Page 429 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

philosophically false and absurd and theologically at least erroneous.”3 Thus, the church attacked the Copernican system because it threatened not only Scripture but also the entire prevailing conception of the universe (see the box on p. 392). The heavens were no longer a spiritual world but a world of matter. Humans were no longer at the center, and God was no longer in a specific place. All this the church found intolerable. In 1633, Galileo was found guilty of teaching the condemned Copernican sys- tem and was forced to recant his “errors.”
The condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisition, coming at a time of economic decline, seriously under- mined further scientific work in Italy, which had been at the forefront of scientific innovation. Leadership in science now passed to the northern countries, espe- cially England, France, and the Dutch Netherlands. By the 1630s and 1640s, no reasonable astronomer could overlook that Galileo’s discoveries, combined with Kep- ler’s mathematical laws, had made nonsense of the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian world system and clearly estab- lished the reasonableness of the Copernican model. Nevertheless, the problem of explaining motion in the
The Telescope. The invention of the telescope enabled Europeans to inaugurate a new age in astronomy. Shown here is Johannes Hevelius, an eminent German-Polish astrologer (1611–1697), making an observation with his telescope. Hevelius’s observations were highly regarded. He located his telescope on the roof of his own house, and by the 1660s, his celestial observatory was considered one of the best in Europe. The inset shows a photograph of Galileo’s original telescope, built in 1609.
universe and tying together the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler had not yet been solved. This would be the work of an Englishman who has long been con- sidered the greatest genius of the Scientific Revolution.
Newton
Born in the English village of Woolsthorpe, Isaac New- ton (1642–1727) at first showed little promise. Then he attended Cambridge University, and in 1669 he accepted a chair in mathematics at the university. Dur- ing an intense period of creativity from 1684 to 1686, he wrote his major work, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, known simply as the Principia (prin- SIP-ee-uh), from the first word of its Latin title. In this work, Newton spelled out the mathematical proofs demonstrating his universal law of gravitation. New- ton’s work was the culmination of the theories of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. Though each had undermined some part of the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian cosmology, no one until Newton had pieced together a coherent synthesis for a new cosmology.
Toward a New Heaven: A Revolution in Astronomy 391
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