 1948). 

1. Astroscopia Compendiaria tubi optici molimine liberata (compound telescopes without a tube), published 1684.

Unfathomable Dots–324,198 Stars and Knowing the Structure of the Milky Way, 1873

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1107 (Appended April 27, 2015)
[A continuation of our History of Dots  series.]

 

The history of dots must have some fair share of its content filled with a very varied history of astronomy, which just goes to show that even within the seeming-sameness of microscopic investigations of dots that its subcategories could be so vast and differentiated. (The image above is a small detail from the following image, below.)

Dots aren’t necessarily just dots–even in representing the stars, dots have a rich history. The first star-dots published in the West appear in 1482, taken from the work of the first century astronomer and philosopher Hyginius¹, and is a book that contains maps of the constellations composed of such beautiful light-encrusted bits.  There wouldn’t be another work like this one, strangely, for another 75  years. Alessandro Piccolomini’s² work of 1559 (which would be the first true star atlas), and again we see the familiar representation. 

Galileo’s dots were very aggressive.  By 1610 he had produced his fifth and most powerful telescope, allowing things to be seen one thousand times closer, using it to make enormous discoveries–discoveries so big in fact that their towering significance is a but hard to understand today in the context of early 17th century knowledge. It was all published in his fantastic Sidereus Nuncius on March 4, 1610—the extraordinary  very title page³ of the book proclaiming some of the great discoveries of Galileo’s adventure.

One monumental outcome of Galileo’s work was expanding the number of stars in the sky, which was basically mucking around with the perfect plan of the creator–formerly a cornerstone for the existence of a divine being.  With the exception of comets and eclipses the sky had remained immutable, a perfect score of the creator’s creation, until 1572, when Tycho Brahe noticed something new in Cassiopeia, something that was not a comet—a “something” that was a star. This was momentous because the night sky had been seen for centuries as being complete—a new star, the Nova of Brahe, contradicted this high belief, offering the possibilities of newness where there had not been one previously.  And so too with Kepler’s new star of 1602.

One of the things that Galileo brought to the world was an entirely new sky, revealed to him through his telescope—so many stars that he could only guess (though he reckoned that there was an order of magnitude more stars than previously known “stars in myriads, which had never been seen before….and which surpasses the old, previously known, stars by ten times”).
   
Which brings me to the images that I stumbled on today from “Statement of Views respecting the Sidereal Universe”⁴which was  the work of the astronomer and great popularizer,  Richard A. Proctor (“B.A. (Cambridge), Honorary Fellow of King's College, London”).

Proctor’s dots challenge all dots that have come before so far as theorizing on the structure (and extent) of the Milky Way is concerned.  Proctor refers to William Herschel’s⁵--the man who first gave the Milky Way its shape and who fixed our own sun in an inferior and not-particualrly-special place inside that map--statement that the extent and constitution of the Milky Way is “unfathomable”. 
 
Proctor gets there by presenting a map of the night sky with stars visible to the naked eye:

 
And then the double hemisphere map of the northern and southern skies “We have here the first step towards just views of the constitution of the Milky Way, or rather the next step beyond the great, but little noticed, discovery of Sir W. Herschel's, that the bright clouds of the Milky Way are for the most part spherical clusters of stars.”(Page 546.)

Finally is the crux of the matter: two sections of an fantastic map displaying 324,198 stars visible via a 2.5 inch aperture telescope.

(The following being a small detail in the above section:)

He comments:“I assert, without the slightest fear of contradiction by any possessing such knowledge, that the broad teaching of the equal-surface chart. 0/3 24,000 stars disposes finally of all theories of the constitution of the sidereal universe which had previously been enunciated. The chart does not definitively indicate a new theory—rather it suggests the idea that the constitution of the sidereal universe is too complex to be at present ascertained. But it completely negatives (i), the stratum theory (even in the modified form apparently retained by Sir W. Herschel) ; (ii), the flat-ring theory of Sir John Herschel ; and (iii) the infinitely extended stratum theory, with condensation towards the mean plane, which Struve adopted.” (Page 547)

I think that for 1873 the verbose Mr. Proctor got his point across.     

Notes

1. Hyginius Mythographus (fl. 1st century A.D.). Poeticon astronomicon. Edited by Jacobus Sentinus and Johannes Lucilius Santritter. Venice: Erhard Ratdolt, 14th October 1482. The first star atlas per se, standing alone in its field for a century.

2. Piccolomini, Alessandro.  De la Sfera del Mondo.  1559                              

3.  Galilei, Galilei  Sidereus Nuncius (known in English as Starry Messenger), published 1610
The title page reads: Great and very wonderful spectacles, and offering them to the consideration of every one, but especially of philosophers and astronomers; which have been observed by Galileo Galilei … by the assistance of a perspective glass lately invented by him; namely, in the face of the moon, in innumerable fixed stars in the milky-way, in nebulous stars, but especially in four planets which revolve round Jupiter at different intervals and periods with a wonderful celerity.

4. Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Paper, Abstracts and Reports of the Proceedings of the Society from Niovember 1872 to June 1873, vol XXXIII, London, printed by John Strangeways, 1873.                    

5. It seems that few people now remember Frederick William Herschel as a great discoverer of alternative existences, but, well, that's pretty much what he did--and he did it during a time that must've made his astronomical discoveries seem like science fiction .For example, in 1785 Herschel published a revolutionary image of the “Stellar System” (the Milky Way), showing its irregular pattern and the off-center placement of our sun amidst a panoply of other stars.
(His image was remarkably and substantially correct, with the most grievous error being the placement of the sun too close to the center of the galaxy.) It was an image which bought the concept of a not so humano-centric idea into popular philosophy, and that our sun was a star among stars in a sea of stars.

Horse Poop and the Stars: Robert Hooke, 1673 (No, it Wasn't Pegasus)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1097

Had there been no Newton every school child would know the name of Robert Hooke (1635-1703) in its place—he was polymathic, totally energized, big-thinking non-sleeping experimentalist and theoretician who worked across numerous disciplines (physics and astronomy, to chemistry, biology, and geology, to naval technology), not the least of which was architecture (having helped Christopher Wren in the design of the new St. Paul’s).  Hooke was a superb instrumentalist and inventor who also (for the most part) introduced humanity to the previously-unseen microscopic world (in his gorgeous and revolutionary Micrographia¹..) .He was an enormous figure who was also never below a fight or argument, and whose grasp of his own very considerable accomplishments never seemed to be limited by what he had actually done in spite of his own tremendous and prodigious output.  Some people lay the blame for Hooke’s obscurity upon Newton’s great and tireless vindictiveness against Hooke, but that’s by far from the whole story of Hooke’s troublesome personal legacy.  Not only is his portrait not on the coin of the realm (like Newton's) nor hanging everywhere in the halls of academia, but there is no known lifetime surviving portrait of the man, and the exact location of his burying place is not known. He came a little close to Newton’s enormity, and in the absence of  Jupiter and Saturn even the Earth starts to look a little bit big.among the rest of the planets.

In addition to high genius and a man largely responsible for keeping together (and moving forward) the Royal Society, Hooke was also a hypochondriacal, meanish, semi-miser prone to receiving insults real or imagined, always very well aware of his place in history of of history's possible sleights against him, and also prone to vindictive attack if the mood moved him. Newton too could be as sharp as sand in the eye, but he survived as a person, and Hooke sorta didn't.  I'm not sure why, really, he seems so mostly-forgotten nowadays, priggishly envious idea-appropriating vindictive Despicable Me character or not--his swath of accomplishments was wide and deep as almost anyone else coming out of Britain for 200 years, which should be enough to send a lot of the historical personal detritus into the lost memory bin...but it doesn't, or something else, but popular history just doesn't work for the man.

Stephen Inwood's The Forgotten Genius recalls the 1673 letter that Robert Hooke wrote to the Council of the Royal Society, complaining of a new wrinkle in his ever-wrinkling private life:  the garden that had been just outside his rooms had been converted into a "coaching inn and stables", meaning that there were mounds of festering summertime horse poop within nostrils' reach.  He wrote to the Council that he needed a new accommodation, to "free himselfe from sitting as he now doth in the suffocating stink of the stables hors dung and Jakes [privy], which hath bin a great cause of his late illness". [The portrait is supposed to be that of Hooke, which is fine by me--I like this one.  It shows a very thin man under the wig and bulky clothing, clear blue eyes, tight mouth, translucent skins, surrounded by the implements and directions of his thought, not the least of which is the night sky over the sitter's shoulder.]

The changes were agreed to, but not quickly, and it was still December 1673 or so that Hooke got his hands on Johannes Hevelius' new Machina Coelestis, a book which contained what Hooke saw to be germinal flaws, fatal flaws to the advancement of astronomy--and of course varied affronts to his own innovations in astronomical instrumentation--but which were preventable. By him. Hooke had it within himself to attack anything or anyone, and so it came to be Hevelius' turn, monumental stature or not. (Newton's turn would come soon after.)

Now there is only contrived evidence that the horse dung and suffocating stink threw Hooke over the edge--but I do like the idea of this being the case, and though probably no real historian would go this way, I like to think that it was this High Stink that helped Hooke in his large attack upon Hevelius.  Of course Hooke needed no pushing or prodding from outside sources, even if those outside  sources were already sort of within him.  But I do like the image of his pen and razor-sharp mind fueled by the poop mounds and privies.  

I can imagine his knuckles turning an easy white as he read the book that charged against his superior optical method of sighting instrumentation for astronomical work, Hevelius clinging to some methods of the 16th century.  They fought, of course, and for the most part it was a lonely (if correct) fight by Hooke, his possible benefactors and allies at the Royal Society  turning out not to be so given personality clashes and such.  But I can imagine the Hevelius, and the knuckles, and the wrongness of it all, all brewing in the stank of late summer swelter of horse dung mounds, filling Hooke's nostrils and wigs and everything else with a rage for a rage that already existed.

And here's a line I won't very often get to use to close anything out:  the poop couldn't've hurt..

Notes:

1. The 28-year old Hooke published the results in a gorgeous and revolutionary book, Micrographia (a lovely e-text edition appears at Gutenberg, here) in 1665, which became an instant best seller and highly praised and valued. (Samuel Pepys, perhaps among the shiniest stars whose imprimatur was like a royal blessing, said the book (was) "the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life.") There is no telling what the people of the mid-17^th century thought of seeing such incredible discoveries in the little semi-invisible stuff that made up their normal, daily lives.  The only thing that somewhat equates to this would be if the first images of the Hubble were those of Earth-bound objects whose detail had previously been unknown.  Hooke’s observations and drawings of things like the common flea were just an astonishment—that such a creature of “low order” could have such intricate detail and design was a complete revelation.  The drawings of the fly's eye, too, was an inescapable wonder, an incredible object to consider as having any detail pre-microscope, and then revealed to have unimaginable design and elegance.

Picturing Almost-Nothingness--When Nothing Was Something

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1092

The Great Nothing–a History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things #79

Perhaps the biggest, blankest, most missing-est thing that we have presently is the universe, or rather the universe before the universe was created.  I can talk about the universe in that way because I’m talking about the one that is most classically conceived as such by much of the Western world:  a deep, multi-thousand-year-old belief that the universe came into being via the hand of a creator. 


The universe in question is the one in the hands of the Primum Mobile (pictured above, bottom row, fourth image), one of 50 images depicted in a series known as the Mantegna Tarocchi, drawn and engraved by artists unknown ca. 1465, though it was once believed to be the  work of the great master Andrea Mantegna (and later the possible work of Bacci Baldini).¹


 From my reading of this image, the universe is held  in the hands of the primum mobile, a spherical container of not-quite-nothing, waiting for the creator to breathe life into it.  The possibility of absolutely nothing was seen as an impossibility, a perfect vacuum, a space of certain nothingness, was a violation of theological belief.  That the sphere existed was a proof that–in the 15th century–you simply couldn’t have a container of nothingness. The very presence of the sphere confirming that there was something being contained by it.

As a matter of fact the issue of nothingness was very contentious, with the concept of its possibility and the display of a vacuum not achieved until 1672.  This beautiful illustration is from one of the greatest experimental physics books of the 17th century, coming as it does from Otto von Guericke's  Experiemnta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio (Amsterdam, 1672).  (In another minute department, this one is also I guess the greatest book ever written by a Mayor of anywhere (as von Guericke (1602-1886) was mayor of Magedeburg for 33 years).)  The image shows the greatest of von Guericke's efforts, and one of the greatest (or most important) experiments in experimental science--the dramatic demonstration of the vacuum, showing here that teams of horses could not pull apart two halves of an evacuated sphere, and of course the efficacy of air pressure operating against it (um, the vacuum). The "floating" bits in the sky were an exploded view of the sphere that was the subject of the experiment. 
               
What was more important though, and what the general reader today might easily miss, was that von Guericke created something that many scientists and philosophers said didn't, and couldn't, exist:  the vacuum.  In modern times, Copernicus depicted the universe as a vast void; Descartes came in the back door (following the ancient and interesting though incorrect theory of Aristotle*), not liking the idea very much, and claiming that such empty space couldn't exist.  Von Guericke provided the proof that the vacuum, that nothing, did exist.²

Ultimately the Tarocchi was providing the Standard View of the creation, and did so before t he great assaults on the celestial kingdom got underway at the hands of Copernicus and Galileo, and of course many others--but that was all still 80 years away. 

Notes: 
   
1. The series as I said consists of 50 cards, all of which were teaching aids for the richer kids, dividing society, making a hierarchical display of the different levels of society. There were five series, each with ten engravings; the first series displayed the stages of social man,  beginning with the beggar and working through to the pope. [Series E* contained the Beggar, Servant (Fameio), Craftsman (Artixan), Merchant (Merchadante), Gentleman (Zintilomo), Knight (Chavalier), Doge (Doxe),King (Re), Emperor (Imperator) and finally ending with the Pope (Papa).] Series D displayed Apollo and the nine Muses; Series C was dedicated to philosophy and the sciences (showing the seven liberal arts plus astrology, philosophy and theology); Series B showed the seven virtues plus the Genius of the Sun, Time and World (Iliaco, Chronico and Cosmico, repectively).  Series A, composing the last 10 images (numbers 41-50) displayed the heavy hitters, the real weight: the Seven Spheres of the  solar system (the greatest part of the structure of the universe of te time) with the paths of the five planets plus the sun and moon, surrounded by the Octava Spera (the Eighth Sphere) and then by tghe Primum Mobile and Prima Causa (the last, card 50, being the god). 

In the corners and bottom of the decorative borders is the classification system: the name and Roman numeral are first located along the bottom edge, with the group’s lettrer (E through A) and the group Arabic number located on the corners.

2. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) theorized that as air became thinner objects moving through it would move faster, which is true; he further speculated that if there was no air at all, that if vacuums did exist, then objects would move infinitely fast, which he correctly assumed was not possible, and thus the vacuum could not exist.

Resolving Dots into New Worlds & Discovering Multiple Shadows

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1054    The  History of Dots series

[Thanks to Randall Rosenfeld of the University of Toronto for sparking this post!]

It seems that few people now remember Frederick William Herschel as a great discoverer of alternative existences, but, well, that's pretty much what he did--and he did it during a time that must've made his astronomical discoveries seem like science fiction .For example, in 1785 Herschel published a revolutionary image of the “Stellar System” (the Milky Way), showing its irregular pattern and the off-center placement of our sun amidst a panoply of other stars.

(His image was remarkably and substantially correct, with the most grievous error being the placement of the sun too close to the center of the galaxy.) It was an image which bought the concept of a not so humano-centric idea into popular philosophy, and that our sun was a star among stars in a sea of stars¹.

Not only that, but Herschel also made observations on double stars that showed that Newton's laws of gravitation extended throughout the universe, and that it was possible for the stars themselves to submit to these laws and react to each other.  After constructing his mammoth four-foot telescope, Herschel expanded the observable sky multifold, showing that there was a possible 75 million stars now available for study.  And if the stars were behaving like planets then the actions of our own solar system seem perhaps to be not so unique; and with all of these new stars the possibilities for new planets and new solar system (and with that the possibilities for other life forms) seems a greater possibility.  

And on these new worlds in these new solar systems there was therefore the possibility of two or more suns, meaning that there could be sets of shadows cast by anyone/thing on the surfaces of any of these new worlds.  

In fact Herschel was able to show that our own Sun was following a prescribed path through the Milky Way, making Sol much less of spectacular enigma of mythical importance and more of just another starry dot in a sea of dots.  And while he was making the Sun into a starry dot he was also resolving those other starry dots into something of greater understanding and significance, bringing them into a systemic mechanism of the universe.

Herschel also made an alpha/omega kind of discovery, as well--he marveled at  nebulous "holes"² that he was finding in the Milky Way, thinking that, perhaps, he was looking into the very soul of the universe, at the place where stars were born. 

This is extraordinary stuff coming to use from 200 years ago.  Few people have made such enormous and concrete contributions with such far reaching intellectual and philosophical implications.  So hats-off tonight to Frederick William Herschel, a man with big eyes.

Notes:

1. This galacto-centric view remained until the work of Harlow Shapley's globular clusters in 1918.

2. Specifically his famous and luscious "Coalsack" nebula.

History of Dots Series: Missing the Beginning of the Stars as Dots

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1029

[History of Dots series]

I was wondering when it was that stars began to appear as dots in celestial atlases or astronomical works–dots rather than starry stars, decorated spheres with crusty circular fire rings about them.
I felt that at some near point in the history of astronomy that t he conventional antiquarian way of representing a star would fall away with magnification, or clarity, just as has been the opposite case with the magnification of simple dots to reveal complex structures, say with the amplification of the flea eye...even a graphite pencil’s period at the end of a sentence on a piece of paper will turn itself from a dot into something as complex as the coastline of England (given enough magnification).
The first star atlas published in 1482 after the work of the first century astronomer and philosopher Hyginius¹ contains maps of the constellations composed of such beautiful light-encrusted bits.  There wouldn’t be another work like this one, strangely, for another 75  years. Alessandro Piccolomini’s² work of 1559 (which would be the first true star atlas), and again we see the familiar representation.  I thought that this would change with the invention of the telescope, so I checked out Galileo’s³ beautiful account (pictured at left) of his discoveries in the Sidereus–again the same complicated, sawblade stars. 

This has not been a very scientific search thus far, only checking handy notes and images that I’ve made.  But the same result has been true for the star images in Bayer⁴, Cellarius⁵, Hevelius⁶(at right), Coronelli⁷, Flamseed⁸,  Doppelmay^r9 and Bode¹⁰. Even William Herschel’s fabulous map of the galaxy is a collection of these pointed stars.  I think that I’ve just missed what is normally seen by regular folks as a conventional reassignment of star images to something more “modern”–and if that’s the case it has simply passed me by. (It seems though that among all of these that Hevelius comes closest--he inverts the familiar star pattern to the interior of a sphere.)  And I continue to miss it.  I’ve worked my incomplete survey now pretty close to the end of the 18th century, and I simply do not have a close answer..If anyone out there does have it, please let me know.  
Notes:
1. Hyginius Mythographus (fl. 1st century A.D.). Poeticon astronomicon. Edited by Jacobus Sentinus and Johannes Lucilius Santritter. Venice: Erhard Ratdolt, 14th October 1482. The first star atlas per se, standing alone in its field for a century.
2. Piccolomini, Alessandro.  De la Sfera del Mondo.  1559                               
3.  Galilei, Galilei  Sidereus Nuncius (known in English as Starry Messenger), published 1610
4.  Bayer, Johann.  (1572 – March 7, 1625) Uranometria 1603, which was the first atlas to cover the entire celestial sphere.
5. Cellarius, Andreas  (c. 1596 – 1665): Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660, 1661, 1708).
6. Hevelius, Johannes (1611 – 1687): Firmamentum Sobiescianum, sive Uranographia (1690).
7. Coronelli, Vincenzo (1650 – 1718):
8. Flamsteed, John (1646 – 1719): Atlas Coelestis (1729, 1753).
9. Doppelmayr, John Gabriel (1677 – 1750): Atlas Coelestis (1742).
10. Bode, Johann Elert (1747 – 1826): Vorstellung der Gestirne auf XXXIV Tafeln (1782).

Seeing Vision: Examples of Light and Sight, Personified

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 976

(On seeing the morning’s rising sun): “Looks like light to me.” SpongeBob SquarePants 

“All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to answer the question, 'What are light quanta?' Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.”  A. Einstein

“Are not gross bodies and light convertible into one another, and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter into their composition?” I. Newton, Opticks, 1704, Query 30.

Depicting the capacity of sight and nature of light has been both an easy and a knotty problem in the history of science. Over the successive theories on the basis of light the artistic presentation of the phenomenon has been generalized (generally) in a very simple way:  by straight lines.  There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, the lines are just parenthetic place-holders suggesting direction, not actual descriptors of what light “looks” like.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of images printed 1550-1850 to call upon to make this point, and I've selected but a few.  The first belongs to Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner and which appeared in his  Oculusm hoc est: fundamentum opticum...,printed in Innsbruck in 1619. His work is an out-and-out landmark in the history of optics,  physiological optics and ophthahlmometry, and provided a springboard for two generations following him, not the least of whom was Rene Descartes. The illustration above is the book's frontispiece, and features four camera obscuras demonstrating four principles of the eye, the middle ground of which is a beam of light 

Rene Descartes depicted the interpretation (in his  Principles of Philosophy of 1644) of light and its physiological reaction in the brain as follows:

the lines of sight depicting binocular vision, observed (and compressed) by the eye's "particles" and processed by the pineal gland which in turn manipulate the "fluids" in the control of nerves and muscles. 

Another example of even greater fame than the iconic image by Descartes is that of the diagram showing the connection between color and its reflective index by Isaac Newton, appearing in his Opticae of 1706.

 

Another fine example comes from Zacharias Traber's (1611-1679) beautifully illustrated classic of optics (and physiological optics) , Nervus Opticus sive Tractatus Theoricus..., published in Vienna in 1690.  Traber is a great collector and synthesizer of the work done during and before his time, using the work of Descartes, Kepler, Schott, Kircher, Scheiner and Aguilon (for example), and then further implementing their ideas especially in the areas of color theory  and light refraction.  The image certainly reflects Jesuit Traber's religious training, depicting the holy source of light (originating with the almighty force) which directs it to the sun; the light then is left to the inquisitive and playful hands of cherubs who reflect and magnify it, as well as use it to start a fire (from the condensing lens) and observe it through a telescope. The main cherub empties a sack containing a number of different optical tools, no doubt for the playful brethern beneath. 

 

And then of course there is the great, unstoppable, polymathic and sometimes incorrect Jesuit Athanasius Kircher.  This image appears in his masterwork Ars Magna lucis et umbrae, printed in Amsterdam in 1671, which deals with light and shadow, optical illusions, color, refraction, projection and distortion, sundials, mirrors, as well as astronomical subjects. Most of these subjects are clearly seen in the engraved frontispiece to the work (below), the source of all of the "rays" of light coming from the godhead, relayed through a telescope, reflected from a mirror, and gathered in a camera obscura. 

 

Other interesting images from the Kircher include this spotlight.

A Note on "Opposite Sameness" in the History of Dots

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 968 

Part of the History of Dots series that I find so attractive is the dot’s great equalizing effect.  The dot has the potential of making everyone, everywhere, feel the wonder of mighty insignificance—the Earth, for example, depicted from far away, a dot in the cosmos, the solar system a dot in the galaxy, the galaxy a dot in the realm of galaxies.  And then back again, powering perspective back inside us, finding the common thread of humanity again at the cellular level, a dot of sameness.

For example, the map drawn by Sir William Herschel must have been a staggering thing to see when it was first published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1785--at least by the popular viewer.  The enormity and expanse of galaxies was not yet understood, and to see (at this time) our own sun relegated to a point of sameness in what he deduced to be a spiral-shaped Milky Way Galaxy among many others could well have been an astonishing experience to a first-time viewer.

So to for at the other end of the spectrum with the embryological work of Karl Ernst von Baer (an Estonian educated in Germany who worked in St. Petersburg) as it was published in his De ovi mammalium et hominis genesi (1827). 

His work established beyond all doubt that the reproductive processes for all mammals were generally the same—or without fundamental difference—from other animals.  And since “mammals” included “man”, it came as quite a shock to the popular audience that the basic facets of reproduction were little changed between dominant predator and all the other stuff. At the professional level Baer’s work was of enormous importance in the development of cell theory which would lead to natural selection…and he also established embryology as a discipline. 

And so the substance of dots at opposing ends of measurement, bringing about a similarity of recognition.  Dots.

Artistic Nothingness: Cosmic Panspermia, Spermatozoa and Neurons.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 964

In the history of life there is a virtual geology of buried ideas of how living things came to be.  The belief in spontaneous generation is ancient and evidently still holds a comforting sway (in a scrubbed-up way) among some moderns. There was a lot written on the subject over the centuries: for example, Virgil (Georgics) gives us directions on how to make bees, and the great mathematician Cardan/Cardano passed along instructions on how fishes are made of water, no doubt drawing on the more ancient moisture-related beliefs of Anaximander (600BCE).  Aristotle was more circumspect on the issue of

spontaneous generation, though he did cast a fairly wide and more cautious net:  "sometimes animals are formed in putrefying soil, sometimes in plants, and sometimes in the fluids of other animals." Even the beautiful, polymathic and occasionally very wrong (but way ahead of his critics) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher stated (in his masterwork Mundus Subterraneus, 1646) that he had seen mice generated out of nothing but plants and water.  So it goes. 

The more modern variations on this theme attract a varied collection of some very big names. Though the spontaneity now takes place in the extraterrestrial realm, with comets and meteors and such impacting with the earth with life debris from god knows where (literally), seeding life on earth—though the theories usually beg the question of where the stuff on the meteors and etc. came from.  These names include Svante Arrenhius, Lord Kelvin, the beautiful Hermann von Helmholtz, Fred Hoyle, and many others.

Generally the more-modern view is attributed with the name of cosmic panspermia (it seems to my memory that the first of the most modern life-generating panspermia theories is published in the Comptes rendus in the id 1850’s but I cannot right now remember who it was that wrote it).  And it is this cosmic seed bit that struck me when I first saw this title page (above) of a very rare work by Caspar Posner (1626-1700)—Eilfertiges doch unvorggreiffiches Bedencken… published in 1682.  It seems that Posner recorded these verities of “shooting stars” in Jena on the night of 5 December 1682, quickly writing this four-page work describing them.

The images reminded me instantly of the first spermatozoa images published by Anton von Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723)—and actually they were the first images of live and dead (left and right, respectively) dog spermatozoa.  He did absolutely superb work, a great pioneer working with a hand-held single-lens (barely recognizable as a) 200x microscope.

And there too there’s the detail in this image by the great Santiago Ramon y Cajal ( 1852-1934), who drew the first accurate picture of nerve cells in the cerebellum (found in one convolution of a mammalian cerebellum), which helped formulate his theory that the basic structural unit of the nervous system as the neuron. 

Perhaps it is a simple artistic fittingness to connect the 1682 meteorite shower with cosmic panspermia and Leeuwenhoek and Cajal; in a squinty-eyed way they look pretty good together.  On the other hand of course these are just random bumped-together thoughts having nothing to do with one another.  I vote for artistic nothingness.

The Church and the Telescope, 1610-1671

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 865 

It is fascinating to consider the extent of change that took place between the time of Galileo’s first use of the telescope on the sky and the publication of this image in Cherubin d’Orleans (Francois Lassere), La dioptrique occulaire¹…just 60-odd years later in 1671.  When Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius² was published in 1610 he challenged the very foundations of theological belief by changing the face of the immutable heavens, saying that not only was the universe changeable, but it was much larger than ever thought. It was a stupendous series of announcements in the book, many of which caused grief to the Catholic Church.  I wrote in an earlier post here:”It is difficult today to estimate the impact Galileo’s innovation and the subsequent (and immediate) publication of Sidereus had on society.  The challenges to long-defined orthodoxy and the bending of theological constraints (though the church would have its turn on Galileo later); expanding the size and scope of the universe, applying mathematics to the study of physics, understanding the physics of motion, developing the telescope and the microscope and

other precision physical instruments, are all such deeply important changes that it is difficult to resize them in terms of 21^st century advancement.”  But it really the challenge, the change, to the perfection of God’s universe that upset religious folks the most—Galileo appeared in the interest of the Inquisition a number of times before he was finally placed under house arrest by it in 1633 (basically for some of his views regarding his very strong and elegant defense of Copernicanism in his 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems³) where he remained until his death in 1642.

And when we come to Cherubin’s work, which shows the gift of the telescope alighting from heaven, a gift from the supreme being, it seems that this warfare between the Church and the early astronomers and Copernicans had been changed.  In many ways, I had not, but enough certainly changed under the enormous advances in theory and instrumentation--in that time, from Galileo in 1610, there was extraordinary improvement and innovation in the development of the telescope and optical theory.  (In fact, the telescope used by Galileo would soon be abandoned, replaced by more superior designs, the elements of which are still in use today.)

The advances in the decades following Sidereus were enormous. The highlights briefly put:  Johannes Kepler came first in 1611 with his Dioptrice, followed quickly by Niccolo Zucchi’s reflecting telescope of 1615.  Bonnaventura Cavalieri’s Specchio Ustoria was published in the same year as the Dialogo (1632), with Martin Mersenne’s Harmonie Universelle in 1636, Rene Descartes in 1637 and Anton Schyrle in 1644. Several major inventions cascaded after this: Christian Huygens invented the compound eyepiece in 1650, James Gregory perfected the Gregorian telescope in 1663, Newton made his reflector in 1667, the great Laurent Cassegrain created his telescope in 1672, and then the longtime Royal Society captain and royal pain in Newton’s ____, Robert Hooke, created the clock-driven equatorial mount in 1673.  Many of these men were priests (and monks—and as a matter of fact the first telescopes that were delivered to North America, India and Japan were done so by priests) and so it came to pass that the Church provided the foundation which made many of these advances possible. 

Even so it strikes me as just a little odd that these telescopes coming from heavenly hands and distributed to the near and far, that this instrument which so threatened the church just a few decades earlier,  would be seen so relatively soon as a gift from god.

Notes:

1.   The title in full:  La dioptrique oculaire ou, La theorique, la positive, et la mechanique, de l'oculaire dioptrique en toutes ses especes  The entire work is located HERE.  http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/ECHOdocuView/ECHOzogiLib?mode=imagepath&url=/mpiwg/online/permanent/library/EH2Z7P3M/pageimgIn this vast work on optical theory and instrumentation Cherubin also describes the first screw mount microscope. 

2.  The translation of the rest of the magnificently- and unusually-clearly-worded  title page continues as follows:  “…great and very wonderful spectacles, and offering them to the consideration of every one, but especially of philosophers and astronomers; which have been observed by Galileo Galilei … by the assistance of a perspective glass lately invented by him; namely, in the face of the moon, in innumerable fixed stars in the milky-way, in nebulous stars, but especially in four planets which revolve round Jupiter at different intervals and periods with a wonderful celerity.”

 

3. The full title: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo), in which the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems are described and compared.  Galileo worked within the Vatican’s matrix necessitating a balanced presentation between the different systems, and evidently did so successfully (the book becoming  a best seller), but its ride on the list of the Vatican’s banned (“Prohibited”) books lasted until 1835. 

Dotting the "i" in Copernicus: Correcting Errors in Epochal Works

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 831  Blog Bookstore

There’s nothing quite like writing a revolutionary work than correcting one—and correcting a work that actually needed it.  In the world of epochal efforts, that subset of work that was needed for substantial re-arrangement and correction of The Big Idea is a small one indeed.  In the period from 1875-1915 or so, when virtually every discipline in the West underwent groundbreaking change, none that I can think of offhand needed sweeping revisions, or revisions at all.  Granted, you can’t really “correct” Schoenberg or Strindberg or Joyce or Kandinsky for mistakes, but you can do that for Roentgen or Einstein or Planck or Boltzmann.  But it wasn’t necessary for the big thinking in the sciences.  This is what the today-little-known Erasmus Reinhold (1511-1553) knew needed to be done with Copernicus’ De Revoultionibus (of 1543)—as attested to so somewhat later by Johannes Kepler.  As a matter of fact, according to the Dictionary of Science Biography¹, a vast and superb 20-volume keystone repository of necessary information, Kepler referred to the necessary corrections as  a “huge and disagreeable task”(vol XI, p 366)  but absolutely essential to make the work less cumbersome and slow and more handy and, well, useful.

Reinhold’s book, Prutenicae Tabulae Coelestium Motuum, was speedily done and shows the work of master mathematician, appeared in 1551, delayed as it was for a few years by war.  It instantly became an exceptionally influential book, computationally brilliant and even superior to Copernicus, with the Tables² replacing those of the master, and which were bettered only by those of Kepler’s own Rudolphine Tables³. Eramus’ book presented the first astronomical tables based on Copernicus’ work, but the work as a whole slipped by the heliocentric system, which Erasmus chose to not engage. But he certainly did the necessary corrections for De Revolutionibus⁴, further helping  Copernicus slay the astronomical monsters of ancient construction.   The Principia is another issue… 

Notes:

1. Owen Gingerich, who wrote the “Erasmus” entry for the DSB, 
referred to him as the most influential astronomical 
pedagogue of his generation.  Erasmus also published a 
commentary on Georg Peuerbach's Theoricae Novae 
Planetarum in 1542 as well as one on the first book of Ptolemy's 
Almagest in 1549.

2.  The Prutenic Tables were named for both Copernicus and the man who financed their publication, Erasmus supporter and benefactor Duke Albrecht of Prussia (whose influence seems to have been initially gained for Erasmus by Philip Melanchton).

3. Johannes Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables(Tabulae Rudolphinae)  were published in 1627 and cosnsited of a star catalog and planetary tables based on the extraordinary collection of data and observations of Tycho Brahe.

4. The entire TRANSLATED work is located here.

In the preface to De revolutionibus Copernicus takes on the ancient masters like Ptolemy and Aristotle with a steel glove:   “But meanwhile they introduced a good many ideas which apparently contradict the first principles of uniform motion. Nor could they elicit or deduce from the eccentrics the principal consideration, that is, the structure of the universe and the true symmetry of its parts. On the contrary, their experience was just like some one taking from various places hands, feet, a head, and other pieces, very well depicted, it may be, but not for the representation of a single person; since these fragments would not belong to one another at all, a monster rather than a man would be put together from them. Hence in the process of demonstration or "method", as it is called, those who employed eccentrics are found either to have omitted something essential or to have admitted something extraneous and wholly irrelevant. This would not have happened to them, had they followed sound principles. For if the hypotheses assumed by them were not false, everything which follows from their hypotheses would be confirmed beyond any doubt. Even though what I am now saying may be obscure, it will nevertheless become clearer in the proper place.”  

5. Copernicus also had some pretty strong stuff to say about the great early scholar Lactantius:

“Perhaps there will be babblers who claim to be judges of astronomy although completely ignorant of the subject and, badly distorting some passage of Scripture to their purpose, will dare to find fault with my undertaking and censure it. I disregard them even to the extent of despising their criticism as unfounded. For it is not unknown that Lactantius, otherwise an illustrious writer but hardly an astronomer, speaks quite childishly about the earth's shape, when he mocks those who declared that the earth has the form of a globe. Hence scholars need not be surprised if any such persons will likewise ridicule me. Astronomy is written for astronomers.”