My current incarnation as Galileo actually began two years ago when I was contacted by my friend, Scott Roberts—then VP at Meade Instruments about the possibility of doing some multi-media presentations as Galileo for the company. Unfortunately, Scott left Meade to pursue other business opportunities and the idea was scrapped by Meade executives, so I was left to fend for myself.

As planning got underway for IYA2009 I created a website, entitled Galileo 1610 and decided to attend the AAS Convention in St. Louis and perform some excerpts of my show , Galileo 1610. I met some wonderful people there who gave me much encouragement, including Dava Sobel, author of the wildly popular book, Galileo’s Daughter, who after attending one of my presentations, gave me an enthusiastic endorsement– and I was on my way.

As fortune would have it, the kickoff of IYA2009 opened in the U.S. in my hometown Long Beach, California. Galileo made his debut at the welcoming reception, posing for photo opportunities and promoting Sierra Nevada’s special brew- Galileo’s Ale.

In March, Galileo traveled to SUNY Oneonta in New York to perform for university students and the community- at- large in a beautiful theatre on campus.

The 1st annual San Diego Science Festival was the next stop for Galileo. Thousands of school-age kids and their parents showed up at Balboa Park the first weekend in April. In addition to two performances at a local library and on an outdoor stage, Galileo revealed sunspots for the first time to hundreds of astronomy enthusiasts who cued up all day for a look through his solar telescope.

The summer of 1609 was the most memorable period in Galileo’s life. It was then that he first learned of the invention of a Dutch spyglass which would change the course of his life, not to mention the course of history. I decided at this time to begin tracing Galileo’s footsteps as if it were exactly 400 years ago. The events in Galileo’s life would unfold contemporaneously in real time. After Galileo rejuvenated himself at Rancho LaPuerta resort spa in Mexico with star parties and an engaging interactive performance, off he went to Chicago, Illinois.

Exactly 400 years ago to the day that Galileo demonstrated his telescope to the Venetian Senate from the bell tower at St Mark’s Square in Venice, Galileo performed at the Eugene Cernan Earth and Space Center to report on these new developments, and on October 22 when the moon was in the exact phase that prompted Galileo to make his first drawings depicting lunar craters that would turn the Aristotelian idea of an unblemished orb on its head—Galileo performed for the community of Bowling Green, Kentucky in conjunction with the Barren River Imaginative Museum of Science.

It’s been an exciting year for Galileo—and next year is going to be even better! Of course, all of this has had a personal effect on me as an amateur astronomer as well. By late November in 1609, Galileo had improved his telescope to a 20- power instrument and was not only investigating the topography of the moon but was beginning to chart the heavens, noting a “congery of stars” comprising the Milky Way, the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula and the Beehive Cluster. Living in light-polluted skies that Galileo never had to contend with, I am discovering the wonders of a hydrogen-alpha filter in my astro-imaging that reveals the intricate delicacies of emission nebulae that not even Galileo could have imagined. It’s a great time to be an amateur astronomer. I wonder what Galileo would have thought about water on the moon!

For at least eighteen centuries it was regarded as pure and perfectly rotund, free of blemish, encased for all time in an immaculate crystalline sphere just like Aristotle had said.  And this conception fit perfectly with recent Church doctrine, depicted iconographically as the Immaculate Conception, drawn from Revelation 12, verses 1-2, showing a pregnant woman with a crown of twelve stars standing on a crescent Moon, its smooth and translucent horns pointed downward toward the corrupted sublunar earthly realm.

Then along came Galileo, fresh from his heady and victorious demonstration with his new and improved telescope to the Venetian Senate from the top of the campanile in St. Mark’s Square in August ‘09, and with one fell swoop— he destroyed nearly two millennia of reality.  With his artist’s brush he fashioned the moon into an entirely different creature; earthlike- rough, maculate, opaque- not made of some fifth element of the heavens, but of the same solid stuff as the Earth, illuminated not only by the sun, but by the secondary light of the earth as well.

This was not the first time someone had suggested that the moon was like the earth.  Some had even speculated that the moon had always been inhabited. Even the great Kepler proposed that lunar residents could be dwelling in caves, which they constructed to shelter themselves from the scorching Sun.  Others insisted they saw rain clouds on the moon.

Galileo would have none of this lunacy.  As early as 1604, five years before he used his telescope to begin demolishing the Aristotelian theory of the heavens, Galileo already had a mathematician’s view of our closest neighbor.

In  the Considerations of  Alimberto Mauri, a controversial work on the new star of 1604 published pseudonymously in 1606, Galileo had noted the irregularity of the terminator at quadrature as evidence that the Moon has large mountains and flat planes.

“But since everything has its proper cause, I shall proceed with this investigation reasoning differently, and I shall say that the moon, according to Posidonius and other ancient Philosophers (as Macrobius repeats) is so similar to the earth as to be called by them another earth.  Then it is not inconsistent to think that it is likewise not entirely even, but that there are also on the moon mountains of gigantic size, just as on earth; or rather, much greater, since they are [even] sensible to us.  For from these, and from nothing else, there arise in the moon scabby little darknesses, because greatly curved mountains (as Perspectivists teach) cannot receive and reflect the light of the sun as does the rest of the moon, flat and smooth.   And for proof of this I shall adduce an easy and pretty observation that can be made continually when she is in quadrature with respect to the sun; for then the semicircle is not smooth and clean, but always has a certain boss in the middle.  For this, what more probable cause will ever be adduced than the curvature of those mountains? By that, and particularly in that [middle] place, she comes to lose her perfect rotundity.”

But what proof did this mere mathematician have?  What unmitigated nerve!

Then, there is the matter of the dating and provenance of Galileo’s earliest drawings of the 5-day old moon that appear in Galileo’s Starry Messenger, published in March of 1610.   What controversy these drawings have inspired amongst Galilean scholars!   According to a study by Professor Righini in 1974, Galileo may have begun sketching the moon’s surface as early as the first week in October, 1609, only a few short weeks after he first devised and gifted his 8- power spyglass to the Doge of Venice.   In that case, he must have already been using a superior instrument; after all, no self-respecting telescope enthusiast would just give away the most powerful weapon from his arsenal, certainly not Galileo who was always looking to one-up the next guy and claim first prize when it came to his discoveries.   This is the reason I strongly doubt Stillman Drake’s contention that Galileo didn’t even bother looking at the moon through his telescope until the end of November or early December, 1609.   With all due respect to the late, great Mr. Drake whose research is unequaled by any modern Galilean scholar—are you kidding, Sir?  Galileo would have been dying to look at the moon through an even more powerful lens system to confirm what he had already predicted back in his 1604; the moon had these “scabby little darknesses” that reflected the light of the sun at a certain angle, which with simple trigonometry, one could easily calculate the height of the lunar mountains.

Which brings one finally to wonder why Galileo deliberately distorted the size and shape of one particular crater which reminded him of “the Province of Bohemia, near the middle of the moon” commonly supposed to be “Albategnius,” when he exaggerated it beyond all respectable size and proportion in his drawing.   Lunacy?  No.  Neither Galileo’s fabricated lens nor his God-given lens had failed him, nor was his trying to misrepresent what he saw in order to delude the unenlightened.  This mathematician-turned-artist was merely trying to visually demonstrate the irregularities of the lunar surface in situ, a style which Professors Van Helden and Biagioli have identified as disegno, a popular representational technique in which he was well-trained and  that he judiciously employed in order to clearly communicate his revolutionary discoveries.

The Real Story of How Galileo Ignited the Age of the Telescope

Although Galileo tried to avoid a conflagration, controversy rages to this day concerning the great astronomer’s role in fueling the 400-year-old so-called conflict between science and religion.

But there is another debate, although thankfully it is being conducted with far less angst and vitriol among historians and academicians, concerning the methods by which Galileo was able to improve upon an unusual optical device, invented in the Netherlands 400 years ago, which allowed faraway objects to be seen as if nearby.

Was Galileo’s dramatically rapid improvement of the telescope the pre-ordained product of a ruthlessly methodical and mathematical mind?

Or was it merely the fortuitous outcome of a desperate, opportunistic man; Berthold Brecht’s so-called hero: hell-bent on claiming fame and fortune to save himself and his family from economic collapse?

Perhaps it was a happy conjunction of both?

What do two highly-regarded historians have to say? According to William Shea, Galileo was a talented artisan, but “until his dying day he remained totally in the dark regarding the laws of optics that lay behind his success.” Albert Van Helden does acknowledge that Galileo was a brilliant experimenter—he did, after all, figure out that magnification was related to the focal lengths of the two lenses he employed in his fledgling instrument. But how did he do it? Trial and error. Ringing endorsements of Galileo’s prodigious knowledge of optical theory? Not exactly.

Yet, even after Galileo published his famous Siderius Nuncius, wherein he described how he improved the magnification and quality of the image in his telescope, no one could duplicate his efforts, not even Mr. Kepler—who was certainly no “lightweight.” So how was Galileo able to do it?

In his excellent and comprehensive article, “Galileo and the Telescope”, Tel Aviv professor Ya’acov Zik contends that Galileo’s improvements on the telescope weren’t accidental; that he undoubtedly understood the principles of the telescope. Galileo said as much in a letter he wrote to his brother-in-law just one week after his successful demonstration of his 8-power telescope from Campanile di San Marco in Venice- August 21,1609. He states unequivocally that his instrument “havere fondamento su la scientia di prospettiva”—in other words, it has its foundation in the science of perspective. Zik states that Galileo, being a mathematician, understood prospettiva very well. Measuring things was his forte. He had been tutoring students for years on the use of his military or geometric compass. Zik writes: “From his vast experience of taking measurements on the earth surface, Galileo knew that the proper way of representing or drawing objects is done by using a defined proportion scale. It is possible to manipulate the scale and the angle of vision without damaging the realistic representation as long as we are following the formal calculation rules, arithmetical or geometrical…

And here’s the intriguing part: Zik concludes that Galileo could easily draw the similarities between his problem and the model of describing a method to measure the height of a tower… using a mirror.

Measuring the height of a tower using a mirror? Why does this sound vaguely familiar? Recall the story of Archimedes’s burning mirror in the siege of Syracuse, sometimes called Archimedes Death Ray which was also supposedly used to defend Constantinople in 519 AD. Can you conjure up this image of Archimedes poised on top of a tall tower, directing a huge mirror which reflects the sun’s rays directly onto the Roman ships in the sea below, setting them ablaze once they were within bowshot.

Yet another Galilean scholar, Sven Dupre has argued that Galileo must have been familiar with the optical properties of concave mirrors in terms of the “punctum inversionis” as it was practiced in 16th century optics since he owned copies of Della Porta’s Natural Magic and DeRefractione and also Ausonio’s Theorica which describes not only the burning properties of a concave spherical mirror, but its image formation and location as well.   It would not have been the first time Galileo used medieval texts for inspiration and instruction from fiery themes.   Recall that Galileo established quite a name for himself as a mathematician early-on with the Medici’s.  Just past his teenage years, Galileo impressed the Florentine Academy with his lectures on Dante’s Inferno.  He solved a problem which had vexed all who had preceded him:  how do you calculate the size and the shape of Hell?  His solution eventually led to one of the most important discoveries in the history of science — the principle of scale invariance, or the idea that in nature, size matters.  So is it so unreasonable to assert that perhaps only Galileo was uniquely endowed with the requisite knowledge to transform a toy Dutch spyglass into an instrument whose impact on the world would be of epic proportions?

One of Galileo’s most important discoveries, the law of falling bodies, can actually be traced to his early musical experiments with his father, Vincenzo Galilei, a musicologist and lute virtuoso. Together, they discovered the motions of pendulums while measuring with weights, the tensions of lute strings.

Galileo was an outstanding lutenist himself, whose “charm of style and delicacy of touch” surpassed even that of his father. Playing the lute was a source of great pleasure and a special comfort to him in his final years, when blindness was added to the many other trials of his life.

It’s May 1609. Galileo is forty-five years old, the father of three illegitimate children; a burned-out financially strapped university math professor in Padua, who is desperately seeking patronage from the ruling Medici family in Florence, so he might return to his ancestral home with security.
He hears about an unusual optical device just invented in the Netherlands that is apparently able to render faraway things as though nearby.

Could we get a glimpse into the mind of a man whose destiny it was to be the first human being to assault the heavens with a telescope, and explain to the rest of us what he saw?

In his Starry Messenger, Galileo informs us:  “It was the summer of 1609 when on one of my trips to Venice, some startling news reached my ears.  A spectacle maker in Holland had presented to Count Maurice of Nassau a glass, manufactured in such a way as to make distant objects appear very near, so that a man at the distance of two miles could be clearly seen.  This seemed to me so marvelous an invention that I began to think about it.  What if I could make such a device—only more powerful?  It appeared to me to have a foundation in the science of perspective.  Once again I turned to my lute for inspiration as I contemplated such an instrument.”

Dear loyal listeners, you are about to hear for the first time ever an ancient recording recently unearthed in the Vatican archives—yes, of the great Galileo himself—alone in his study, alone except for his constant companion, his faithful lute—the one built for him by Wendelio Venere in Padua in 1582— listen in—as we discover for the first time how Galileo and his lute together used music to inspire the creation of his own device that would bring him immortal fame.

steps-of-my-discovery1

The device needs…
Either one
Or more than one glass
This we can be sure.
Concave, convex, parallel
Or is there something more?
If parallel then nothing changes
Either large or small
A concave lens makes objects tiny
–That won’t do it all!
And convex, though it does enlarge them
Makes things indistinct

So none of these alone will work
I think I need a shrink!
But what if we combine just two
Excluding parallel
That leaves us with
Concave-convex–
Now we’re doing swell.
If I put them in a tube
And place them just like so
I’ll have an instrumento
That will make me lots of dough!

But what shall we call this thing?

what-shall-we-call-my-instrumento1what-shall-we-call-my-instrumento2

What shall we call my instrumento?
I need a very catchy name
Do you like perspicillum?
It’s Latin just the same.
When you hear the name canocchiale
Does it make you want to eat?
It’s so Italiano
On the tongue it tastes so sweet.
No!
It’s a telescope!
It’s a telescope!
It’s a telescope they say!
For a telescope!
For a telescope!
For a telescope they’ll pay.

Then I’ll get rich and pay off all my debts
Then I’ll leave Padua with no regrets

It will be so fine in Firenze
I’ll be best friends with the duke.
Life will be sublime in Firenze
I’ll be free from all rebuke.
No more students confounding my brain
No more little children to drive me insane
In Firenze there’s time to think and to rest
There I can breathe and see what comes next

Life would be sublime in Firenze
Of this I am convinced.

In Siderius Nuncius, Galileo’s history making pamphlet published in April 1610, Galileo claims he first heard a rumor about the Dutch perspicillum, or spyglass in May of 1609 and that this rumor was corroborated in a letter he received from a former student now living in Paris, one Jaques Badovere– but various historians have speculated that Galileo may have known about the Dutch spyglass much earlier than May of 1609, probably through his friend and confidant, Paolo Sarpi who seemed to have his finger on the pulse of European scientific and cultural developments.

As we mentioned in our previous podcast: as early as February, 1609—in an effort to gain more intimate access to the Tuscan court– Galileo wrote this letter to a friend well connected to the Medici family. Should we dismiss the following language as pure self-promotional hype?

“I have various inventions of which one alone should a great prince take delight in it, might suffice to place me above want for the rest of my life. Daily I discover new things, and if I had more leisure, and were able to employ more workmen, I should do much more in the way of experiment and invention.”

Is it possible that as the year began, Galileo was already working on some kind of vision-enhancing device of his own? Furthermore, might we assume from these remarks that either Galileo already had or was seeking a workman who might be more skilled than himself in optics and lens-making?

In his wonderful retrospective work: Stargazer:The Life and Times of the Telescope, Fred Watson states that although Galileo may not have been acquainted with the modern laws of refraction, he was a mathematician and was certainly familiar with refraction—the bending of light rays when they cross a transparent surface such as the front of a glass lens.

Eileen Reeves, author of Galileo’s Glassworks, on the other hand, surmises that Galileo may have erroneously assumed that the spyglass involved a lens-mirror combination because his friend Paolo Sarpi had unearthed some news about a so-called “French mirror.”

Reeves recounts an amusing tale that in late 1608 a scathing pamphlet describing the alleged sexual misdeeds of the Society of Jesus entitled Discoverie of the Most Secret and Subtile Practices of the Jesuits”, was published in Latin and then promptly translated into five other languages. This bawdy pamphlet happened to include also “a revelation about an optical device owned by the French King Henri IV’s confessor, Father Pierre Coton.”

“The Jesuits them-selves brag that hee hath a looking glasse of Astrology [speculum constellatum], wherein he made the King to see plainly what-soever his Majestie desired to know, and that there is nothing so secret, nor any thing propounded in the privy councells of other Monarkes, which may not be seene or discovered by the meanes of the of this celestial or rather devilish glasse.”

Even before this publication, the Jesuits had already been satirically portrayed as colonizers of the moon “almost all of whom have fox tails attached to their belts, along with concave mirrors, with which they see what is done in the world and dazzle the eyes of those who look at them.” Reeves thus concludes that the conventional account of Galileo’s belated awareness of the telescope—that he heard nothing of it for eight or nine months after its emergence in The Hague- should be reexamined in light of the news concerning the mirror in Paris.

It remains a matter of speculation that Galileo was seriously sidetracked by these far-fetched and fanciful rumors, however it is fun to imagine that if his investigations had taken him to experiment with reflective mirrors instead of refractive lenses, perhaps he would have discovered the Newtonian telescope long before Newton!

In next month’s podcast we will learn how Galileo rapidly improved upon the Dutch version of the spyglass and how it became to be known as the “telescope.”

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy

We will never know if Galileo suffered a blow to his prestige as a result of this miscalculation.  But if he did, certainly it was short-lived.   From time immemorial in the world of high-level politics and patronage, the death of leader always presents an opportunity for the talented opportunist to advance his own station and prestige, and as an aspiring worldly courtier, Galileo Galilei was no exception.   The reigns of power now lay in the hands of the young prince Cosimo, whom Galileo had tutored for several summers and to whom Galileo had provided instruction on fortifications and the use of his military compass.

There can be no denying that at this point in his life Galileo was ready for a major change.  Now, at age forty-five, having fathered three children with a woman, Marina Gamba, whom he never married, stuck in a dead-end low-paying job as a mathematics professor at the University of Padua, Galileo was debt-ridden and burned-out.   For years he had sought a way to gain patronage from the Medici family in Florence, so he could return to his ancestral home with security.   His predicament could not be stated in a more poignant or desperate fashion than in this letter which he wrote early in 1609 to a gentleman in Florence, probably a power broker in the Tuscan court whom he addressed as “Vespuccio” in this prolific run-on sentence:

“If his Highness, with his courtesy and humanity which distinguish him above all other men, would deign to take me under his service, thereby rendering me satisfied beyond overflowing, I would say without hesitation that having now labored for twenty years, and these the best years of my life, in dealing out, so to speak in retail, to all who choose to ask, that small portion of talent, which through God and my own labor, I have gained in my profession, my desire would be to possess so much rest and leisure as to be able to conclude three great works which I have in hand, and to publish them before I die.  This might possibly bring some credit to me, and also to those who had favored my undertaking…”

These three great works by the way, which are cited by Galileo most likely refer to The Dialogues on Motion, the Two Great Systems, and another, which is lost, one historian speculated was a work entitled: De Incessu Animalium.

Anyway, now referring to his present position in Il Serennisima, the beautiful republic of Venice, Galileo continues his lament:

“It is impossible to obtain from a republic, however splendid and generous, a stipend without duties attached to it; for to have anything from the public, one must work for the public, and as long as I am capable of lecturing and writing, the Republic cannot hold me exempt from my duty, while I enjoy the emolument.   In short, I have no hope of enjoying such ease and leisure as are necessary to me, except in the service of an absolute prince.”

Is anyone beginning to feel sorry for poor Galileo?   Well, let us hear more of what he has to say:

“But I would not that, from what I have said your lordships should think that I have unreasonable pretensions, as that I desire a stipend without merit and without service, for such is not my thought.  As to my merit, I have various inventions of which one alone should a great prince take delight in it, might suffice to place me above want for the rest of my life.”   For experience shows me that many discoveries of far less value have brought honor and riches to their discoverers.  And it has always been my intention to offer my inventions to my prince and natural master that he might do with both the invention and the inventor, according to his good pleasure.”

Galileo is well aware that a timely and well-placed gift or invention can sometimes do wonders to advance one’s career, but what novelty is he referring to here?  It is most likely not the lodestone which, in honor of Prince Cosimo’s marriage, Galileo had earlier cast into a globe-shaped impressa with small pieces of iron surrounding it, on which is inscribed the motto “vim facit amor” – love produces strength.   Certainly this invention  cannot be the telescope, since word of its creation would not reach Galileo until the summer of 1609!    So what could he promoting here?   Let’s listen in:

“Daily I discover new things, and if I had more leisure, and were able to employ more workmen, I should do much more in the way of experiment and invention.”

Apparently, he has nothing in hand at the moment, except empty promises.  But Galileo is supremely confident that he will devise some kind of contrivance that shall find great favor with the new Grand Duke of Tuscany.   Did he consult his own horoscope?  It would seem that Galileo has a talent for prediction after all– for in less than one year after writing this letter, having published his “Starry Messenger” and having dedicated the marvelous discoveries revealed therein to his patron Cosimo d’Medici, Galileo would indeed be in a position to dictate his own terms to the Grand Duke and achieve the prestige and position that he had long desired.   But, there is much more to that story which we will reveal in future episodes.

Kepler once explained that “as every animal has been given by nature some means of getting a living, so too the astronomer has been furnished with astrology in order to enable him to live.” We will never know if Galileo agreed with his erstwhile friend, however, there is little doubt he had no choice but to oblige the request of the Medici family whose patronage he desperately sought. Moreover, Galileo would need to put a positive spin upon his calculations– no matter the outcome. Happily he predicted that the Grand Duke would recover quickly and enjoy a long and fruitful life. Four weeks later Ferdinand was dead. So much for Galileo’s career as an astrologer.

This minor faux pas, however, did not discourage Galileo in the least. He not only continued to refine his studies on motion but now began to concern himself with the parabolic trajectories of falling bodies and experiment with materials used to propel them. What type of wood, he mused, might be shaped in such a fashion as to be equally resistant to breakage at any point? How about yew? No, I don’t mean you– I mean yew. Y.E.W. Yew trees grew abundantly in Italy. Yew was much prized by archers for its tough, yet resilient qualities. As an accomplished musician and player of the lute, Galileo certainly knew about yew. It was cut into thin strips and glued to make the ribs which formed the bowl, or hollow rounded back of the lute. How was it possible to build a nearly weightless bowl– strong enough to resist over one hundred pounds of string tension pulled across the fingerboard by a severely-angled peg box– yet resonant enough to produce a delicate, beautiful sound? The lute maker had to be a gifted artisan indeed; well-skilled in the principles of geometry. That yew took life as an archery bow, but gave life as a lute, is a paradox of mythic proportions that could not have escaped Galileo. Neither is it a stretch of the imagination that he derived perhaps his inspiration from Ariosto’s epic poem, Orlando Furioso.

But as a strong and justly tempered bow
Of Pyrmont steel, the more you do it bend,
Upon recoil doth give the bigger blow,
And doth with greater force the quarrel send.

“Whenever I enter into Orlando Furioso, it is as if a treasure room opens up before me, a regal gallery adorned with a hundred classical statues by the most renowned masters, with countless historical pictures—the very best ones by the most excellent painters—with a great number of vases, crystals, agates and other jewels, a festive hall full of everything that is rare, precious, admirable and perfect.”

I leave you with the parting words of friendship between Brandimarte, a warrior who has been mortally wounded, and his hero, Orlando. These words he uttered just before the end:

Remember me, Orlando, when you pray…

To you I commend my Fiordi-

but the ligi, he could not say.

Click following text for .mp3 audio:

E dirgli Orlando fa che ti raccordi

Di me ne lo razion tue gratea Dio

Ne mente raccomando la mia Fiordi-

Ma dir non pote ligi e qui fi nio