February 14, 2024 · 7:30 am

Magnetic Variations – VI De Magnete

Although people who compile such lists very often ignore it, there can be no doubt that William Gilbert’s De Magnete must be listed amongst the most important science books published in the Early Modern Period. It is the first printed book entirely dedicated to the study of the magnet, magnetism, and the magnetic compass and following Petrus Perigrinus de Maricourt’s Epistola de magnete only the second tome dedicated exclusively to the topic at all. It is a presentation of systematic, detailed, empirical, experimental science published thirty-eight years before Galileo’s Discorsi, often claimed to be the first such book. 

Obviously the product of many years of dedicated research into all aspects of the magnet and magnetism, De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure (On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on That Great Magnet the Earth) was originally published in Latin by Peter Short in London in 1600. The English translation runs to three hundred and fifty pages. There appears to have been an edition in Amsterdam 1600, a new edition published in London in 1633, two editions published in Stettin in 1628 and 1633, two in Frankfurt 1629 and 1633, and one in Ferrara in 1629. The reception throughout Europe, which I will look at in some detail later, was generally very positive. 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The book opens with an address to the author by Edward Wright (1561–1615) the leading English expert on navigation in the period and author of Certaine Errors in Navigation printed in London by Valentine Sims in 1599. Gilbert couldn’t have had a better recommendation for his text. I will look at this address in the next blog post in this series. This is followed by an Author’s Preface, in which Gilbert justifies his publication in rather flowery terms towards the end of which he slags off the Ancient Greeks. The work is divided into six books each of which deals with a different aspect of magnetism. 

Book I, Writings of Ancient and Modern Authors Concerning the Loadstone: Various Opinions and Delusions, whereby “delusions” is Gilbert’s opinion of virtually everything that had been written about magnets and magnetism in the past. He debunks the myths about garlic and diamonds blocking magnetism as well as other less well known ones; naming and shaming the authors who perpetuated them. He gives a long list of authors who mentioned magnets and magnetism the writes:

…by all of these the subject is handled in a most careless way, while they repeat only the figments and ravings of others. 

Having made negative comments about Fracastoro, all he has to say about Perigrinus is:

Of date two hundred years or more earlier than Fracastorio, is a small work attributed to one Petrus Peregrinus, a pretty erudite book considering the time:

Considering that Gilbert took the idea of experimenting with terrella, i.e. small spherical loadstones, and quite a few of the experiments he did with them, from Perigrinus this is a rather thin acknowledgement.  Perhaps surprisingly, one author who gets a modicum of praise is Giambattista della Porta and Gilbert also repeats some of the experiments from Magia Naturalis in his research. He continues slagging off authors on magnetism right, left and centre before closing the chapter with the little piece of chauvinism that I brought in the first episode of this series:

There are other learned men who on long sea voyages have observed the difference of magnetic variation; as that most accomplished scholar Thomas Harriot, Robert Hues, Edward Wright, Abraham Kendall, all Englishmen; others have invented and published magnetic instruments and already methods of observing, necessary for mariners and those who make long voyages: as William Borough in his little work the Variations of the Compass, William Barlo (Barlow) in his Supplement, Robert Norman in his New Attractive–the same Robert Norman, skilled navigator and ingenious artificer, who first discovered the dip of the magnetic needle.Many others I pass by of purpose: Frenchmen, Germans, and Spaniards of recent times who in their writings, mostly composed in their vernacular languages, either misuse the teachings of others, and like furbishers send forth ancient things dressed with ne names and tricked in an apparel of new words as in prostitutes’ finery; or who publish things not even worthy of record; who, pilfering some book, grasp for themselves from other authors, and go a-begging for some patron, or go a-fishing among the inexperienced and the young for a reputation; who seem to transmit from hand to hand, as it were, erroneous teachings in every science and out of their own store now and again to add somewhat of error.[1]

With his opening chapter Gilbert basically says, all that went before was rubbish, now I’m going to deliver up the real story of magnets and magnetism. He devotes the next fifteen chapters of book one to the loadstone, iron and iron ore, starting with the history of the loadstone and then moving on to its properties, its poles, their basic attraction and repulsion. He then moves on to the relations between loadstone, smelted iron and iron ore basically arguing that they are one and the same, loadstone being ‘a noble kind of iron ore.’ In passing he rejects the then still prevalent Aristotelian theory of metals In the seventeenth and final chapter of book one he presents the central thesis of his book, its title:

That the terrestrial globe is magnetic and is a loadstone; and just as in our hands the loadstone possesses all the primary powers (forces) of the earth, so the earth by reason of the same potencies lies ever in the same direction in the universe. 

Gilbert argues that we can only infer this fact from the behaviour of magnets and compasses, as demonstrated in his experiments with his terrellas and versoria. A versorium was a miniature, adapted compass needle able to turn horizontally or vertically. We can not experience the earth’s loadstone nature directly because its surface, what we can the crust, is corrupted and degenerated. 

Terrella with versoria

The next five books of De Magnete are each devoted to one aspect of the movement of magnets and compass needles, so we have–magnetic attraction, the directional property of compass needles, variation, dip, and revolution.

Book II: Of Magnetic Movement is after a first chapter listing the five movement, dedicated to magnetic attraction, although Gilbert rejects the term attraction as too aggressive preferring instead the term coition:

Coition, we say, not attraction, for the term attraction has wrongfully crept into magnetic philosophy, through the ignorance of the Ancients; for where attraction exists, there force sems in and tyrannical violence rules. 

Coition, a synonym for coitus,  was a neologism meaning ‘coming together’ like two lovers’ bodies, by which Gilbert did no mean that two magnets made love but that their motions were governed by principles of mutual harmony. He demonstrates coition by placing two terrella on circular discs of wood that had hemispherical depressions in the centre to receive them and floating them on water. They begin to spin and circle each other until the opposing poles are drawn together. Interestingly Gilbert doesn’t think magnetic repulsion exists. If his two floating terrella repulse each other they continue to rotate until they come together in coition. 

There is a long section in Book II devoted to static electrical attraction in order to explain why it is not the same as magnetic attraction. Today, this section gets as much attention as the rest of the book on magnetism and is regarded as the beginning of research into electricity, a term the coining of which Gilbert is indirectly given the credit for. 

In the rest of book two he covers every possible aspect of magnetic attraction between loadstones, loadstones and iron, loadstones and the earth etc. Interestingly having dismissed the possibility that magnetic attraction is a force, Gilbert, who is generally anti-Aristotelian, turns to Aristotle’s four causes theory to explain it. Magnetic attraction is the form of the matter of the loadstone or the earth in the Aristotelian sense of the terms. Gilbert also investigated what we would call the magnetic field, which he called ‘Orbis Virtutis’ (the sphere of virtue). He carried out these investigations using his versoria. 

Book III Of Direction, deals with the phenomenon that a magnetic compass needle, ignoring for the moment variation, always aligns in the same direction. He states that this is confirmed for the whole globe by the reports of mariners, naming dropping the personal reports of the circumnavigators, Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish in the process. Once again Gilbert introduces his own terminology in the title of the second chapter:

Directive (or Versorial) force, which we call Verticity: What it is; how it resides in the loadstone: and how it is acquired when not naturally produced. 

Sailing his miniature compass, the versorium around a terrella Gilbert demonstrates that, in terms of verticity, it behaves identically (ignoring variation) to the mariner’s compass on the terrestrial globe. In book two he had sliced loadstones and compasses into half to demonstrate that the two halves still have poles at both ends. Now he shows that his versorium behaves on a half terrellas exactly the same as on the complete one, the cut surface becoming the opposite pole, demonstrating that it is the poles towards which the versorium points. Gilbert uses these experiments and the real mariner’s compass behaviour data provided by the mariners to argue by analogy that the sphere of the Earth is indeed a compass. Gilbert believes that the magnetic poles of the Earth are identical to the geographical poles. 

Book IV, Of Variation, opens with a confession:

Do far we have been treating of direction as if there were no such thing as variation; for we chose to have variation left out and disregarded in the foregoing natural history, just as if in a perfect and absolutely spherical terrestrial globe variation could not exist. 

He now turns he attention to variation, systematically rejecting all the suggestions that had been put forth to explain it and such concepts as the zero variation meridian or graduated differences in variation around the globe, using the extensive empirical data available to do so. In this book. he surveys all the available information on variation. He dismisses the argument that variation could be used to determine longitude, well aware of the importance of finding a solution to the longitude problem. 

Gilbert argues that variation is the result of damage or imperfection to the terrestrial globe, which is anything but a perfect sphere:

[The] globe of the earth is at its surface broken and uneven, marred by matters of diverse nature, and hath elevated and convex parts that rise to the height of some miles and that are uniform neither in matter nor in constitution … For this reason a magnetic body under the action of the whole earth is attracted toward a great elevated mass of land as toward a stronger body, so far as the perturbed verticity permits or abdicates its rights. 

The variation takes place not so much because of these continental lands, as because of the inequalities of the magnetic globe and of the true earth substance which projects farther in continents than beneath the sea-depths. 

Imperfections in a Terrell causing variations in the versoria

He dismisses the argument that variation could be used to determine longitude, well aware of the importance of finding a solution to the longitude problem. However, having made the error of believing that variation is constant, the temporal changes in variation were not known at this time, Gilbert endorses the scheme of Simon Stevin (1548–1620) put forward in his De Havenvinding (1599), also published in English as The Haven-Finding Art in the same year and included as an appendix in later editions Edward Wright’s Certaine Errors in Navigation, to provide tables of the correctly measured variation to compare with measured observations as an aid to navigation. The thirteenth chapter of book four provides the best and most detailed description of how to determine variation published up till that time.

Gilbert’s instrument for determining variation of land
Instruments to determine variation at sea

Book V, Of the Dip of the Magnetic Needle, is of course very much up to date, because although Georg Hartmann (1489–1564) had first discovered magnetic dip or inclination in 1544, the phenomenon had first become widely known in 1581 when Robert Norman published his The Newe Attractive. Gilbert mentions Norman and his book at the end of Book I and uses the illustration from The Newe Attractive in this Book V. Gilbert once again sets up experiments with his trusty terrella and versorium to demonstrate and measure magnetic dip. On his terrella he measures the dip for the latitude of London and shows it to be the same as the value measured by Norman for the city. He also discusses the possibility of using magnetic dip, as an alternative method for determining latitude. A scheme never realised.

An instrument for showing by action of a loadstone the degree of dip below the horizon in any latitude

The book closes in Book VI with the most spectacular claim of all, titled Of The Globe of Earth as a Loadstone, it contains the startling claim that the earth’s diurnal rotation is due to its being a loadstone, based on the false belief that a suspended terrella rotates freely about its polar axis. Gilbert has been called a Copernican and although he names Copernicus amongst those who claim that the earth moves he can at best be called a semi-Copernican, as he only argues for diurnal rotation, a position first argued by Heraclides Ponticus in the fourth century BCE. Gilbert makes no mention of the heliocentric theory of the earth’s orbit around the sun.

The above is merely a sketch of the highly detailed contents of De Magnete, but if you wish to know more then I recommend reading the book, which in the English translation is actually very readable and in the Dover edition very affordable.

The book was on the whole well received and became a central text on empirical methodology for the early decades of the seventeenth century. The strongest reactions came from Galileo, Kepler, and Francis Bacon. 

Galileo appears to have acquired a copy very soon after publication from a philosopher who feared that keeping it on the shelf would infest the other books with the novelties it contained. and inspired by the book took up his own investigations into magnetism. He mentioned the book frequently in his correspondence with Giovanni Francesco Sagredo (1571–1620) and Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623). Paolo Sarpi in one of his letters, names Gilbert, with François Viète, as the only original writer among his contemporaries. We know from the only surviving letter from Gilbert, about which more in a later episode, that Sagredo wrote to Gilbert, presumably in February 1602:

… a Secretary of Venice, he came sent by that State, and was honourably received by her Majesty, he brought me a lattin letter from a Gentle-man of Venice that is very well learned, whose name is Iohannes Franciscus Sagredus, he is a great Magneticall man, and writeth that hee hath conferred with diuers learned men of Venice and with readers of Padua, and reporteth wonderfull liking of my booke…

Sagredo is one of the three figures, together with Salviati (Copernican, Galileo), and Simplicio (Aristotelian), discussing the Two Chief World Systems in Galileo’s Dialogo from 1632, he represents the supposedly neutral, intelligent layman.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

On Day Three in the Dialogo Galileo includes a twenty-five page discussion of Gilberts theory that the Earth is a loadstone, initiated by Simplicio:

SIMPLICIO: Are you then one of those who subscribe to the magnetic philosophy of William Gilbert?

SALVIATI: I am indeed, and I think everyone who has read the book attentively and checked his experiments agrees with me. 

Then Salviati goes off on a rant about thinkers who stick dogmatically to old ideas and are too cowardly to accept new ones. He then waxes lyrically about Gilbert and his ideas over many pages. However, towards the end of this section Salviati torpedoes Gilbert’s theory of diurnal rotation.

SALVIATI: […] Lest I forget, however, let me first tell you of one detail that I wish Gilbert had never considered. He allows that is a small sphere of loadstone could be perfectly balanced it would turn on its own axis; but there is no reason why it should do so. 

Johannes Kepler was an even bigger fan of Gilberts theories than Galileo. Chapter 33 of his Astronomia Nova(1609) is titled, The power that moves the planets resides in the body of the sun and Chapter 34 The Sun is Magnetic, and Rotates. Here he writes:

The example of the magnet I have hit upon is a very pretty one, and entirely suited to the subject; indeed, it is little short of being the very truth. So why should I speak of the magnet as if it were an example? For, by the demonstration of the Englishman William Gilbert, the earth itself is a big magnet, and is said by the same author, a defender of Copernicus, to rotate once a day, just as I conjecture about the sun.

Chapter 57, Natural Principles of Reciprocation, presents Kepler’s proto-gravitational theory, which is based on magnetism. It is too complex to explain here but there are a couple of relevant Gilbert quotes:

What if all the bodies of the planets are enormous round planets? Of the earth (one of the planets for Copernicus) there is no doubt. William Gilbert has proved it. 

For this magnetic power is corporeal, and divisible with the body, as the Englishman Gilbert, B. Porta, and others, have proved. 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Whilst the leading natural philosophers on the continent were praising Gilbert to the heavens, in Kepler’s case quite literally, at home in England Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was of a very different opinion concerning Gilbert and his book. In his De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) he wrote:

Gilbert has attempted to raise a general system upon the magnet, endeavouring to build a ship out of materials not sufficient to make the rowing-pins of a boat.

In The Advancement of Learning (1605), Novum Organum (1620) and repeated in De Augmentis Scientiarum(1623) he wrote: 

The Alchemists have made a philosophy out of a few experiments of the furnace and Gilbert our countryman hath made a philosophy out of observations of the loadstone.

In his History of Heavy and Light Bodies published posthumously, he wrote:

[Gilbert] has himself become a magnet; that is, he has ascribed too many things to that force and built a ship out of a shell. 

At least Gilbert is in good company, Bacon also rejected Copernicus’ heliocentricity and William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. The best comment on Bacon’s approach was supposedly made by William Harvey, in his Brief Lives, John Aubrey tells us that Harvey:

“had been physitian to the Lord Chancellour Bacon, whom he esteemed much for his witt and style, but would not allow him to be a great Philosopher. Said he to me, ‘He writes Philosophy like a Lord Chancellour,’ speaking in derision, ‘I have cured him.’”

Inspired by Gilbert the Jesuits took up research of magnetism in a big way, largely to prove Gilbert wrong. Niccolò Cabeo (1586–1650) in his Philosophia magnetica (1629) accepted Gilbert’s proof that the earth is a loadstone but recast all of his theories about magnetism in Aristotelean terms, of course, rejecting his argument for diurnal rotation.

Source: Wikimedia Commons
Dip needle, engraving, from Cabeo, Philosophia magnetica, 1629 (Linda Hall Library)

The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) published a massive tome on magnetism, Magnes (The Loadstone), which launched a massive attack on the heretics Gilbert, Stevin, and Kepler but added little of substance to the work of Cabeo.

Source

Next up was Jacques Grandami (1588–1672) a professor at La Flèche the Jesuit college where both Descartes and Mersenne had studied. He published his Nova Demonstratio Immobilitatis Terrae (A new Demonstartion of the Earth’s Immobility) in 1645, which contained a new experiment, à la Gilbert, which disproved Gilbert’s magnetic diurnal rotation theory. 

 Nova Demonstratio Immobilitatis Terrae 

Grandami placed a terrella on a wooden disc in water, just as Gilbert had done, making sure that its axis was perfectly vertical. He marked the terrella’s equator with the 180° of longitude east and west. He set the terrella spinning having noted its orientation when it started and then again when it stopped. He repeated this experiment many times and each time the terrella stopped with the same east west orientation as when it started. He concluded that magnetism controlled not only North-South alignment but East-West alignment too. His conclusion:

…there is no doubt that the magnetic virtue that God gave to [the Earth] not only keeps its poles still and stable but also its other parts and points.[2]

He then tackled magnetic Copernicanism, which was:

…not only false, but clearly contrary to magnetic laws. They will have our demonstration, stick to their opinions more firmly, and refute opposing opinions more solidly. Then they can praise divine wisdom in earth’s magnetic quality, which causes its stability, and demolish the other useless and ridiculous effects of the Sun and other planets.

Grandami wrote up his claims in a manuscript that was circulated widely through Marin Mersenne’s network but which had very little resonance, although his experiment was widely repeated and found to be correct. The crunch came from a simple, rather obvious, comment from Mersenne, Jesuit educated but a Minim friar,  provoked by Grandami’s conclusions. Mersenne pointed out that the analogy claims between the Earth and a terrella were invalid because the terrella was not free but was affected by the magnetic field of the Earth, torpedoing Grandami’s claims for a geo-static earth but at the same time Gilbert’s magnetic diurnal rotation. He published his thoughts in 1644, a year before Grandami finally commited his manuscript to print.

I do not even wish to pursue those ways by which others believe that the Earth’s stability is proved from magnetic directions, since exactly the same thing happens to the magnet whether the Earth stands still or moves. So far, nothing from magnetic laws, any more from projectiles and the fall of heavy bodies can or ought to prove the double or triple motion of the Earth, the double rest of the Earth or its immobility 

Universae geometriae synopsis (1644)

I will close this very brief survey of the reception of De Magnete with Isaac Newton. Challenged on the action at a distance concept of his law of gravity, Newton proffered both magnetism and static electricity as attractive forces that displays action at a distance.

As Attraction is stronger in small Magnets than in great ones in proportion to their Bulk, and Gravity is greater in the Surfaces of small Planets than in those of great ones in proportion to their bulk, and small Bodies are agitated much more by electric attraction than great ones; so the smallness of the Rays of Light may contribute very much to the power of the Agent by which they are refracted. And so if any one should suppose that Æther (like our Air) may contain Particles which endeavour to recede from one another (for I do not know what this Æther is) and that its Particles are exceedingly smaller than those of Air, or even than those of Light: The exceeding smallness of its Particles may contribute to the greatness of the force by which those Particles may recede from one another, and thereby make that Medium exceedingly more rare and elastick than Air, and by consequence exceedingly less able to resist the motions of Projectiles, and exceedingly more able to press upon gross Bodies, by endeavouring to expand itself. (Opticks, Queries 21)

As I stated at the beginning, there can be no doubt that Gilberts De Magnete is one of the most important science books published in the Early Modern Period a fact that should be more widely acknowledged than it usually is.   

[1] De Magnete by William Gilbert Translated by P. Fleury Mottelay, Dover Publications, NY, 1958, pp. 14-15

[2] This quote, and several others, is taken from Stephen Pumfrey’s excellent but frustrating biography of Gilbert, Latitude & The Magnetic Earth: The True Story of Queen Elizabeth’s Most Distinguished Man of Science, (Icon Books, 2002). Frustrating because it has no academic apparatus, no foot or endnotes, no references and above all no index!

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February 7, 2024 · 7:22 am

From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XV

Over time, the translation movement stated by the ‘Abbāsid Caliph al-Manṣūr (714–775) translated a large part of the works of Aristotle into Arabic. His philosophy was warmly welcomed by the Islamic philosophers, who didn’t just read it but analysed it with great care and wrote long and deep commentaries on it. The works of Aristotle were from this source reintroduced into Europe in the twelfth century, together with the, often critical, commentaries of the Islamic scholars, this time translated from Arabic into Latin, sometimes via Hebrew. This led, thanks largely to the work of Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280) and his pupil Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), to the acceptance of Aristotle on the then still comparatively young, medieval European universities and the beginnings of scholasticism. All of this, of course, lies in the future and we first want to look at how Islamic scholars accepted and reacted to Aristotle’s theories of motion, fall and projectile motion. This reception was influenced by the writings on the subject of John Philoponus (c. 490–c. 570), which had also been translated into Arabic, and which, whilst largely ignored in late antiquity and the early European Middle Ages, enjoyed a strong reception under Islamic scholars. 

Working our way forward chronologically, our first Islamic scholar who took up the works of Aristotle was Abū Naṣr Muḥammad al-Fārābī (c. 870–950/951), known in Latin as Alfarabius. al-Fārābī, a polymath, was born in Trasoxiana (modern Turkestan) the son of a military soldier.

Iranian stamp with al-Farabi’s imagined face Source: Wikimedia Commons

Whether his was Turkic or Persian is not known. Little is known of his childhood but he went to Harran to study under the Nestorian Christian Yuhanna ibn Haylan. Later he moved to Baghdad to continue his studies under Ibn Haylan and also studied logic with Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus (d. 940) and Arabic grammar with Abu Bakr ibn al-Sarraj (c. 875–c. 928).

al-Farabi on the currency of the Republic of Kazakhstan Source: Wikimedia Commons

Later in life he moved to Damascus and then to Alexandria before returning to Damascus, which is where he probably died. His importance for the history of physics is not direct. However, he attempted to reconcile the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle in the tradition of the Neoplatonists. Drawing attention to their works for other Islamic scholars. In his work he provided the first comprehensive Arabic classification of the sciences in his Kitab al-ibsa al ‘Ulum (Catalog of Sciences). It is a largely Aristotelian in nature and was adopted, amongst others, by Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–1039) and Ibn Rushd (1126–1198). His only direct contribution to physics was a new argument in his On Vacuum on  the nature of the existence of void, concluding that air’s volume can expand to fill available space, and he suggested that the concept of perfect vacuum was incoherent.

Our next Islamic scholar is Abū Rayhān Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Bīrunī (973–after 1050) possibly the most polymathic of all Islamic scholars.

An imaginary rendition of Al Biruni on a 1973 Soviet postage stamp Source: Wikimedia Commons

He was born in an outlying district of Kath the capital of the Afrighid Kindom of Khwarazm, part of the Persian Empire before it was conquered by the Muslims, now in Uzbekistan. Depending who is doing the describing he is described as Khwarezmian, Persian, or Uzbeki. He led a very complex life, which would turn this post into a book if I tried to describe it. He is reputed to have written 146 books on a very wide range of subjects., although his main areas of study were astronomy, mathematics, and geography. He lived for a time in India studying the land, its cultures, and its peoples. The book he wrote on India is his most well-known work. His only real contribution to physics was his use of a hydrostatic balance to experimentally determine the density of many different substances. “He reports very precise specific gravity  determinations for eight metals, fifteen other solids (mostly precious or semiprecious stones), and six liquids.” (DSB). He carried out a major dispute with Ibn Sīnā (980-1073) in which he rejected Aristotle’s claim that the Earth is eternal.

Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn bin ʿAbdullāh ibn al-Ḥasan bin ʿAlī bin Sīnā al-Balkhi al-Bukhari (980-1073), known in Latin as Avicenna, was one of the most influential of all Islamic philosophers within the Islamic Empire and one of the two most important Islamic philosophers, when translated into Latin during the twelfth century Scientific Renaissance. Born into a Persian family in Transoxiana near the city of Bukhara, today in Uzbekistan. He had a comprehensive and wide-ranging education and became a physician. 

Portrait of Avicenna on a Iranian postage stamp Source: Wikipedia Commons

Although he wrote books on almost all subjects, his two most important works are Kitāb al-Shifāʾ (The Book of Healing) an encyclopaedia of science and philosophy, intended to cure the souls and the five volume al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb (The Canon of Medicine) and encyclopaedia of medicine. The latter an Aristotelean take on the works of Hippocrates and Galen became a standard work in Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance and was still in use in the seventeenth century. Avicenna’s philosophical work, a Neoplatonic Aristotelianism came to overshadow and replace the philosophical work of al-Fārābī, Farabism. 

In The Book of Healing, probably influenced by John Philoponus, Ibn Sīnā developed a theory of motion in which he distinguished between the inclination or tendency to motion and the force of a projectile. Projectile motion was the result of an inclination (mayl) transferred to the projectile by the thrower. He concluded that projectile motion in a vacuum would not cease. For him inclination was a permanent force whose effect was dissipated by external forces such as air resistance. 

Abu’l-Barakāt Hibat Allah ibn Malkā al-Baghdādī (c. 1080–1164) was born Baruch ben Malka into a Jewish family in Balad on the Tigris north of Mosul in modern Iraq. He only converted to Islam late in life. He is regarded as a follower of Ibn Sīnā and was like him a physician. He was an Aristotelian but heavily criticised Aristotle’s theories of motion. 

al-Baghdādī ??

He showed, in his theories, that velocity and acceleration are two different things and that force is proportional to acceleration and not velocity.  He “proposed an explanation of the acceleration of falling bodies by the accumulation of successive increments of power with successive increments of velocity. ( A. C. Crombie Augustine to Galileo v.2, p.67). He further developed Philoponus’ theory of impetus, stating that the mover imparts a violent inclination (mayl qasri) on the moved and that this diminishes as the moving object distances itself from the mover. (  Gutman, Oliver (2003), Pseudo-Avicenna, Liber Celi Et Mundi: A Critical Edition, Brill,  p. 193) He further suggested that “there is motion only if the relative positions of the bodies in question change.” He also stated that “each type of body has a characteristic velocity that reaches its maximum when its motion encounters no resistance.  ( Langermann, Y. Tzvi, “al-Baghdadi, Abu ‘l-Barakat (fl. c.1200-50)”, Islamic Philosophy, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1998) ,

Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyà ibn aṣ-Ṣā’igh at-Tūjībī ibn Bājja (c. 1085–1138), known in Latin as Avempace, was an Arab born in Zaragoza in al-Andalus, today’s Spain. Another polymath he made important contribution to botany in his Kitāb an-Nabāt (“The Book of Plants”).

An imaginary sketch representing Muslim polymath Ibn Bājja. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Much of what we know about his theories of motion comes from the extensive criticism of them by Ibn Rushd, (1126–1198). The philosopher Ernest A. Moody identifies four main reasons for regarding Ibn Bājja as a major figure in the development of the theory of impetus:

1. “For Avempace…V = P – M, so that when M = 0, V = P. This opposes Aristotle’s (supposed use of) V = P / M.” 

2. “Internal coherence with this “law of motion” requires, Moody believes, also a defence of the theory of an impressed force – as we find for example in Philoponus himself.” 

3. “Avempace’s appeal to an ‘impressed force’ was also reflected in the fact that ‘if we use modern terms, it might be said that the force of gravity, for Avempace, is not determined essentially as a relation between the masses of different bodies, but is conceived as an absolute indwelling power of self-motion animating the body like a soul.” 

4. “The theory of an ‘impressed force’ appears to have been upheld by al-Bitruji, who was influenced ins ideas by Avempace’s disciple Ibn-Tofayl.”

Ibn Bājja argued that even in a void a body would move with finite velocity because, although there was no resistance, the body would still have to traverse distance. (( A. C. Crombie Augustine to Galileo v.2, p.67). 

We turn briefly to ʾAbū Bakr Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Malik bin Muḥammad bin Ṭufayl al-Qaysiyy al-ʾAndalusiyy (c. 1105–1185), Latin Abubacer Aben Tofail. Born in al-Andalus in Guadix near Granada into an Arabic family, he was as stated above in 4. a student of Ibn Bājja. He is notable for having agitated to reject Ptolemaic astronomy and return to a purer Aristotelian homocentric astronomy.

An imaginary sketch representing Muslim polymath ʾAbū Bakr Muḥammad Ibn Ṭufail. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ibn Tufayl in turn influenced Nur al-Din Ibn Ishaq al-Betrugi (died c. 1204), known in Latin as Alpetragius, about whom almost nothing is known except that he probably came from near Cordoba. He adopted both an impetus theory of projectile motion and an Aristotelian homocentric astronomy model from Ibn Tufayl, combining the two to suggest, like Philoponus, impetus as the form of motion of the planets. 

Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji

Ibn Tufayl was heavily involved in politics and was a secretary for the ruler of Granada, and later as vizier and physician for Abu Yaqub Yusuf (1135–1184), the Almohad caliph. The Almohad Caliphate ruled over Southern Spain and Northern Africa from 1121 to 1269. Ibn Tufayl named Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rushd; (1126–1198), Latin Averroes. Ibn Rushd was together with Ibn Sīnā the second of the two most important Islamic philosophers, when translated into Latin during the twelfth century Scientific Renaissance.

Ibn Rushd was born in Cordoba into a family well known in the city for their public service, especially in the legal and religious fields. He was probably of mixed Muladí and Berber ancestry. The Muladí were the native population of the Iberian Peninsula before the Muslim conquest. He was a strict adherent of Aristotelian philosophy rejecting the Neoplatonic interpretations of al-Farabi and Ibn Ibn Sīnā. He came to be regarded as the greatest of the Islamic Aristotelians and acquired the title of The Commentator in medieval Europe. 

Detail of Averroes in a 14th-century painting by Andrea di Bonaiuto Source: Wikimedia Commons

He followed Ibn Tufayl in rejecting the deferent and epicycle models of Ptolemy in favour of the homocentric spheres of Aristotle. However, he also rejected the impetus theory that Ibn Tufayl had inherited from Ibn Bājja. 

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Ibn Rushd launches a detail attack on Ibn Bājja’s theory of motion, which includes quotes from Ibn Bājja’s lost work on physics. This debate between the two theories, Aristotle contra Philoponus, as presented by Ibn Rushd was taken up again in Europe in the thirteenth century as part of the Scientific Renaissance with European medieval scholars taking up arms respectively for Averroes or Avempace. 

All of these Islamic polymathic philosophers, spread out over nearly two centuries, had the philosophy of Aristotle at the core of their own work. The majority, however, in a modified Neoplatonic version. When dealing with Aristotle’s concepts of motion, the ideas of John Philoponus came to play a central modifying role, with the notable exception of the work of Ibn Rushd. Through the discussion and adoption of Philoponus’ proto-impetus theory meant that when the big twelfth century, Scientific Renaissance translation movement was up and running this alternative to Aristotle’s concepts became once again available in medieval Europe. 

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Filed under History of Physics, Islamic science

January 31, 2024 · 2:28 pm

The story of a drum

This is one of my occasional autobiographical posts, so if you come here just for the #histsci, you can skip this one.

I recently decided to be sensible and to relinquish my claim to a part of my inheritance, a drum. This is not just any drum, it is a very special drum and I’ve decided to tell its, for me, rather fascinating history. In order to tell the story of this drum I first have to sketch a large chunk of my family’s own somewhat atypical history.

My mother was born in Rangoon in Burma, then part of British India, as a, I think, third generation colonialist. She was born into a wealthy family and enjoyed a first-class education, for a woman of a certain standing. However, instead of finding a suitable husband and marrying, as would have been the normal course for a young lady in her position, she took up a career and became a SRN (State Registered Nurse), advancing eventually to matron of a hospital.

My father was born in London the son of a bank manager of Lowland Scots extraction. He attended a minor public school, where he excelled academically, and in the autumn of 1939 was due to go up to Oxford to study Greats, that’s Latin, Greek and Ancient History, for those not up on Oxbridge slang, considered in those days the pinnacle of the British education system. 

However, this was not to be. On 1 September 1939, Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany. My father having received a full military training in his public school cadet corps, in which he was an officer, did not wait to be mustered but volunteered for military service. Because he not only spoke ancient Greek, but was also fluent in modern Greek, he also volunteered for oversees service. After all, Greece was also a theatre of war. The British Army in the grand tradition of large bureaucratic organisations sent my father, not to the Balkans, but to India, where he became an officer in the Royal Indian Army. 

At some point during the war my father fell ill and ended up being treated in the hospital where my mother ruled the roost. In true romantic novel tradition, the dashing young British officer and the beautiful, dark haired colonial nurse fell in love and married. At the end of the war my father, now a major, was decommissioned and became a civil servant in the British colonial administration. My brother was born in 1945 in Lahore, which was then still in India but is now in Pakistan. In 1947, my eldest sister was born in the same hospital in Rangoon as my mother. 

Come independence, my family had to leave India and came to Britain. My father was, of course, returning home but my mother, already over thirty, was coming to Europe for the first time in her life, as were my brother and sister. They moved to Whalley Bridge in Derbyshire, to a house my father had inherited from his mother.

Whaley Bridge Source: Wikipedia Commons

Thanks to the support of a local politician and businessman, my father now attended the University of Manchester, where, his military service being credited as a BA, he did a MA in Egyptology. My second sister was born in Buxton in 1950. In the summer of 1951, my family moved to Thorpe-le-Soken, an agricultural village in North East Essex, and I was born in December of that year, In Clacton-on-bloody-Sea of all places. That stain remains in all my official documents for life!

Thorpe-le-Soken High Street Source: Wikimedia Commons

The move was motivated by my father’s appointment as lecturer for Art and Archaeology of South East Asia at SOAS in London. Quite how a man who had spent eight years living and working in India and then done as MA in Egyptology became a lecturer for Art and Archaeology of Southeast Asia is a puzzle that I still haven’t solved! Following the defeat of the French colonial government in Vietnam in 1954, my father spent a sabbatical year in SE Asia mostly in Vietnam. I still have a Vietnamese birthday card printed on silk that he sent me, but I no longer have the French Dinky Toy armoured car that also came from there. 

Somewhere down the line my father became an expert for the Vietnamese, Bronze Age, Đông Sơn culture. Archaeologists define cultures by the artefacts that are typical for that given culture. Đông Sơn culture is define by its bronze artifacts, in particular the Đông Sơn drums.

The drums were produced from about 600 BCE or earlier until the third century CE; they are one of the culture’s most astounding examples of ancient metal working. The drums, cast in bronze using the lost-wax casting method are up to a meter in height and weigh up to 100 kilograms. Đông Sơn drums were apparently both musical instruments and objects of worship.

They are decorated with geometric patterns, scenes of daily life, agriculture, war, animals and birds, and boats. The latter alludes to the importance of trade to the culture in which they were made, and the drums themselves became objects of trade and heirlooms. More than 200 have been found, across an area from easternIndonesia to Vietnam and parts of Southern China. (Wikipedia) 

My father authored the article The Sea-Locked Lands: The diverse traditions of South East Asia in Stuart Piggott’s vast coffee table book The Dawn of Civilization: The First World Survey of Human Culture in Early Times (Thames and Hudson, 1962), which contains a section: The bronze drums of Dong-son. 

Source: Amazon

But back to rural North East Essex. We lived in a fairly large Canadian, cedar wood house, situated in the middle of a very large garden.

Our House being built in the late 19th century Source: Changes in a Rural Essex Village: A Pictorial View of Thorpe le Soken & Landermere 1880–1990

There are now six houses standing on the land that used to be occupied by our house and garden. How a Canadian, cedar wood house, and it was the real thing, imported from Canada in the 19th century, came to be built in a rural village in Essex is a story for itself.

Front & Side View of our house Source: Family photos

On one side our  garden was bordered by a country lane and on the other side by a large country house Hamford House, situated in a vast park, which itself was bordered by the rather splendid Victorian police station, where my childhood best friend, the son of the police sergeant, lived. 

Thorpe-le Soken Victorian Police Station Source: Essex Live

In the 1950s the house next door and its park were compulsory purchased by the local authority to build a secondary modern school. The owners, an elderly, ex-colonial couple, retired to Dovercourt, a seaside town next to the port of Harwich. When they moved they gave my father two artefacts. The first was a very beautiful Burmese sword with a story in pictures inlaid in the blade in silver. The second was a Đông Sơn drum that they had bought on a street market in Burma! 

To the right of the school and Hamford House is our house in the middle of the trees Source: Changes in a Rural Essex Village: A Pictorial View of Thorpe le Soken & Landermere 1880–1990

It’s a story you couldn’t make up, an expert for the Vietnamese Đông Sơn culture gets given the Đông Sơn cultural artefact, a drum, by his next door neighbour in a North East Essex rural village! I should hasten to point out that this is not a bronze age drum, but the drums continued to be made down the centuries and this one is, I think, 18th century, but it is still a wonderful object.

Our Đông Sơn Drum All Photos: Chakirek–Photography

The measurements are: diameter of the tympan 63cms, dia. of the base 46.4cms and the height 45.5cms.

When my father died I didn’t immediately inherit the drum, but it was earmarked for me in the future, staying with my stepmother in the meantime. In the last couple of years my stepmother, who is getting old but who is very efficient, has been sorting out her life and household for her eventual departure from this life. She asked me if I still wanted to have the drum and of course I said, yes please. However, when we looked into the problems of transporting it to Germany it turned out to be a very expensive project, due to its size, weight, and value for the insurance. So, we decided to shelve it for the meantime, and I said I would take it back to Germany with me when I travelled over for my stepmother’s funeral.

Recently I have been giving the topic some more thought and have reached a new conclusion. I am seventy-two years old and do not enjoy the best of health if I make it to eighty, I shall be very surprised. My stepmother, however, seems indestructible, so I looks like I shall be going to significant trouble of somehow transporting the drum to Germany for, probably, just a few years. Then whoever gets lumbered with sorting out my affairs has the problem of what to do with the drum. After discussing the problem with my stepmother, I have, with a heavy heart, decided the drum should instead be sent to auction and the proceeds donated to a charity of my stepmother’s choice.

 I can, however, still claim that I almost owned a Đông Sơn drum. 

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Filed under Autobiographical

January 30, 2024 · 2:26 pm

If you can’t define science or the scientific method, how can you know what science is and how to do it? 

Over the years, experience has taught me to be very wary of books about either the history or the philosophy of science written, not by historians or philosophers, but rather by practicing scientists. There are, of course, notable exceptions but such books are often at best questionable and unfortunately oft a total disaster. My caution, potential bullshit antenna set of an alarm when I first stumbled across the advertising for David B. Teplow’s The Philosophy and Practice of Science, but then I noticed that it had a ringing endorsement from Hasok Chang, and I became curious. In my opinion Hasok Chang  is a living master of the history of science and if he endorses something then it is worth paying attention, so I asked Cambridge University Press for a review copy and having received one I’m now reviewing Teplow’s tome. 

We start off with a general impression, this is a monumental book, by which I’m not referring to its physical dimensions, it’s slightly larger than octavo and has about four-hundred pages. What makes it monumental is the vast amount of detailed information that Teplow has managed to pack into those four hundred pages, which is both its strength and, given its principal intention, its weakness, about which more later. It is a brilliant tour de force into which Teplow has obviously poured his heart and soul, mining to the depths and regurgitating in small portions the 770 papers and monographs that he lists in his bibliography. A process that has taken him a decade since he spent a year at Cambridge University as a visiting scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science under the guiding hand of Hasok Chang with a detailed proposal for the book in his luggage.  For all of the energy and scholarship that Teplow has invested in his book it is, unfortunately, from my standpoint as a historian of Early Modern science, at least in one aspect fatally flawed. But I will deal with that later first the positive aspects. 

In his preface Teplow writes:

I argue that excellence in scientific practice requires inculcation not only in its empirical form, but also in its historical development, philosophy, and sociology, which the student and scientist should integrate into their design and performance of experiments, interpretation of results, dissemination of findings, and evaluation of the veracity and importance of their work. This is what I consider the “process of science.”

The process of science is this book and this book is the process of science. The manner in which it is written is scientific behaviour, which means thinking deeply and digging deeply. As you read, you will not only be asking questions, but you will also be learning how and why to ask and answer them. [emphasis in original]

He delivers what he promises!

The book is in six sections rather than chapters. The first is the introduction and the second rather short chapter is Defining Science. The following four chapters are elements of Teplow’s process of science and each is divided into subsections and the subsections are divided into subsections, each covering an aspect of the central topic of the section.

The introduction explains Teplow’s motivation for the rest of the book. Having sketched the importance of science in modern society, he explains that if you really want to understand science you need not only to study science but also its history, philosophy, and sociology. Also, this approach should lie at the centre of science education. The main purpose of the book is to explain to young ongoing scientists why, in order to become good scientists, they need to study the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Here we meet one of Teplow’s favourite devices, tables containing list of the points he is trying to make the second table 1.2 gives twenty-two bullet point answers to the question Why integrate science history, philosophy, and practice? He then explains his programme in the remaining chapters. 

Defining science turns out in Teplow’s hands to be a more than somewhat difficult undertaking. He presents a quite large selection of definitions of science provided by philosophers and scientists and shows how each of them whilst having merits is in some why deficient. Towards the end of the chapter, he writes:

We have seen that many definitions of science have been proffered, each of which may have merit but none of which can define science in the absolute. The scope and complexity of science precludes this. One might thing this puts the idea of science on a weak footing. After all, how can we practice something if we don’t even know what it is? Answer: many forms of science are practiced and this diversity not only is a good thing, but it is one of the most important ways quantum leaps science [sic] are made.

There are two things to note here, this failure to really pin down some aspect of science occurs again and again throughout the book and he explains why this can be viewed as a strength rather than a weakness. 

There is one glaring bizarre statement in the chapter that I can’t ignore. Having started the chapter by explaining the science is about knowledge and that the theory of knowledge is epistemology, he then launches his investigation with Aristotle:

Our epistemological quest begins with the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC), and interestingly, with the  word root of epistemological, epistḗmē  (Greek: ἐπιστήμη). In Aristotle’s era, epistḗmē meant knowledge. The word he used for this type of knowledge was scientia, which is the root of the Latin word science. 

Of course, Aristotle did not use the word scientia, which is Latin for knowledge and has nothing to do with Greek. The word science, whilst derived from scientia it’s not Latin but according to the etymological dictionary is mid-14c French. How that got past the fact checkers and copyeditors I can’t quite fathom. 

The third chapter is titled Learning Science and the first subsection explain why one should learn the history and philosophy of science in order to learn science itself. There is another of Teplow’s tables with a long list of questions about science that can only really be answered with the philosophy and/or history of science. 

The next section is basically a long list of well known scientific facts, such as the boiling point of water, that on closer examination turn out not to be facts at all. The message being that in science one should look deeply and question everything.

The following section, Scientific Intuition, I found to be somewhat problematic. Teplow say, probably correctly, that if you wish to become a scientist you need a certain undefined feel for the subject, his scientific intuition. I don’t have any real problems with this and I think it applies to any profession. Put trivially, it you don’t like drawing and can’t sketch for toffees than maybe you shouldn’t consider becoming a graphic artist.

It is the next part of this section that worries me. To illustrate his point, he brings short but detailed biographies of the life and work two prominent twentieth-century figures in the life sciences, the biophysicist Max Delbrück (1906–1981 and the biologist Lee Hood (1938). The biographies are very good and both men are truly fascinating and truly exceptional. Unfortunately, because they are so exceptional it tends to confirm the widespread popular misconception than one needs to be some kind of unique genie to become a scientist. You can’t become a physicist if you are not Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein or some combination of both. 

US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld in a news briefing on 12 February 2002 famously made the following statement:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. 

People who couldn’t be bothered to actually think about what he said poured out a great deal of ridicule and scorn at his expense but it is actually a profound analysis and would have made a good chapter heading for the next part of Teplow’s book.

In the pages of the next sections, which are very good, Teplow looks first at knowledge and its acquisition and then ignorance , which, as he correctly points out, is possibly more important in science than knowledge. Science is trying to find answers for the things we don’t know, i.e. of which we are ignorant, rather than simply accumulating lists of things we do know.

Chapter four takes a deep dive into the history of science in an attempt to determine what exactly is the much talked about scientific method. Starting with The Edwin Smith Papyrus (3000–2500 BC), a manuscript on ancient Egyptian medicine, and ending with Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) and the philosophical rejection of method, Teplow takes us through twenty-five different version of scientific methodology, in somewhat more than seventy pages, covering all the big name. This is on the whole well done although I do have some negative comments. However, before I deal with those, I found his treatment of the nineteenth century–John Herschel, William Whewell,  John Stuart Mill, Claude Bernard, William Stanley Jevons–very good, in particular his in depth study of the ideas of Jevons, who tends to get overlooked. 

Happily, he includes a section on Ptolemy (c. AD 100–170) which is on the whole very good but then he goes and spoil it with the simple sentence, Ptolemy assumed from the onset, as Aristotle had suggested, that the cosmos was geocentric. When will modern science writers finally learn that if one makes simple empirical observations of the heavens without any prior knowledge, then it is very obvious that we live in a geocentric cosmos. It is the most logical, i.e. scientific, explanation for what one observes. 

Teplow observes, quite correctly, that in his optics, Ibn al-Haytham (965–1040) works in a way that is very similar to the way that modern scientist work, quoting other people when making this judgement. However, he fails to note that al-Haytham is working almost identically to Ptolemy in his optics, which whilst praising him for his methodology in astronomy Teplow never mentions, implying that al-Haytham is doing something totally new.

By Al-Biruni we get the classic, “The precision of his astronomical instruments and experimental work is obvious from his determination of the radius of the Earth, 6,339.6 km, which is the same, within experimental error, as that determined by modern scientists (6,356.8–6,378.1 km).”  No mention of the fact that it would have been literally impossible for al-Biruni to have made the measurement in the way he describes. 

Teplow has a section on Roger Bacon in which he quotes various people disputing that Bacon made a contribution to the scientific method. He quotes the Center for Islamic Studies as follows:

It is absolutely wrong to assume that experimental method was formulated in Europe. Roger Bacon, who, in the west is known as the originator of experimental method, had himself received his training from the pupils of Spanish Moors [my emphasis], and had learnt everything from Muslim sources. The influence of Ibn al-Haitham on Roger Bacon is clearly visible in his works.
Europe was very slow to recognize the Islamic origin of her much advertised scientific (experimental) method. In his book, “The Making of Humanity,”Briffault states, 
“It was under their successors at the Oxford School that Roger Bacon learned Arabic and Arabic science. Neither Roger Bacon nor his later namesake has any title to be credited with having introduced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no more than one of the apostles of Muslim science and method to Christian Europe; and he never wearied of declaring that the knowledge of Arabic and Arabic science was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge.

To find this ahistorical garbage in a serious book is to say the least stunning. That Roger Bacon was the first European to write about and propagate the optics of al-Haytham is true but that he had received his training from the pupils of Spanish Moors, and had learnt everything from Muslim sources, is toral cobblers. Also, as far as I know Bacon did not read Arabic.

After various other medieval philosophers, Teplow delivers an interesting discussion on the other Bacon, Francis and then we arrive at Galileo! Why do rational people lose their marbles as soon as the hear or read the name Galileo and switch into hagiography mode? 

“We now come to Galileo Galilei, whose approach to science does make him a father, and maybe even thefather of the scientific method.”

Really? Teplow quotes as confirmation of the highly dubious judgement those leading historians and philosophers of science, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking! Who am I to argue with such authorities?

Teplow tells us Galileo studied mathematics in Pisa. No, he didn’t, he studied medicine and broke off his studies. He received mathematical tuition privately after he had left the university. Teplow has Cosimo II de’ Medici appointing him Chief Mathematician and Philosopher. Chief of what? He was actually court philosophicus and mathematicus. “It was here that Galileo produced his two most famous works Dialogue […] and Discourses […]. In the former work, among other things, Galileo provides arguments supporting the accuracy of the Copernican model of the universe, in contradistinction to the model of Ptolemy.”

In the Dialogo Galileo produces a lot of polemic and hot air but very few real arguments supporting the Copernican model, because he doesn’t really have any. However, Teplow seems to think that we have to maintain the myth. It gets worse.

“Before Galileo, many had argued for the importance of integrating mathematics with observation. Some of these arguments were philosophical in nature and some were applied. However, it was Galileo’s integration of mathematics (including geometry) with experiment, for example, in his validation of the Copernican model of the universe…”

Yer wot? Galileo never validated the Copernican model, he couldn’t and his polemical arguments for the Copernican system featured very little mathematics. In fact, the best mathematical validation for a heliocentric  system was Johannes Kepler’s  three laws of planetary motion, which Galileo studiously ignored. Love the including geometry! What other mathematics did Galileo use?

I suppose the extensive work of Kepler and Stevin combining mathematics and observation before Galileo somehow doesn’t count. Teplow doubles down on his version of the myth that Galileo introduced mathematics into natural philosophy in his section on the methodology of Isaac Newton. Here he says, “We have also seen that Newton, following Galileo, integrated mathematics into natural philosophy.” There were a very large number  of scholars in the seventeenth century using mathematics in natural philosophy between Galileo and Newton, several of whom had a much bigger influence on Newton’s work that Galileo. Teplow compounds his historical ignorance with a footnote to this sentence:

It should be noted, at the time mathematics and natural philosophy were considered two independent fields, the former of which was felt by many to be inferior to the latter, as mathematics was considered the province of engineers and artisans.

Teplow’s claim had been true in the sixteenth century, which is when the division between the two field started to crumble, but by the time Newton wrote the Principia it had been for quite a long time no longer the case. 

Of course, Teplow includes the infamous Il Saggiatore quote about the Book of Nature being written in the language of mathematics to justify his claims. He goes completely over the top with his closing quote: Galileo had made “a clear break from the past, deliberately replacing the scientist-philosopher with the mathematical scientist.” A quote from Clavelin M. The Natural Philosophy of Galileo (MIT Press, 1974). You have to ignore an incredible amount that Galileo wrote to believe that. Sublunar comets, theory of the tides anybody?

Teplow delivers good discussions of Descartes, Boyle, and Newton before arriving at the nineteenth century, his discussion of which I have already praised. His discussion of the Logical Positivist and Popper is also acceptable and then we arrive at the scandal  child of the philosophy of science, Paul Feyerabend. He gives a reasonably good account of Feyerabend’s anarchistic approach to scientific method and the earthquake it caused within the philosophical and scientific communities but, perhaps, surprisingly ends by viewing Feyerabend’s contribution to the debate positively. 

We now arrive at the page that I described in an earlier post as A history of science and technology cluster fuck! The post opens thus:

I don’t remember ever coming across half a paragraph of just nineteen lines that manages to cram in so many history of science and technology myths, errors, and falsehoods as the one that I recently read whilst soaking in a hot bath. A truly monumental cluster fuck!

I’ m not going to repeat it here but if you want to know more, go and read it!

The passage that I dissected there leads into a section on Data-Driven Research the last subsection on the scientific method. In his conclusion, titled, The Scientific Method: Yes, No, Maybe?, Teplow answer is, “Scientific method, in fact, is pluralistic in nature.” Correct in my opinion.

The fifth chapter is actually the heart of the book, having dealt with various aspects of the philosophy of science, Teplow now turn to Science in Practice, in a section that covers 163 of the 350 pages of text in the book. He dissects with a very sharp scalpel every conceivable aspect of actually doing science from choosing a project to the truth, or lack of it, of the theories produced in five sections and twenty-nine subsections.  Bringing varying and contrasting views on every topic handled, a master class in in-depth analysis. 

If you want to know how science is created and the validity of each step of the process this is the place to turn or is it? However, I have a nagging feeling that Teplow’s thoroughness is to a certain extent self-defeating. In his cover blurb Hasok Chang writes the following:

A veritable intellectual feat including a sweep of the whole history of scientific methodology … [it is] a philosophical manual for working scientists, especially those who are in the early stages of their careers. I hope that generations of students and researchers entering their scientific careers will discover this book and benefit from its abundant wisdom.

Those 163 pages, presenting in quite incredible detail every aspect of scientific practice, are, due to their conciseness and compactness, also incredibly dense and anything but an easy read. I find it hard to imagine the average recently graduated doctoral student or freshly baked post-doc devoting the time and energy to ploughing their way through Teplow’s exhaustive and exhausting analysis. Less and simpler might have been better but I could well be wrong. I for one am not going to offer you an in-depth analysis.

I will, however, draw attention to another couple of Teplow special history claims. In his section Observation⟶Interpretation Having established that Ptolemy grew up in a geocentric world dominated by the cosmology of Aristotle, Teplow writes:

Not surprisingly, Ptolemy’s first model incorporated simple circular orbits of the sun and planets around the Earth. […] To improve the accuracy of the model, Ptolemy implemented epicycles (“orbits within orbits”) within each planets orbital path (deferent), made the Earth eccentric (moved it away from the center of all orbitals) and created an equant, a point offset from the orbital center by an amount equal to the offset of Earth. 

Ptolemy’s first model did not incorporate simple circular orbits but incorporated epicycles, deferents and eccenters, which he had inherited from earlier astronomers and mathematicians,  from the very beginning. All he added was the equant point. 

We then get a version of the misleading diagram that I spent a whole blog post demolishing a couple of years back.

The image on the right is what you actually see from the earth. If you want to see the image on the left you first have to travel outside of the solar system. This is a still from a short video. the original video is on my blog post

After a lot of hogwash about how Ptolemy should have shaken off his ingrained bias and chosen the simple, i.e. heliocentric model, we then get the classic:

Bias imposed on natural philosophers from the public, and especially the Catholic Church, acted to stifle interest in such models and squelch discussion and publication of these models. The Church was particularly sensitive to interpretations of scientific results that produced conclusions contradicting the prevailing theological view that the Earth must be at the center of the universe. One must remember that the suggestion of heliocentricity was heresy, an act that carried heavy legal penalties, including death. Galileo was, in fact charged and convicted of heresy for his confirmation of Copernicus’s results and further promulgation of the idea of heliocentric heavens. [my emphasis]

Regular readers of this blog already now how much rubbish is contained in those few lines but for the sake of any new readers… The Catholic Church only got sensitive about heliocentricity when in 1615, Galileo and Paolo Antonio Foscarini started telling it how to interpret the Bible, not a wise thing to do in the middle of the Reformation/Counter Reformation. Scholars were free to discuss or publish these models as long as they treated them hypothetically their actually scientific status at the time, and not as established fact. The suggestion of heliocentricity was never formally declared heretical, to claim otherwise is a myth. Galileo was not charged with heresy but with breaching a Church injunction not to hold or teach the theory of heliocentricity (as fact). He was found guilty of grave suspicion of heresy and not heresy, a completely different offense. Galileo in no way confirmed Copernicus’ result, he wasn’t able to. What results? Copernicus published a hypothesis, which was unsupported by the available empirical facts at the time. 

The final chapter or section of the book is as its title, Science as a Social Endeavour, suggests a brief tour of the sociology of science. A positive aspect of the book as science is all too often handled as if it takes place in some sort of intellectual vacuum. After some interesting discussions on the role, function, and status of practicing scientists in a social context. 

Unfortunately, Teplow once again displays his ignorance of pre-modern science. He provides one of his tables with the title Issues about which truth and opinion collide.

This is an important aspect of the sociology of science and in general Teplow handles it well, dealing with the conflicts between science and pseudo-science quite extensively. 

Five of his examples are classical science contra non-scientific with an either/or, either you accept the science or you reject it and believe in some sort of non-scientific hogwash. However, the situation with astronomy and astrology is totally different. To quote myself from an essay I wrote for the Forbidden Histories website:

Over a period of something between three and four thousand years, astronomy and astrology were not rivals or competitors but two sides of the same coin, Siamese twins joined at the hip only separated in the final phases of the so-called scientific revolution.

[…]

Ptolemy wrote [in his Tetrabiblos] that the science of the stars has two aspects, one that determines the position of the stars and the other that determines their influence. We would call the first astronomy and the second astrology…

Teplow justifies his inclusion of the pair astronomy/astrology in a footnote:

It is interesting, but not surprising that the same type of pseudo-scientific tripe was expounded by astrologers [who were also the astronomer, which Teplow doesn’t mention] in the eleventh century. However, what is very surprising that even then, some natural philosophers, such as the famous Islamic scholar al-Biruni, condemned this pseudo-science. Referring to astrologers, al-Biruni wrote”… [they] would stamp the sciences as atheistic, and would proclaim that they lead people astray to make ignoramuses, like him, hate the sciences and scientists. For this will help him conceal his ignorance, and to open the door for the complete destruction of both science and scientists.” (see Chapter 6, al-Biruni-On the Importance of the Sciences, in Levi, Islamic Central Asia : An Anthology of Historical Sources (Indiana University Press , 2010)).

It is clear from the context that al-Biruni is referring to one individual (him, his) so I don’t why Teplow has written “they,” also the objections of the unknown critic appear to be theological rather than astrological. I’m not going to go into it here but al-Biruni’s views on the practice of astrology are much more complex and he even wrote a book on astrology:

The Tafhīm. A manual of instruction in astrology, well over half of the book is taken up with preliminaries to the main subject. Persian and Arabic versions are extant, both apparently prepared by Bīrūni himself. It is arranged in the form of questions and answers. There are five chapters in all, the first (thirty-three pages in the Persian edition) on geometry, ending with Menelaus’ theorem on the sphere. The second (twenty-three pages) is on numbers, computation, and algebra. Chapter 3, the longest (229 pages), deals with geography, cosmology, and astronomy. From it a complete technical vocabulary may be obtained, as well as sets of numerical parameters, some of them uncommon. The next chapter (thirty-one pages) describes the astrolabe, its theory and application. Only the last chapter (223 pages) is on astrology as such, but it is complete and detailed. (E. S. Kennedy, DSB)

The Tafhīm  is regarded by historians of Islamic astrology as one of the best explanatory texts on the topic. So, Teplow’s quote is not quite the slam-dunk that he thinks it is. 

Teplow closes his book with a subsection, The Progress of Science: Paradigms, Research Programmes, and Traditions, which looks at the philosophy of science theories of Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Larry Laudan respectively.  The accounts are brief, possibly too brief. For my taste his account of Kuhn’ Paradigms is too benevolent and I don’t think he has really understood Lakatos’ Research Programmes. I can’t really comment on his analysis of Laudan’s work as I’ve never read it.

Teplow’s book is illustrated with a fairly large number of his tables, various diagrams. and some pictures. On the subject of footnotes, he writes at the end of the preface:

One need not read all 777 footnotes, but I encourage the reader to patiently take the time to do so because footnotes reveal interesting and surprising thinks not generally taught to students not known by even the most accomplished practicing scientists.

The book doesn’t have a bibliography in the normal sense but a consecutively numbered list of 770 references that are numbered in the sequence in which they appear in the text. A quote or a text summary in the text is then simply referenced with a number, [555] for example. There is a very skimpy and as I discovered relatively useless index. A couple of time I found historical examples, like the ones I have criticised above, and neglected to note where they were, thinking I could find them again in the index! No chance!

Despite all of the negative comments in my review I actually think this is a very good book. The majority of the history of science examples that Teplow brings are from comparatively recent areas of the biological sciences, where he is personally at home. These are as far as I can judged well researched and accurate. However, as I have illustrated he lets himself down with the very poor quality of his references to earlier eras of the history of science. Otherwise, the book has lots of valuable information for those who wish to understand the process of science, all of which is assiduously researched and presented. Personally, I think it is too compact, too dense, and simply too much for the average ongoing young scientist to sit down and plough their way through it. However, I think, with the historical errors corrected, it would make an excellent textbook for a half or even a full year course for ongoing scientists and I personally have long thought that such a course should be part of the education of every ongoing scientist.

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Filed under Book Reviews, History of science, Philosophy of Science

January 24, 2024 · 9:30 am

From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XIV

Up till now I have treated Greek culture in antiquity as if it were a single entity existing from the pre-Socratics in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE down to John Philoponus in the sixth century CE and beyond. This is, of course, anything but the truth. Before Alexander the Great, there was a collection of city states scattered along the coasts of the Black Sea and Asia minor, the Mediterranean coast of North East Africa, modern day Greece, Southern Italy, and parts of the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain that were vaguely united because they spoke various dialects of a common language. From about 500 BCE the Persian Empire controlled the Greek city states in Asia Minor and Macedonia. 

These city states waged war with each other and rose and fell in prominence and power. In 336 BCE  Alexander came to power and as is well known from school history lessons conquered a very large chunk of Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, introducing the so called Hellenistic period and culture after the fragmentation of his Empire following his early death. The Hellenistic period is considered to have covered the period from Alexander’s death in 323 BCE down to the death of Cleopatra VII, yes that Cleopatra, in 30 BCE. 

The Romans began to exercise a strong influence over Greece in about 200 BCE, eventually swallowing it by about the turn of the millennium. From now on Greece and other Greek speaking areas such as Alexandria in Egypt were Roman provinces. Under the Romans Greek science reached a high point of sorts in the second century CE with the medical writings of Galen (129–216) and the writings of Ptolemaeus (fl. 150) on astronomy, astrology, optics, geography, and music. At this time educated Romans read the works of Greek philosophers and scientists in Greek. From the second century onwards, it was basically all downhill for Greek scholarship till Constantine I moved the capital of the empire to Byzantium, in the early fourth century, renaming it New Rome, later he would name it Constantinople. From now on the empire was split into two, the Western and Eastern Empires and whilst the Eastern Empire flourished the Western Empire continued to decline. However, neither empire produced any significant scientific advances. As already explained in the last episode, Neoplatonism in various shades was the predominant philosophical direction. 

In the sixth century CE, very few people could still read Greek, so Boethius (c. 480–524) and Cassiodorus (c. 485–c. 585) both of them Neoplatonic Christians in the service of Theodoric the Great (454–526) the Ostrogoth ruler of Italy between 493 and 526, thought efforts should be made to conserve manuscripts of Greek learning and also to translate them into Latin. 

Boethius set out to translate the complete works of Plato and Aristotle but actually achieved very little before he was put to death still relatively young. He only managed Aristotle’s work on logic. If he translated any other works they did not survive. He is said to have written texts on the Quadrivium–arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. He produced a loose translation of the treatise on arithmetic of the Neopythagorean Nicomachus of Gerasa (c. 60–c. 120 CE) and wrote a textbook on music both of which became standard textbooks in the Middle Ages. His purported translations of Euclid and Ptolemaeus have not survived.

Medieval illustraion of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius Source: Wikimedia Commons

Like Boethius, Cassiodorus  was politically active on the court of Theodoric. When he retired he founded the monastery of Vivarium near Squillace in Calabria right down in the south of Italy. Here he wrote, amongst other things, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum (543–555), a recommended reading list, a guide for introductory learning of both “divine” and “secular” writings. The first section deals with divine literature but the second reflects what would become the seven liberal arts , the Trivium and Quadrivium–grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. Cassiodorus and his Institutiones served as a model for other Christian monasteries, to conserve and copy manuscripts of classical learning. 

Frontispiece showing Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus (seated opposite Theodoric), fol. 2r of Leiden ms. vul. 46 (Gesta Theodorici), Manuscript on vellum. 186 ff., 220 x 125 mm. Fulda, dated 1176/7. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636), another Neoplatonic Christian, is generally regarded as the final figure in scholarship in classical antiquity, although he can also be regarded as a proto-scholastic. His contribution to the preservation of classical knowledge was his Etymologiae, a summa of universal knowledge. An encyclopaedia consisting of 448 chapters in 20 volumes. Written in Latin, it abridges and summarises the Roman Learning in Late Antiquity. As such he preserved many fragments of classical learning that would have been hopelessly lost. However, because of its popularity many important works were no longer copied and so lost. The Etymologiae continued to be immensely popular throughout the Middle Ages, There were at least ten printed editions between 1470 and 1530. 

Isidore of Seville holding a book. Fortyfour (44) books. Text: qua rogatum eo fecit quamvis imperfectum relinquerat .. libris divisi et fuit libri quadraginta quatuor. Isidorus Source: Wikimedia Commons

The works of Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore formed the basis of the curriculum during the Middle Ages, first of the Latin schools attached to the cathedrals and then later of the undergraduate degree at the medieval universities.

Two things are important to note, firstly in opposition to a widespread popular myth, propagated by many militant atheists, Christianity and Christians were not responsible for the decline and loss of classical learning in late antiquity. In fact, the opposite is true, what survived in Europe did so because it was conserved and copied in monastery libraries, which is where much of it was found by the manuscript hunters during the Renaissance. 

“Until the 12th century brought translations from Arabic sources, Isidore transmitted what western Europeans remembered of the works of Aristotle  and other Greeks, although he understood only a limited amount of Greek.” This quote from the Catholic Enyclopedia indicates the next step of our story. After the decline of classical knowledge in Europe there was a brief period of less than two centuries before it began to be studied, criticised, and further developed in the Islamic Empire in Arabic translation. This raises the question as to why the newly emerging Islamic culture undertook the translation and appropriation of classical Greek learning.

In order to put this massive transition of knowledge into context we need to make a sketch of the early history of Islam. According to Islamic tradition Muhammed (570–632), born in Mecca, began to receive revelation from revelation from the Angel Gabriel in 610 at the age of forty. He began  to preach, first privately, then publicly, then in 622, persecuted by the Meccans, he and his follower fled to Medina (the Hijra, emigration), the year now regarded as the birth year of Islam. Note that  Isidore of Seville was still alive and compiling his Etymologia. Muhammed died in 632 and was succeeded by the first four caliphs Abū Bakr till 634, ʿUmar till 644, Uthman ibn Affan till 656, and Ali ibn Abi Talib till 661. The last three were all assassinated. Ali ibn Abi Talib’s son Hasan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib was declared caliph, but a major war broke out between different fractions and eight months after his appointment he abdicated in favour of Mu’awiya I, the governor of Syria and the founder and first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty or caliphate.

During this period Islam had expanded at a phenomenal rate and from its humble beginnings it had conquered the whole of the Arabic peninsula, the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, large parts of Byzantium and Persia, as well as the Mediterranean coast of North Africa by 1655. The Umayyad Caliphate ruled the Islamic Empire from 661 until 750, expanding it further with the conquests of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Central Asia, Sind, and parts of Chinese Turkestan. 

Age of the Caliphs   Expansion under Muhammad, 622-632   Expansion during the Rashidun Caliphate, 632-661   Expansion during the Umayyad Caliphate, 661-750 Shows modern borders. Source: Wikimedia Commons

During the first four caliphates Muslim were fully occupied with creating and defining their religion and expanding, through conquest, their area of influence, and had little or no interest in Ancient Greek or any other knowledge for that matter. The Umayyad Caliphate had moved the capital of the empire to Damascus, which had previously been part of Byzantium and was therefore predominantly Greek speaking. Most of the administration was also Greek speaking but they too showed no real interest in acquiring the corpus of Ancient Greek knowledge. All of this would change dramatically with the end of the Umayyad Caliphate in 750.

For various reasons the Umayyed dynasty were increasingly unpopular and in 750 they were overthrown in the ‘Abbāsid Revolution. I’m not going to detail the twists and turns in the struggle for power between the ‘Abbāsids and the Umayyads, but the ‘Abbāsids managed to forge a large coalition of Muslims and non-Muslims, which succeeded in toppling the Umayyads and leading to the establishment of the ‘AbbāsidCaliphate.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

It was now that the extraordinary appropriation of Ancient Greek knowledge began under the second ‘Abbāsid Caliph al-Manṣūr (714–775), who reigned from 754 to 775.

How extraordinary this was is explained by Dimitri Gutas:

A century and a half of Graeco-Arabic scholarship has amply documented that from about the middle of the eighth century to the end of the tenth, almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek books that were available throughout the Eastern Byzantine Empire and the Near East were translated into Arabic. What this means is that all the following Greek writings, other than the exceptions just noted, which have reached us from Hellenistic, Roman, and late antiquity times, and many more that have not survived in the original Greek, were subjected to the transformative magic of the translator’s pen: astrology and alchemy and the rest of the occult sciences; the subjects of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and theory of music; the entire field of Aristotelian philosophy throughout its history: metaphysics, ethics, physics, zoology, botany, and especially logic – the  Organon; all the health sciences: medicine, pharmacology, and veterinary science; and various marginal genres of writing, such as Byzantine handbooks on military science (the tactica), popular collections of wisdom sayings, and even books on falconry – all these subjects passed through the hands of the translators.[1]

The translation movement, which began with the accession of the ‘Abbāsids to power and took place primarily in Baghdad, represents an astounding achievement which, independently of its significance for Greek and Arabic philology and the history of philosophy and science (the aspects that have been overwhelmingly studied to this day), can hardly be grasped and accounted for otherwise than as a social phenomenon (the aspect of which has been little investigated), To elaborate: The Graeco-Arabic translation movement lasted, first of all, well over two centuries; it was no ephemeral phenomenon. Second, it was supported by the entire elite of ‘Abbāsid society: caliphs and princes, civil servants and military leaders, merchants and bankers, and scholars and scientists; it was not the pet project of any particular group in the furtherance of their restricted agenda. Third, it was subsidized by an enormous outlay of funds, both public and private; it was no eccentric whim of a Maecenas or the fashionable affectation of a few wealthy patrons seeking to invest in a philanthropic of self-aggrandizing cause. Finally, it was eventually conducted with rigorous scholarly methodology and strict philological exactitude – by the famous Hunayn ibn-Ishāq and his associates – on the basis of a sustained program that spanned generations and which reflects  in the final analysis, a social attitude and the public culture of the early ‘Abbāsid society; it was not the result of the haphazard random research interests of a few eccentric individuals who, in any age or time, might indulge in arcane philological and textual pursuits that in historical terms are proven irrelevant.[2]

Why did the ‘Abbāsids initiate this mind blowing socio-political, socio-cultural programme of intercultural translation? What motivated it? What did they intend to achieve? In what follows I will give a sketch of an answer based on the arguments presented by Dimitri Gutas in his book.  

One of the ‘Abbāsids strongest allies in their rebellion against the Umayyads were the Persians both Islamic and non-Islamic.  They, of course, were hoping for independence but that was not on  the ‘Abbāsids agenda. To pacify the Persians and help them accept their fate the ‘Abbāsids utilised the tactic of cultural–political assimilation rather than subjugation. Most notably, they built a new capital city for the Islamic Empire in Persia, the legendary Baghdad just north of the Sassanian capital of Ctesiphon and the adopted Persian ideologies and practices, where they were not in conflict with Islam. To these belonged the mass translation of scholarly text from Greek. How this came about needs a little background.

In 750 when we say Persia, we are talking about the Sassanian Empire, which was established in 224 CE and lasted till 651 when it was conquered by the Arabs. It arose on the ruins of the Achaemenid Empire, the Persian Empire defeated by Alexander in 330 BC, when Adashir I defeated the Parthians and they regarded themselves as the true heirs of the Achaemenid Empire. The Sassanians had a myth/legend that Zoroaster, the founding prophet of their religion, was, in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian canonical scriptures, the source of all leaning. The Chinese have a similar myth concerning the Yellow Emperor, who is said to have discovered and invented everything. When Alexander conquered Persia he copied all of this leaning had it translated into Greek and sent back to Greece. He then destroyed all traces of it in Persia. Basically, everything from Pythagoras, Euclid, Aristotle et al had been stolen by Alexander from the Persians. Quoting Gutas again:

[4] In the confines of India and China, however, there survived some things [of these books] which the kings of Persia had copied and preserved there when charged to do so by their prophet Zoroaster and Gāmāsb the learned…

[6] Then Ardašīr ibn-Bābak the Sassanian sent to India and China for the books which were there and also to Byzantium. He had copies made of whatever had reached there and traced the few remains that survived in ‘Irāq. He collected those that were dispersed and brought those that had been separated.

[7] After him, his son Sābūr did the same until these books had been copied in Persian in the way in they had been [compiled by] Hermes the Babylonian who ruled over Egypt, Dorotheus the Syrian [of Sidon], Qaydarūs the Greek from the city of Athens which is famed for its science, Ptolemy the Alexandrian and Farmāsb the Indian. They commented upon them and taught them to the people in the same way in which they had learned from all those books which originated in Babylon.

[8] After Ardašīr and Sābūr, Kisrā [Chosroes I] Anūširwān [531–78] collected these books, put them together [in their proper order]. And based his acts on them on account of his desire for knowledge and love for it.[3]

This is just one of several accounts of Alexander’s theft of Persian knowledge and the attempts to retrieve it made by the Sassanians. There was an imperative in Sassanian society to retrieve the “stolen” knowledge and translate it into Pahlavi (Middle Persian). Some texts had already been translated into Pahlavi when al-Manṣūr started his programme of assimilation. He simple adopted the Sassanian imperative and set the translation moment in motion beginning by translating the Pahlavi texts into Arabic and then extending to the Greek scholarly literature which was also translated into Arabic. As already noted above the Islamic overlords more that fulfilled that imperative in which they were assisted by Persian, Jewish and Syriac Christian scholars, and translators. The latter often translated first from Greek into Syriac, an Aramaic dialect, and then into Arabic. 

Much of the Pahlavi literature, which was first translated, was astrological and al-Manṣūr adopted astrology, which had previously been unknown in pre-Islamic Arabic culture, although the Umayyads dabbled they didn’t seriously adopt it.  He did so in a big way because astrology played a significant role in Persian court culture where the astrologer was a valued court advisor. When he built Baghdad, he had four astrologers, the Persian court astrologer Nawbaht and his colleagues Māšā’allāh, al-Fazārī, and ‘Umar at-Tabari,  determine the most fortuitus day to lay the foundation stone, 30 June 762.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The transfer of Greek and also Indian and Chinese knowledge into Arabic in the Middle Ages played a significant role in the history of the evolution of the sciences. When I first started becoming interested in the history of science main stream texts still claimed that the Arabic scholars merely preserved the Greek knowledge and added nothing new to it. We now know that this is rubbish and in the next episodes of this series I shall be looking at the Arabic contribution to the evolution of physics.

[1] Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbāsid Society(2nd–4th, 8th–10th centuries), Routledge, 1998 p. 1

[2] Gutas, p 2

[3] Abū-Sahl ibn-Nawbaht’s Kitāb an-Namutān quoted by Gutas pp 39-40

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Filed under History of Astrology, History of science, Islamic science

January 17, 2024 · 8:49 am

Magnetic Variations – V William Gilbert

We have now reached the pinnacle of investigations into magnetism and the magnetic compass, during the Early Modern Period, with the publication of William Gilbert’s De magnete in 1600. I will be handling it in four separate posts–a biography of Gilbert, a presentation of the book, a possible/probably co-author, and the dispute of the disciples. It is interesting to look at Gilbert as a whole and not just as the author of De magnete, because he had a long and successful career as a physician, which would make him a figure of interest in the histories of science and medicine if he had never carried out his research into magnetism. All of which tends to get overlooked because of the significance of De magnete. I found it wrong when somebody changed the title of his Wikipedia article from William Gilbert (physician) to William Gilbert (physicist) arguing This guy seems way more noticeable as a physicIST than as a physicIAN. Correct, in my opinion would be William Gilbert (physician) because that is what he was and did. His magnetic investigations were secondary in his life. 

William Gilbert artist unknown Welcome Library vis Wikimedia Commons

Gilbert[1] was born into a rising, middle-class family that had only recently acquired its well-to-do status. His great-grandfather, John Gilbert, had married Joan Tricklove, the only daughter of a wealthy merchant from Clare, Suffolk. Their son, William Gilbert of Clare, became a weaver and eventually sewer [server] of the chamber to Henry VIII. This William married Margery Grey, and among their nine children was Jerome Gilbert. Jerome, who had some knowledge of law, moved from Clare to Colchester in the 1520’s became a free burgess and recorder there, and married Elizabeth Coggeshall. The oldest of their four children was William Gilbert of Colchester. (DSB)

Timperleys, the 15th-century home of the Gilbert family in Colchester. Source: Wikimedia Commons

By 1558 Jerome Gilbert had married for the second time to Jane Wingfield, who bore him a further nine children. There are no real records of Williams life before he matriculated from St John’s College, Cambridge in May 1558. There is no record of his birth or baptism, but a later nativity listed 2:20 pm, 24 May 1544. However, the monument erected by his stepbrothers Ambrose and William in Holy Trinity Church in Colchester states that he was born in the town of Colchester but gives his age at death in 1603 as sixty-three, placing his birth in 1540. 

Source: Welcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons

Local tradition says that he attended Colchester Royal Grammar School founded in 1128 and granted a royal charter by Henry VIII in 1539. It would be granted a second royal charter by Elizabeth I in 1584. However, there is no proof of his having attended the grammar school and his family was wealthy enough that he could have had a private tutor. In Cambridge he graduated BA  and was admitted to a fellowship of St John’s in 1561. He graduated MA in 1564. He served in the junior position of mathematical examiner in 1565 and 1566, graduating MD in 1569. He was senior bursar in January 1570, then left Cambridge to set up a medical practice in London. 

The inscription on his monument states that he practiced for more than thirty years in London. He was obviously successful acquiring a clientele amongst the gentry and aristocracy. He obtained a grant of arms in 1577 and was moving in court circles by 1580. 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The most important body for medical practitioners was the London College of Physicians. It was established with a royal charter by Henry VII in 1518, although it didn’t start being called the Royal College of Physicians until late in the seventeenth century. 

Charter of incorporation for the College by Henry VIII under the Great Seal, 1518

It was set up as the first official licencing body for physicians in England but only for the City of London and an area of seven miles around it. Up until the sixteenth century there were no controls on who could practice as a physician in England. Previously in the sixteenth century there had been an Act of Parliament in 1511, which gave bishops the power to licence physicians for their dioceses. The setting up of the College of Physicians was the next set in establishing control in the matter, but as noted it only had authority in and around London. The whole thing was set up upon the initiative of Thomas Linacre (c. 1460–1524), who was its first president and benefactor, bequeathing his house and his library to the college.

Portrait of Thomas Linacre (or Lynaker) (c.1460-1524), copied by William Miller (College Beadle and amateur painter), 1810, from a painting at Windsor Castle. This is the usually accepted image of Linacre. However the identification has been challenged and the original at Windsor is now catalogued as An Elderly Man. Source: Wikimedia Commons

In 1523 an Act of Parliament extended their licensing powers to the whole of England, but the licensing was to be carried out in London. There are only very few cases of physicians outside of London, who had been licensed by the college. 

As well as his social climb as a physician Gilbert made a successful career within the College of Physicians. Around 1580 he was elected to one of the about thirty fellowships of the college holding the post of censor, regulating standards of practice, between 1581 and 1590. He held the post of treasurer to the college twice from 1587 to 1594 and again from 1597 to 1599, he was consiliarius from 1597 to 1599 and finally elected president in 1600. 

Between 1589 and 1594 Gilbert was involved in the college’s first, controversial, and aborted attempts to produce a pharmacopoeia. The Pharmacopoeia Londinensis finally saw the light of day in 1618  backed up by a royal proclamation from King James I. The proclamation enabled the Royal College of Physicians to create an officially sanctioned list of all known medical drugs, their effects, and directions on their use. No one was allowed to concoct any medicine or sell any substance if it did not appear in the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis. Of historical interest in the fact that Nicholas Culpeper’s legendary Herbal was a deliberate attempt to break the college’s monopoly on medical treatments. 

Pharmacopoeia Londinensis in facsimile RCP

His social status continued to rise in the same period adding the powerful Cecil family to his patrons. He attended the death of Mildred Cecil, Lady Burghley (née Cooke)in 1589 and that of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I chief counsellor, in 1598. His social climb reached a peak with his formal appointment for life as a physician to Elizabeth I in April1601. He was re-appointed royal physician to James I & VI shortly before his own death in 1603.

Very little in known about his personal life. He remained unmarried but seems to have maintained close relations to his family, especially his half brothers and sisters. By 1595 Gilbert had acquired and moved into Wingfield house in St Peter’s Hill, a large property near St Paul’s Cathedral.

Site of St Peter’s Hill Source: Wikimedia Commons

This was possibly inherited from his stepmother Jane Wingfield. Here he developed an informal intellectual circle. This included the famous correspondent  John Chamberlin (1553–1628), who possessed a large circle of notable intellectual friend such as Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639) and Thomas Bodley (1545–1613), and who lodged in Wingfield House. The physician and magnetic philosopher, Mark Ridley (1560–c. 1624), of whom we will hear much more in a later episode, also lodged in Wingfield House. Thomas Blundeville (c. 1522–c. 1606) author of Exercises (1594) covering a wide rang of cosmographical and navigational topics was a close friend, as was Lancelot Browne (c. 1545–1605) another royal physician, co-author with Blundeville of The Theoriques of the Seuen Planets (1602), an astronomy book that also published research of William Gilbert on magnetism, and which contained work by Henry Briggs (1561–1630) and Edward Wright (1561–1615), who we have met before and will meet again. William Harvey (1578–1657) married Lancelot Browne’s daughter Elizabeth. William Barlow (1544–1625) another magnetic philosopher whom we have met before and will meet again was also a member of this circle. 

As a physician Gilbert came into contact with London’s maritime community. In 1588, he and Lancelot Browne were approached by the privy council to administer drugs to sailors struck down by an epidemic, being two of four, ‘very fytt persons to be employed in the said Navye to have care of the helthe of the noblemen, gentlemen and others in that service.’ Gilbert was also proud of his conversations with the circumnavigators Francis Drake (c. 1540–1596) and Thomas Cavendish (1560–1592). Gilbert offered to write a book on tropical medicine for the chronicler of English exploration Richard Hakluyt (1553-1616) and advised Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s security chief, on health issues during the hostilities with Spain.

At his death in 1603, Gilbert donated his library to the College of Physicians but his library, the college and Wingfield were all destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Gilbert’s high social status, his status as a leading London physician, and his close circle of prominent intellectual friends almost certainly guaranteed a warm reception for De magnete when it was published in 1600. This was not the product of some unknown projector[2] but the work of a man of substance with an excellent reputation.

[1] This biographical sketch relies heavily, but not exclusively, on the writings of Stephen Pumfrey, Gilbert’s best modern biographer. I just wish that Icon Books would reissue his Latitude & The Magnetic Earth: The True Story of Queen Elizabeth’s Most Distinguished Man of Science (2003) with footnotes, or even endnotes, and an index!

[2] In the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods the figure of the projector was as vital as it was common. Daniel Defoe famously nicknamed his era the “Projecting Age.” Decades earlier scholars were already commenting on the “rampant passion for schemes”. Projectors were inventors or entrepreneurs ‘who set out to gain the trust and backing of a powerful patron such as a ruler or potential investor, for what he claimed was a financially profitable and generally prestigious original venture which would yield practical benefits.’

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Filed under History of medicine, History of Navigation, History of Physics

January 16, 2024 · 9:41 am

Hubble telescope and Leeuwenhoek bollocks from NdGT

Back in May 2023, Renaissance Mathematicus friend, Michael Barton, expert for all things Darwinian, drew our attention to a new piece of history of science hot air from the HISTSCI_HULK’s least favourite windbag, Neil deGrasse Tyson. This time it’s a clip from one of his appearances on the podcast of Joe Rogan, a marriage made in heaven; they compete to see who can produce the biggest pile of bullshit in the shortest time. NdGT is this time pontificating about Galileo and the telescope.

A couple of weeks back, another Renaissance Mathematicus friend, David Hop, drew my attention once again to the same Rogan/Tyson interview, this time a longer section in which NdGT extemporises about the space telescope, Hubble, and Antoni Leeuwenhoek before he reaches the section I dissected back in May last year. As to be expected Motor-Mouth-Tyson spews out a non-stop stream of pure drivel, which truly demands the attention of the HIST_SCI HULK: 

NdGT: Why do you think the Hubble Telescope…the mirror issues notwithstanding, which were ultimately fixed when, it was first launched…Why was it so successful? Version of the Hubble telescope previously launched by the military, looking down. The model for that telescope had already been conceived and built and was operating. Then we said we want one of those OK but that’s not public that this is going on. The telescope gets designed has the benefit of previous versions of it having been used successfully but looking down. We look up, this the perennial two way street astronomy in the old days and in modern times astrophysics. 

One doesn’t need to be a fucking rocket scientist to recognise that a military spy satellite, looking down, is technically, optically, functionally, conceptionally different to a space telescope, looking up. But is there any truth in Tyson’s stream of verbal garbage? Now neither Hulky nor I are experts on the Hubble Telescope, it wasn’t built in the seventeenth century, but Wikipedia has good articles on the history of Hubble and on the history of military spy satellites too. Tyson could have taken the time to read them before opening his mouth. But what the hell, why ruin a good story with facts? Neil, “who cares about facts”, Tyson obviously didn’t bother. 

The Hubble Space Telescope as seen from the departing Space Shuttle Atlantis, flying STS-125, HST Servicing Mission 4. Source: Wikimedia Commons

To save you having to turn to Wikipedia, a brief synopsis. We start with the military as Motor-Mouth-Tyson thinks they started the ball rolling and NASA jumped on the bus having seen that it works. 

The United States Army Ballistic Missile Agency launched the first American satellite, Explorer I, for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on January 31, 1958. The information sent back from its radiation detector led to the discovery of the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts.

Wikipedia

Note the date!

The theoretical idea goes back a bit further:

Herman Potočnik explored the idea of using orbiting spacecraft for detailed peaceful and military observation of the ground in his 1928 book, The Problem of Space Travel. He described how the special conditions of space could be useful for scientific experiments. The book described geostationary satellites (first put forward by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) and discussed communication between them and the ground using radio, but fell short of the idea of using satellites for mass broadcasting and as telecommunications relays.

Wikipedia

Note once again both civil and military!

Turning to space telescopes and Hubble: 

In 1923, Hermann Oberth—considered a father of modern rocketry, along with Robert H. Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky—published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (“The Rocket into Planetary Space”), which mentioned how a telescope could be propelled into Earth orbit by a rocket.

Wikipedia

So not exactly a recent idea! 

The history of the Hubble Space Telescope can be traced to 1946, to astronomer Lyman Spitzer’s paper “Astronomical advantages of an extra-terrestrial observatory.” 

Wikipedia

Note the date, twelve years before that first military launch of a satellite looking down!

Spitzer devoted much of his career to pushing for the development of a space telescope. In 1962, a report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recommended development of a space telescope as part of the space program, and in 1965, Spitzer was appointed as head of a committee given the task of defining scientific objectives for a large space telescope.

Wikipedia
Liman Spitzer Source: Wikimedia Commons

Also crucial was the work of Nancy Grace Roman, the “Mother of Hubble”. Well before it became an officialNASA approved, she became the program scientist, setting up the steering committee in charge of making astronomer needs feasible to implement and writing testimony to Congress throughout the 1970s to advocate continued funding of the telescope. Her work as project scientist helped set the standards for NASA’s operation of large scientific projects. 

Space-based astronomy had begun on a very small scale following World War II, as scientists made use of developments that had taken place in rocket technology. The first ultraviolet spectrum of the Sun was obtained in 1946, and NASA launched the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) to obtain UV, X-ray, and gamma-ray spectra in 1962. An orbiting solar telescope was launched in 1962 by the United Kingdom as part of the Ariel programme, and in 1966 NASA launched the first Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO) mission. OAO-1’s battery failed after three days, terminating the mission. It was followed by Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2(OAO-2), which carried out ultraviolet observations of stars and galaxies from its launch in 1968 until 1972, well beyond its original planned lifetime of one year.

Wikipedia

I could go on, but I think that is enough to show that the Hubble Space Telescope was definitively not a case of the civil space programme copying an idea from the military space programme and that Motor-Mouth-Tyson is, as per usual, spreading high grade bovine manure.

NdGT: The invention of the telescope [babble between Tyson and Rogan] Galileo perfects the telescope He learns that the telescope has just been invented in the Netherlands the Dutch were opticians, so they invented the telescope and the microscope within a couple of years of one another This transforms science.

The Dutch were opticians! So what? So were people all over Europe. Funnily enough the man credited with having invented the telescope, Hans Lipperhey, lived in Middelburg in the Netherlands but was actually a German. The invention of the telescope and/or microscope had nothing to do with nationality. 

Rogan: Why did they invent the eyeglass the reading glass?

NdGT: The reading glass was earlier than that, but I don’t know when, The real advance was putting two lenses in line with one another. Trivial in modern times but that was a huge conceptual leap and what you would accomplish [sic] and in so doing depending on how you curve them and how you grind the shape of those lenses you would get a microscope or a telescope. And we’re off to the races! 

It you are going to pontificate about the history of optics and the invention of the telescope and the microscope, you really should know when eyeglasses were invented, as one of the central questions, in that history, is why did it take so long from the invention of eyeglasses, around 1260, to the invention of the telescope in 1608?  The accepted thesis in answer to this question is contained in Rolf Willach’s magisterial Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope: A Life of Influence and Exile (American Philosophical Society, 2008). Willach argues convincingly that it was not putting two lenses in line with one another that led to the telescope, several people had done that without creating a telescope, but masking or stopping down the lens. The shape or form of a hand ground lens becomes more inaccurate the further one goes from the middle. These inaccuracies in the outer areas of the lens cause a distorted image, no problem in eyeglasses where one looks through the centre of the lens, but a major problem in the attempt to create a telescope. Lipperhey was probably the first to mask or stop down the lens so that only the central, correctly ground, portion of the lens gets used to create the image. 

I could write a whole book about Motor-Mouth-Tyson, “depending on how you curve them and how you grind the shape of those lenses you would get a microscope or a telescope.” Let’s just say an explanation it is somewhat wanting in more ways than one. 

NdGT: That’s basically the birth of modern science as we think of it and conduct it. Because you say to yourself, my senses I don’t trust them to be the full record of what’s going on in front of me. 

That the telescope and the microscope extended human perception and added new layers of empiricism to the study of nature is beyond discussion but to call it the birth of modern science is typical Motor-Mouth-Tyson hyperbole. 

NdGT: You pull out a microscope, oh my gosh, Leeuwenhoek , the microscope guy, he got a drop of pond water, puts it under his microscope, just to think to do this, it’s just water, why do you think that’s something interesting to do? He said, I wonder, he was curious and puts it under and sees little, what he described as animalcules happily aswimming.

Rogan: Animalcules!

NdGT: Animalcules, these are like the amoebas and paramecia. So, he writes to…he reports on this to the scientific authorities, and they don’t believe him. They say Van Leeuwenhoek, we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter. Why would anyone believe this that there’s entire creatures, an entire universe of creatures thriving in a drop of pond water. And so, the way science works, one report does not make it true, you need verification. They sent people to the Netherlands to verify his results and there it was the birth of microscopy and then they look at everything. Cells you know, they need vocabulary to describe what you are seeing. 

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Portrait by Jan Verkolje, after 1680 Source Wikimedia Commons

Leeuwenhoek now gets the Motor-Mouth-Tyson stir some half facts with a portion of liquid bovine manure and splatter the result over the listener treatment. Leeuwenhoek did not put his drop of pond water under his microscope because that is not how his single lens microscopes worked. Wait a minute didn’t our narrator just explain that to make a microscope you need to put two lenses in line with one another? If you are building a compound microscope you do indeed need at least two lenses and often more, but Leeuwenhoek is famous for the fact that he used single lens microscopes of his own special design.

A replica of a microscope by Van Leeuwenhoek Source: Wikimedia Commons

The small spherical lens is embedded in a metal plate and the specimen to be viewed in placed on the spike behind the lens and the whole apparatus is held up to the light. At the time Leeuwenhoek examined pond water with his microscope, microscopists were examining anything and everything with their microscopes, so nothing very special in this act. “He reports on this to the scientific authorities” sounds like something out of a dystopian novel by Kafka or Orwell. At the time he was corresponding with the Royal Society in London, basically, at the time, a private gentleman’s club for those interested in natural philosophy, who were publishing the results of Leeuwenhoek’s microscopic investigation in the Philosophical Transactions.

The letter with the animalcules, a term coined by Henry Oldenburg Secretary of the Royal Society, when translating from Leeuwenhoek’ original colloquial Dutch was sent in 1676 and was by no means his first letter. 

.. this was for me, among all the marvels that I have discovered in nature, the most marvellous, and I must say that, for me, up to now there has been no greater pleasure in my eye as these sights of so many thousands of living creatures in a small drop of water, moving through each other, each special creature having its special motion.

Leeuwenhoeks animalcules letter to Oldenburg

The prominent Dutch physician Reinier de Graaf made Oldenburg aware of Leeuwenhoek’s investigations in a letter from 1673:

That it may be the more evident to you that the humanities and science are not yet banished among us by the clash of arms, I am writing to tell you that a certain most ingenious person here, named Leewenhoek [sic], has devised microscopes which far surpass those which we have hitherto seen, manufactured by Eustacio Divini and others. The enclosed letter from him, wherein he describes certain things which he has observed more accurately than previous authors, will afford you a sample of his work: and if it please you, and you would test the skill of this most diligent man and give him encouragement, then pray send him a letter containing your suggestions, and proposing to him more difficult problems of the same kind.

Oldenburg followed de Graaf’s suggestion and from then on the Royal Society regularly published Leeuwenhoek’s letters with his latest investigations until his death in 1723. 

Motor-Mouth-Tyson’ comment, “They say Van Leeuwenhoek, we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter” is a piss poor joke and has no place in an account of the history of science. Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of single cell organisms did indeed cause some consternation because the Royal Society’s  resident microscopists, Robert Hooke and Nehemiah Grew where initially unable to replicate his observations, their microscopes were not powerful enough. Later Hooke would succeed but in the meantime the Royal Society was justifiably sceptical. The situation was not improved by Leeuwenhoek’s refusal to explain his methods out of fear of being plagiarised. 

Tyson is quite correct that scientific results have to be verified, usually by replication. Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, which Tyson introduces in the part of the interview that I dissected last time, were also initially met with scepticism, particularly as people were unable to replicate them. Something Tyson doesn’t mention. They were only accepted after the Jesuit astronomers of the Collegio Romano had finally succeed in replicating them. 

The Royal Society did indeed send a delegation to control Leeuwenhoek’s results. This was not in anyway exceptional in the seventeenth century where personal testimony from reliable witnesses was a common form of verification. When the Royal Society doubted the accuracy of Johannes Hevelius’ astronomical observations, because he refused to use telescopic sights on his instruments, they sent Edmond Halley to Danzig to investigate the matter. The measuring of atmospheric pressure using a primitive barometer by Pascal’s brother in law, Florin Périer, was witnessed and confirmed by Minim Fathers from a local friary. Here we have an interesting aspect of personal witness verification, church officials, rather than natural philosophers, were regarded as the most reliable and trustworthy witnesses. The delegation that went to visit Leeuwenhoek to investigate his animalcules’ reports was led by Alexander Petrie, minister to the English Reformed Church in Delft; Benedict Haan, at that time Lutheran minister at Delft; and Henrik Cordes, then Lutheran minister at the Hague. The visit was for Leeuwenhoek a success and his observations were fully acknowledged by the Royal Society.

NdGT: … and there it was the birth of microscopy and then they look at everything. Cells you know, they need vocabulary to describe what you are seeing. 

As I pointed out in an earlier post this was not the birth of microscopy, although Leeuwenhoek took it to a new level. Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680), Robert Hooke (1635–1703, and Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) were all prominent microscopist contemporaries of Leuwenhoek, who all started their investigations and also published some of their results before Leeuwenhoek began his investigations. The were also not to first and these scholars, particularly Robert Hooke, had already been looking at everything. Ironically, Motor-Mouth-Tyson’s example “cells” had already been discovered by Hooke. His Micrographia (1665) contains a microscopic image of the cells in cork. Hooke coined the term because he thought they looked like the monk’s cells in monasteries.

Robert Hooke’s microscopic image of cork displaying the cell structure Source: Wikimedia Commons

NdGT That was the journey down small then the journey went big, and Galileo perfects the telescope… 

This is where the section of the interview that we dissected back in May last year begins. Motor-Mouth-Tyson is slowly becoming the HISTSCI_HULKS favourite punch bag although the man is so dumb, it’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. On a serious note, NdGT is wildly successful all over the Internet and almost everything he spews forth, and there’s an awful lot fit, about the history of science is either highly inaccurate or simply false and unfortunately his adoring fans don’t know better. Equally unfortunate is the fact that he simply ignores the criticisms of those who know better.

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Filed under History of Astronomy, History of Optics, History of science, History of Technology, Myths of Science, Uncategorized

January 10, 2024 · 7:27 am

From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XIII

Just as the period of dominance of Aristotelian philosophy in antiquity was succeeded by the rise to dominance of Stoicism and Epicureanism, as I documented in the fifth episode of the series, so they too began to lose their hold on the world of thought in late antiquity. From the middle of the third till the middle of the seventh century CE thought in the ancient world was dominated by Neoplatonism. The term Neoplatonism is a neologism created to describe a renaissance of nominally Platonic thought that took place in this period. The term itself is to some extent misleading, whereas the terms Stoic, Peripatetic or Platonic signify a single school founder by a single philosopher with a set of doctrines developed by that founder, Neoplatonism doesn’t.  To quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Late antique philosophers now counted among “the Neoplatonists” did not think of themselves as engaged in some sort of effort specifically to revive the spirit and the letter of Plato’s dialogues. To be sure, they did call themselves “Platonists” and held Plato’s views, which they understood as a positive system of philosophical doctrine, in higher esteem than the tenets of the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, or any other subsequent thinker. However, and more importantly, their signature project is more accurately described as a grand synthesis of an intellectual heritage that was by then exceedingly rich and profound. In effect, they absorbed, appropriated, and creatively harmonized almost the entire Hellenic tradition of philosophy, religion, and even literature—with the exceptions of Epicureanism, which they roundly rejected, and the thoroughgoing corporealism of the Stoics. The result of this effort was a grandiose and powerfully persuasive system of thought that reflected upon a millennium of intellectual culture and brought the scientific and moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the ethics of the Stoics into fruitful dialogue with literature, myth, and religious practice. In virtue of their inherent respect for the writings of many of their predecessors, the Neoplatonists together offered a kind of meta-discourse and reflection on the sum-total of ideas produced over centuries of sustained inquiry into the human condition.

Plotinus (c. 204/5–270 CE) is regarded as the first of the Neoplatonists. Central to his philosophy and in fact to all of the Neoplatonists is monism expressed through the concepts of the One and Henosis.

Head in white marble. Ostia Antica, Museo, inv. 436. Neck broken through diagonally, head broken into two halves and reconstructed. Lower half of nose is missing. One of four replicas which were all discovered in Ostia. The identification as Plotinus is plausible but not proven. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Plotinus taught that there is a supreme, totally transcendent “One”, containing no division, multiplicity, or distinction; beyond all categories of being and non-being. His “One” “cannot be any existing thing”, nor is it merely the sum of all things (compare the Stoic doctrine of disbelief in non-material existence), but “is prior to all existents”. Plotinus identified his “One” with the concept of ‘Good’ and the principle of ‘Beauty’. (Wikipedia)

Henosis is the word for mystical “oneness”, “union”, or “unity” in classical Greek. In Platonism, and especially Neoplatonism, the goal of henosis is union with what is fundamental in reality: the One the Source, or Monad. (Wikipedia)

Plotinus was succeeded by his pupil Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234–c. 305 CE),

Porphire Sophiste, in a French 16th-century engraving Source: Wikimedia Commons

who was in turn succeeded by his pupil Iamblichus (c. 245–c. 325 CE).

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Both Theon of Alexandria (c. 335–c. 405 CE) and his daughter Hypatia (c. 360–c. 415 CE) were Neoplatonists but their philosophy differed from that of the acolytes of Iamblichus, which dominated Neoplatonic thought in Alexandria during their time. 

The Neoplatonic philosopher-mathematicians produced commentaries on and annotated editions of the major Greek mathematical works. Theon was a textbook editor, who produced annotated edition of Euclid’s Elements, Euclid’s Data, his Optics and Ptolemaios’ Mathēmatikē Syntaxis. Theon’s edition of the Elements was, until the nineteenth century, the only surviving edition.

Theon of Alexandria is best known for having edited the existing text of Euclid’s Elements, shown here in a ninth-century manuscript Vatican Library via Wikimedia Commons

We have no surviving works by Hypatia but the Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopaedia of the ancient Mediterranean world lists three mathematical works for her, which it states have all been lost. The Suda credits her with commentaries on the Conic Sections of the third-century BCE Apollonius of Perga, the “Astronomical Table” and the Arithemica of the second- and third-century CE Diophantus of Alexandria. Alan Cameron, however, argues convincingly that she in fact edited the surviving text of Ptolemaeus’ Handy Tables, (the second item on the Suda list) normally attributed to her father Theon as well as a large part of the text of the Almagest her father used for his commentary.  Only six of the thirteen books of Apollonius’ Conic Sections exist in Greek; historians argue that the additional four books that exist in Arabic are from Hypatia, a plausible assumption. So once again, what we have is that Hypatia was like her father a textbook editor.

Proclus Lycius (412–185) wrote a commentary on Euclid’s Elements. According to Thomas Heath in volume one of his edition of The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements:

It is well known that the commentary of Proclus on Eucl. Book I is one of the two main sources of information as to the history of Greek geometry which we possess, the other being the Collection of Pappus.

First Latin edition of one of the major works by Proclus Lycaeus (412-485), founder and head of the neo-Platonic school of Athens: a commentary on the first book of Euclid’s “Elements of Geometry”, Source: Wikimedia Commons

Pappus of Alexandria (fl. 320) produced an encyclopaedic compendium of ancient Greek geometry, astronomy , and mechanics in eight books entitled, Synagoge (Συναγωγή) or Collection. This work, whilst highly important as a record of the history of Greek mathematics, remained virtually unknown until the sixteenth century when it was translated and published by Federico Commandino (1509–1575) in 1588. It became influential in the seventeeth century. The Suda credits him with a commentary on the first four books of Ptolemaios’ Mathēmatikē Syntaxis, now lost. He also wrote commentaries on Euclid’s Elements fragments of which are preserved in Proclus and on Ptolemaios’ Ἁρμονικά (Harmonika), now lost.

Title page of Pappus’s Mathematicae Collectiones, translated into Latin by Federico Commandino (1588). Source: Wikimedia Commons

Apart from small odds and ends, such as Pappus’ hexagon theorem in projective geometry, these Neoplatonic philosopher-mathematicians produced very little original work. However, their role in recording and conserving Greek mathematical works should not be underestimated.

The non-mathematical Neoplatonic philosophers also contributed almost nothing new to the roots of the discipline of physics that I have sketched in the previous episodes of this series but their obsessively inclusive, eclectic agglomeration of the works of earlier Greek philosophers, in particular Plato and Aristotle, meant that these works that had slid into the background during the dominance of Stoicism and Epicureanism was once again brought into the foreground and passed on down to future generations. 

All three of the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam took a strong interest in Neoplatonism because of its strongly monist core and often became first acquainted with the works of Plato, Aristotle, and other earlier Greek philosophers through Neoplatonic sources rather than through the originals. In the history of science transmission of sources often takes indirect roots.

Above I said that Neoplatonic philosophers also contributed almost nothing new to the roots of the discipline of physics, however, there is one very notable exception, the sixth century Christian, Neoplatonist John Philoponus (c. 490–c. 570) of Alexandria. Philoponus was a pupil and sometime amanuensis of the Neoplatonist philosopher Ammonius Hermiae (C. 440­–c. 520),who was also from Alexandria but had studied in Athens under Proclus before returning to Alexandria to teach. He lectured on Plato, Aristotle and Porphyry of Tyre, as well as on astronomy and geometry. As is often the case most of his supposed numerous writings have not survived. He is known to have lectured and written extensively over Aristotle as did Philoponus his pupil. However, whereas Ammonius seems to have been positive in his assessments of Aristotle, Philoponus was highly critical. 

Amongst his voluminous writings Philoponus wrote extensive critiques of almost all of Aristotle’s texts of which in our context a couple are of great importance. As a Christian Philoponus rejected Aristotle’s concept of an eternal cosmos, replacing it with a cosmos created by God in its entirety in one moment. Because his cosmos was a single unified whole he rejected Aristotle’s division of the cosmos into supralunar and sublunar regions. The cosmos was overall the same and subject to the same laws. In this he was following the Stoics, and his philosophy is heavily influenced by Stoic concepts. Philoponus also anticipates Descartes in stating that bodies have extension in space.

Most important in the history of physics Philoponus rejects both Aristotle’s concept of fall and his concept of projectile motion. It seems that, unlike Galileo, Philoponus really did drop objects of differing weight from a tower and concluded that they fall almost at the same speed:

“if one lets fall simultaneously from the same height two bodies differing greatly in weight, one will find that the ratio of their times of motion does not correspond does not correspond to the ration of their weights, but that the difference in time is a very small one” (In Physica, 683, 17).[1]

He dismisses Aristotle’s theory of projectile motion and produces what would later become known as the theory of impetus an important precursor to the theory of inertia.

“some incorporeal kinetic power is imparted by the thrower to the object thrown “and that” if an arrow or a stone is projected by force in a void, the same things will happen much more easily, nothing being necessary except the thrower” (ibid, 641, 29).

Denying Aristotle’s distinction between sublunar and supralunar motion, Philoponus also applied his impetus concept to the motion of the planets.

Because of his deviant religious views on the nature of the Trinity, Philoponus was declared anathema at the Third Council of Constantinople, which limited the reception of his anti-Aristotelian dynamics in late antiquity, but his works were translated into Syriac and Arabic where they would have a significant influence as we shall see in future episodes.

Philoponus was the first philosopher to go beyond the dynamics of Aristotle and his concepts are the beginnings of the path that would eventually lead to the modern theories of that branch of physics.

[1] In Physica, H. Vitelli, ed. (Berlin, 1887)

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Filed under History of Mathematics, History of Physics, History of science

January 8, 2024 · 7:05 am

HISCTSCI_HULK reporting for duty – A history of science and technology cluster fuck!

I don’t remember ever coming across half a paragraph of just nineteen lines that manages to cram in so many history of science and technology myths, errors, and falsehoods as the one that I recently read whilst soaking in a hot bath. A truly monumental cluster fuck!

The offending object is on page 131 of David B. Teplow’s The Philosophy and Practice of Science[1], which I will be reviewing in the not to distant future and which is much better than the handful of lines dumped on here and which I will almost certainly be recommending but for now the cluster fuck. 

Revolutionary advance in science have been achieved through a number of mechanisms. Optics is a good example. Simple, but keen and thoughtful, observation of the worlds at a magnification of 1x, combined with logic, enabled Aristotle to lay the foundation for all of science and for Copernicus to propose a heliocentric solar  system.

The statement about Aristotle laying the foundation for all science is definitely questionable given his rejection of mathematics but I’ll let it pass. Copernicus proposal of a heliocentric solar system was not in anyway based on observation but on rethinking elements of the existing geocentric system.

Copernicus’ heliocentric model from Andreas Cellarius’ Atlas Coelestis 1660

Galileo’s construction of the first telescope’s allowed him to observe the world at ≈30x and to confirm Copernicus’s theory of a heliocentric heavens. 

Galileo by no means constructed the first telescopes. Apart from being preceded by the various inventors of the telescope such as Hans Lipperhey and Jacob Adriaenszoon, by the time he learnt about telescopes they were on sale all over Europe. The Venetian  Senate was truly pissed off when they discovered this after giving Galileo a massive pay rise for presenting them with a telescope, having thought it was something very special.  Galileo was also definitely preceded as a telescopic astronomical observer by Thomas Harriot and probably by Simon Marius. If I could get my hands on the idiot, who first perpetrated the myth that Galileo’s observations confirmed Copernicus’s theory of a heliocentric heavens, I would shove a Galilean telescope up his fundamental orifice. Galileo knew that nothing that he had observed confirmed Copernicus’s theory and he never claimed that he had. It would be 1725 before James Bradley produced the first telescopic observation that confirmed part of the heliocentric theory, when he observed stellar aberration. 

Galileo’s “cannocchiali” telescopes at the Museo Galileo, Florence via Wikimedia Commons

It [optics] also enabled van Leeuwenhoek to study the microscopic world, at ≈250x, and in the process discover “animalcules” (from the Latin for “tiny animal”; animalculum) – including bacteria, protozoa, and spermatozoa – thus becoming the first microscopist and microbiologist. 

Van Leeuwenhoek is a very long way from being the first microscopist. It’s actually difficult to establish who first began using microscopes as scientific instruments. Galileo knew of the microscope and almost certainly discovered the principle, as probably did many others, when looking through a Galilean or Dutch telescope ( one convex, one concave lens) the wrong way it, when it functions as a microscope, but he did make any systematic microscopic studies. The Dutch engineer, inventor, (al)chemist, optician, and showman Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel (1571–1631) was constructing and giving public demonstrations with Keplerian microscopes (two convex lenses) by about 1620. Galileo built a compound microscope in 1624, which he presented to Prince Federico Cesi founder of the Acccademia dei Lincei.

Anthonie van Leeuwenhek Portrait by Jan Verkolje, after 1680 Source: Wikimedia Commons

The first illustrations made with a microscope are attributed to Francesco Stelluti on a pamphlet published by the Acccademia dei Lincei to celebrate the election of Maffeo Barberini as Pope in 1623. The bees were the Barberini family emblem. Stelluti published further microscopic studies of bees in a Tuscan translation of an obscure Latin poem in 1630.

Stelluti Bees1630

In 1644 Giovanni Battista Odierna published a pamphlet of his microscopic studies of the fly’s eye, his L’Occhio della mosca and in 1656 Pierre Borel published a collection a collection of a hundred miscellaneous microscope observations, his Observationum microscopicarum canturia. 

The Italian biologist Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) observed capillary structures in frog’s lungs with a microscope in 1661 putting him ahead of van Leeuwenhoek as microbiologist.

With the help of the newly invented microscope, Marcello Malpighi (A) (1628–1694) solidified Harvey’s concepts and was the first man ever to describe the pulmonary capillaries and alveoli (B). Source:

Given his propensity to vehemently claim priority on every aspect of his research in his polymathic career, Robert Hooke would almost certainly be enraged by our authors claim, as his magnificent and ground-breaking microscopic study the Micrographia was published in 1665, eight years before van Leeuwenhoek’ first letter was published by the Royal Society. Hooke would probably also claim priority as the first microbiologist for his study of and naming of biological cells. 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The claims that van Leeuwenhoek was the first microscopist and microbiologist are total bullshit and display a level of ignorance and/or laziness, on Teplow’s part, who either didn’t bother to check his facts or to do the bloody research. 

Electron and atomic force microscopes now allow scientists to see objects at magnifications up to ≈107x, opening up an immense sub-cellular world in which even individual atoms can be visualized. These instrumental advances expanded the observable universe, and the amount of information to which one has access, many orders of magnitude.

Nothing to complain about here.

The best example of a recent revolution in scientific method comes from computer science, a field that for all intents and purposes, did not even exist until the twentieth century.

Nor here, but the pain starts again in the very next sentence.

The  development of mechanical computers (the “difference and analytical engines”) and arbitrary, user-defined programs (“weav[ing] algebraic patterns”) by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, respectively, followed by the conception and development of electronic computers by John van [sic] Neumann and Alan Turing ushered us into the current “information age.”

Oh boy! Babbage’s Differential Engine, a special purpose computer designed to calculate and print error free mathematical tables using the method of differences was never realised, beyond a small working model, which he had his engineer Joseph Clement (1779–1844) construct in 1832, before the project was abandoned. The Analytical Engine, conceived as a grandiose multipurpose computer never got off the drawing board. 

Portion of Charles Babbage’s calculating machine (Difference Engine No.1), built by Joseph Clement, London, 1832. Science Museum London

Although she described the concept of arbitrary, user-defined programs in her notes to her translation of Luigi Menabrea’s Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage (1842), the concept is from Babbage and not Lovelace. The full quote from Lovelace’s notes is “we may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” 

The idea of a machine that could transcend number, as the Analytical Engine had transcended addition and had been generalized to other operations, had been in Babbage’s thoughts for some years. In a letter to Mary Somerville written 12 July 1836, he spoke of having “a kind of vision of a developing machine.” This was only twelve days after he had taken the decision to adopt punched card as input to the Analytical Engine, and two days after he mused in his notebook.

This day I had for the first time a general but very indistinct conception of the possibility of making an engine work out algebraic developments – I mean without any reference to the value of the letters. My notion is that as the cards (Jacquards) of the calc. engine direct a series of operations and then recommence with the first, so it might be possible to cause the same cards to punch others equivalent to any given number of repetitions. But these hole[s] might perhaps be small pieces of formulae previously made by the first cards and possibly some mode might be found for arranging such detached parts according to powers of nine numbers and of collecting similar ones [the entry breaks off here].

What he was groping for here was some means of bypassing or replacing the columns of numbers that are ordinarily the objects to be operated on, so that he could operate on symbols instead.[2]

Note that this is eight years before Ada translated the Menabrea article. Note also, whereas Ada drops the suggestion in a simple, highly quotable, poetic bon mot, Babbage was acutely aware of the problems involved in actually achieving this aim. As I’ve sodding well said a hundred bleeding times, before accrediting anything to Countess Lovelace see what Babbage has said on the subject in his correspondence and unpublished papers. 

One should also note that there was no continuity or influence between Babbage’s schemes and the invention of the computer in the twentieth century. It was only with hindsight that historians began to praise Babbage as a pioneer of the computer age. 

Neither Alan Turing nor John von Neumann conceived or developed the effing computer! Vannevar Bush (differential analyser, 1927),  Konrad Zuse (Z2 1940, Z3 1941), Vincent Atanasoff & Clifford Berry (ABC, 1942), Howard Aiken (Harvard Mark I, 1944), Tommy Flowers (Colossus, 1943–45), and John Mauchly & J. Presper Eckert (ENIAC, 1945) did conceive and develop computers. 

In 1936 Alan Turing published a meta-mathematical paper, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, which after other people had developed computers provided a succinct way of categorising the computing capabilities of a computing machine.

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem London Mathematical Society

During WWII Turing, together with Gordon Welchman, developed the Bombe from the Polish Bomba, an electro-mechanical device used to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages. The Bombe was designed and constructed by Harold Keen. After WWII, Turing worked on the design of the Automatic Computer Engine (ACE), which he presented in 1945. The ACE was never built.  

Beginning in 1944, ENIAC inventors, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, designed the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) the machine being finally delivered in 1949. Brought in as a consultant, John von Neumann wrote a description of the EDVAC, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, which was published in 1945 and led to Mauchley and Eckert being denied a patent for EDVAC.

First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC Source: Wikimedia Commons

This totally lazy and factually incorrect Turing and von Neuman invented the computer that has become established in popular history of technology gets on my fucking wick. Teplow’s paragraph that I have dissected above is a glowing example of lazy, cliché filled, badly researched history of science and technology that should not be being published by a major academic publisher in 2023. 

[1] David B. Teplow, The Philosophy and Practice of Science, CUP, 2023 

[2] Dorothy Stein, Ada: A Life and a Legacy, The MIT Press, 1985. pp. 102–103

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Filed under Charle Babbage, History of Astronomy, History of Computing, History of Optics, Myths of Science, Uncategorized

January 3, 2024 · 7:40 am

Simon Marius a wannabee!? – STOMP STOMP STOMP…

Springer is one of the world’s largest academic publishers with a vast catalogue of science and history of science publications. One might think that when Springer publishes a history of science book, for which they charge the princely sum of €246.09, that they would at least employ fact checkers before publishing; one would obviously be wrong!

I was searching the Internet for something else when I stumbled across Neil English’s Chronicling the Golden Age of Astronomy: A History of Visual Observing from Harriot to Moore (Historical & Cultural Astronomy), Springer, (2018), which contains a chapter, The Checkered Career of Simon Marius (pp. 29–­33).

Now readers who have followed me long enough will know that I am an active member of a group of historians of astronomy from the area around Nürnberg, who have spent several years rehabilitating the reputation of Simon Marius (1573­–1625), a local astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, who famously discovered the Moons of Jupiter one day later than Galileo, and whom the latter successfully labelled a plagiarist. We have intensively researched the life and work of Marius and made it publicly available in books and through a website, of which I am the English editor.

Engraved image of Simon Marius (1573-1624), from his book Mundus Iovialis, 1614 Source: Houghton Library via Wikimedia Commons

All of this being the case, I was naturally very interested in a publication about Marius that I hadn’t come across before and eagerly read the abstract. My inner HIST_SCI HULK immediately screamed, WHAT THE FUCK! I managed to acquire a pdf of the offending object and passed it on to my friend and colleague the HIST_SCI HULK to review for your delectation:

We start with that oh so provocative abstract, actually the first paragraph of the essay:

N.E: The phenomenal success of Galileo Galilei with the telescope spread like wildfire across the nation-states of Europe, with the result that nearly every astronomer was keen to get his or her hands on such an instrument to make new discoveries in the starry heavens. One of the earliest “wannabees” was the German astronomer Simon Marius.

Any historian, who had truly researched the history of astronomical telescopic observation would know that Simon Marius was very definitely not one of English’s “wannabees” swimming in the wake of Galileo’s “phenomenal success” but had acquired a telescope and begun astronomical telescopic observation well before Galileo went public with his own observations. There is even the possibility that he, like Thomas Harriot, began observing earlier than Galileo. I don’t really think that English could have made a worse start to his essay, but he continues as he started, badly! 

Neil English is obviously only a wannabee historian! 

N.E: Born Simon Mayr (later Latinized to Marius) on January 10, 1573, in Gunzenhausen in the region of the Markgrafschaft of Ansbach (Bavaria, south Germany), where his father served as mayor of the city in 1576. From 1586 to 1601, he studied on and off at the Markgrafschaft’s Lutheran academy at Heilsbronn. And it was during his studies here, beginning around 1594, that he became interested in embarking on a career in astronomy and meteorology.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Markgrafschaft of Ansbach was in Franconia and not Bavaria. Even today it is still in Franconia, which only became part of Bavaria in 1806! Marius was a pupil of the Fürstenschule (its correct name)* in Heilsbronn continuously, not on and off, from 1586 to 1601. Here with his “on and off,” I think, our wannabee historian is just making shit up because there is nothing in the sources to this effect. 

*Lutheran academy would imply that the school was educating young men for the Church, whereas the Fürstenschule was educating young men to work on the margravial court. 

N.E: In 1596 Marius wrote a tract on the comet that appeared in the sky that year, and in 1599 he published a set of astronomical tables. The quality of his researches resulted in his appointment as court mathematician of the Markgrafschaft of Ansbach in 1601. 

That should, of course, be research and not researches but who am I to copyedit our wannabee historian’s text. Marius was first appointed Court Mathematicus (not mathematician, there’s a difference) in Ansbach in 1606, not in 1601. 

N.E: One of his first acts as the Markgrafschaft’s mathematician was to travel to Prague to learn of Tycho Brahe’s observational techniques and to gain familiarity with his instruments. Unfortunately, Brahe died that same year, and Marius’ stay in Prague lasted only 4 months. But he did meet David Fabricius there, who helped consolidate his interest in the science of the heavens. 

When Marius travelled to Prague he was not yet margravial mathematicus (see above). Although he didn’t meet him, Tycho was still very much alive during his visit and its length had nothing whatsoever to do with Tycho’s death. His interest in the science of the heavens was already consolidated before he went to Prague, which is exactly why he went there.

Our wannabee historian is making a real mess of this. 

N.E: After this, he sojourned to Padua to study at the university there, where he quickly became politically active in the student association calling itself the “German Nation,” acting as its chairman from 1604 to 1605. 

Our wannabee historian obviously has no idea what a Natio at a medieval university was and what its function was particularly at the University of Padua. Medieval universities were originally founded as corporations or guilds, Universitas was the medieval Latin for corporation or society derived from whole or entire. These corporations were either of students or of teachers. When it was founded Padua was a universitas of students. All students on matriculation were assigned to a Natio or Nation according to their place of origin or their mother tongue. 

Student nations or simply nations (Latin: natio meaning “being born”) are regional corporations of students at a university. Once widespread across Europe in medieval times […] Students in the University of Padua were divided into 22 nations, which referred to the different territories ruled by the Republic of Venice, to the biggest states of Italy, and to the main states of Europe. Nations were: German (also called Alemannian), Bohemian, Hungarian, Provençal, Burgundian, Spanish, Polish, English, Scottish, Venetian, Overseas (Venetian Greek Islands), Lombard (East Lombardy and West Veneto), Trevisan (North and East Veneto), Friulian, Dalmatian, Milanese, Roman, Sicilian, Anconitan, Tuscan, Piedmontese and Genoan. (Wikipedia)

The Natio played an active role in the administration of the university and Marius played an active role in the administration of the German Nation. If English had used the term university politics I probably wouldn’t have commented but “politically active” has too many varying connotations for the context.

The management of the Nations business was carried out by two councillors, who were elected annually like the procurators. They were responsible for the most important university affairs, such as elections of the chancellors or appointments. […] From July 28th 1604, they were replaced by Caspar Hofmann and Simon Marius. Marius stayed in office until his departure in July 1605.[1]

N.E: In 1602 Marius extended his tutelage to Baldessar Capra, a wealthy student from Milan, in mathematics and astronomy, but there is also evidence that he supplemented his income by practicing medicine. 

There is no evidence that Marius supplemented his income by practicing medicine, rather he matriculated to study medicine which he did from 1601 to 1605, but which our wannabee historian doesn’t appear to know.

Our wannabee historian hasn’t done his fucking research properly, has he?

N.E: Capra and Marius both observed the nova of 1604 together, and with Marius’s help Capra published a book on the new ‘guest’ star. In 1607 Capra published under his own name Galileo’s instruction manual on the sector, which was circulated in the form of a manuscript, and which led to Capra’s expulsion from the university. It appears that Marius played an important role in this plagiarism, but he had returned to his native land in 1605 and so temporarily escaped vilification. In Italy, however, Marius’s reputation was tarnished by this fraud, and by certain other questionable practices as head of the German Nation. 

Galileo supplement his income by manufacturing a brass sector, or military compass. He earned more money by selling an instruction manual for the instrument and giving lessons in its use to the purchasers. The manual was initially in manuscript but in 1607 he had a limited number printed. It was, however, not published but distributed privately. Capra obtained a copy translated it into Latin, the original was in Italian, and published it in his own name. Galileo hauled him before the university authorities, where he was expelled from the university and his book was confiscated.

As noted Marius returned to Franconia in July 1605 and there is absolutely no evidence that he was involved in this plagiarism, although Capra named him in the pamphlet as his maths teacher. 

The authorities confiscated his book and threw him out of the university. That did not satisfy Galileo, who published a brief, brutal rebuttal of the goat (la capra) who had got his goat.[2]

No accusation was made against Marius by Galileo in his anti-Capra diatribe in 1607. 

In the middle of April 1605, Marius occupied another important position in the Nation. He became librarian. […] When Marius left Padua, Christian Rosian became the librarian. At his farewell the Nation unanimously decided to give Marius a small monetary gift for his loyal service.[3]

Questionable practices? Our wannabee historian is making shit up again! 

N.E: Upon his return from Italy, Marius settled in the city of Ansbach and accepted the post of court mathematician, marrying Felicitas Lauer, the daughter of his publisher. 

Didn’t our wannabee historian say that Marius was “appointment as court mathematician of the Markgrafschaftof Ansbach in 1601.” Now he’s saying it was when he returned from Padua, was Marius a quantum time traveller? 

N.E: In 1609 he published the first German translation (from the original Greek) of the first six books of Euclid’s Elements. 

More sloppy research from our wannabee historian. Marius’ translation was published in 1610 not 1609 and it was not the first German translation, that honour goes to Wilhelm Holtzman (Guilielmus Xylander), who published Die Sechs Ersten Bücher Euclidis in Basel in 1562.

N.E: But Marius’ most memorable (and controversial) research involved the telescope. In the fall of 1608, at the Frankfurt Fair, Marius met an artillery officer who tried to sell him a spyglass. Intrigued, the two set about reproducing the device by using spectacle lenses, but it was not until at least a year later that Marius obtained instruments good enough for astronomical observations. 

Given how well documented this episode in the history of the telescope is, I find it fascinating how badly our wannabee historian mangles the facts here; it can only be described as a cluster fuck!

Simon Marius was not at the autumn Fair in Frankfurt in 1608. The officer, a general, who was there was the splendidly named Johan Philipp Fuchs von Bimbach, who was not in the artillery, but was at the time Privy Councillor to Joachim Ernst Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, Simon Marius’ employer.

Hans Philipp Fuchs von Bimbach Source: Wikimedia Commons

He was in the situation not the seller but the potential purchaser. The potential seller was an otherwise anonymous Belgica (then the Latin for a Netherlander), who claimed to be the inventor. The telescope he was offering to Fuchs von Bimbach had a broken lens and the two couldn’t agree on a price. Returning to Ansbach, Fuchs von Bimbach told Marius what he had seen and the two tried to construct a telescope using spectacle lenses and although, they understood the principle they failed. They tried to get better lenses made in Nürnberg, then a major centre for the manufacture of cheap spectacles but that was also not successful. Eventually Fuchs von Bimbach imported a finished telescope from the Netherlands, and they began observing in summer 1609. Later they bought lenses from Venice and constructed a better telescope. 

N.E: In 1614 Marius published the fruits of his research on Jupiter in a book entitled Mundus Iovialis anno M.DC.IX Detectus Ope Perspicilli Belgici (“The Jovian World, discovered in 1609 by means of the Dutch Telescope”), in which he claimed that he had observed Jupiter’s moons beginning as early as the end of November 1609 and furthermore had begun recording his observations on December 29. That said, Marius had adopted the Julian calendar and so the date corresponded to January 8, 1610, on the Gregorian calendar. 

Since Marius did not publish any observations, as Galileo had done in his Sidereus Nuncius, it is impossible to verify Marius’s claim. His reputation was, however, not the highest. 

Actually, wannabee historian, it’s the other way round:

Unlike Galileo, however, Marius provided detailed tables of his observations, part of what helped clear him to the Dutch panel. And on the cover of the Mundo Iovialis, Marius sketched the objects in orbit, a contrast to Galileo’s sketch using asterisks and the letter O, making what Pasachoff says was “arguably the first image of the orbits.”[4]

There are no observations in the Sidereus Nuncius but there are tables of observation in Mundus Iovialis.

In 1614, Marius had a perfectly good reputation, so why is the wannabee historian claiming that it wasn’t? He’s sort of justifying Galileo’s anti-Marius tirade in The Assayer (Il Saggiatore) from 1623. Before we take at look at this one should note that The Assayer was published nine years after Mundus Iovialis and sixteen years after the Capra plagiarism affair. 

Like a lot of others our wannabee historian takes The Assayer seriously, appearing to think that what Galileo spouts in this evil piece of polemic must be true. It’s Galileo, it’s Holy Writ! People gush over what a brilliant a piece of polemic The Assayer is, what they ignore is that it’s in reality a stinking turd of a text. The Assayer was one text in a heated exchange between Galileo and the Jesuit, mathematician, and astronomer Orazio Grassi (1583–1654) on the nature of comets. What most people overlook or simple refuse to acknowledge is that in this dispute Galileo was horribly, utterly, and totally wrong. Grassi argued on the basis of observations and mathematical calculations that the three comets of 1618 were supralunar, Galileo, surprisingly, argued that they were merely sublunar optical effects. Surprisingly, because by 1618 virtually the whole of the astronomical community had long ago accepted that comets were indeed supralunar, and Aristotle was wrong on this. Despite being provably wrong, Galileo maintained his strange position including it in his Dialogo in 1632. Not content with arguing falsely against Grassi’s scientific viewpoint, Galileo poured a ton of vicious abuse on his head. Having built up steam Galileo also launched a vicious attack on the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650) with whom he had had a dispute over sunspots a decade before. Covering him in a torrent of abuse he also falsely accused Scheiner of having plagiarised his work on sunspots. This turned out to be more than somewhat ironical as Galileo would go on to plagiarise Scheiner on the topic in his Dialogo. This is the context in which one has to view Galileo’s attack on his third victim in The Assayer, Simon Marius:

Of such usurpers I might name not a few, but I shall pass them over now in silence, as it is customary for first offenses to receive less severe punishment than subsequent ones. But I shall not remain silent any longer about a second offender who has tried too audaciously to do me the very same thing which he did many years ago by appropriating the invention of my geometric compass, despite the fact that I had many years previously shown it and dis- cussed it before a large number of gentlemen and had finally made it public in print. May I be pardoned this if, against my nature, my habit, and my present intentions – I show resentment and cry out, perhaps with too much bitterness, about a thing which I have kept to myself these many years. I speak of Simon Marius of Gunzenhausen; he it was in Padua, where I resided at the time, who set forth in Latin the use of the said compass of mine and, appropriating it to himself, had one of his pupils print this under his name. Forthwith, per- haps to escape punishment, he departed immediately for his native land, leaving his pupil in the lurch as the saying goes; and against the latter, in the absence of Simon Marius, I was obliged to proceed in the manner which is set forth in the Defence which I then wrote and published.

This is quite extraordinary, firstly there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Marius wrote the said plagiarism published by Capra and Galileo raised no such charge in 1607 when he prosecuted Capra. As noted above Marius left Padua in July 1605 two years before Capra published his stolen text and there is not record of Marius and Capra having any contact whatsoever after his departure. It is patently obvious that Galileo is making shit up! Does our wannabee historian even question Galileo’s unfounded and obviously spurious accusation? Does he hell he simple prints it without comment leading any reader not aware of the true facts in the belief that Galileo’s accusation is true!

Galileo now ramps up his accusations claiming that Marius had plagiarised his Sidereus Nuncius in his Mundus Iovialis, going so far as to claim that Marius had never even observed Jupiter and its moons:.

 Four years after the publication of my Sidereal Messenger, this same fellow, desiring as usual to ornament himself with the labours of others) did not blush to make him- self the author of the things I had discovered and printed in that work. Publishing under the title of The Jovian World, he had the temerity to claim that he had observed the Medicean planets which revolve about Jupiter before I had done so. But because it rarely happens that truth allows herself to be suppressed by falsehood, you may see how he himself, through his carelessness and lack of understanding, gives me in that very work of his the means of convicting him by irrefutable testimony and revealing unmistakably his error, showing not only that he did not observe the said stars before me but even that he did not certainly see them until two years afterwards; and I say moreover that it may be affirmed very probably that he never observed them at all. 

After making an argument about the inclinations of the orbits of the satellites to the ecliptic, Galileo turned his attention to the date on which Marius claimed to have discovered the satellites:

Next, notice the craft with which he tries to show himself prior to me. I wrote in my Sidereal Messenger of making my first observation on the seventh of January, 1610, continuing then with others on the succeeding nights. Along comes Marius, and, appropriating my very observations, he prints in the title page of his book and again in the opening part of his work that he had already made his observations in the year 1609, trying to give people the idea that he was first. Now the earliest observation that he produces as made by him is the second one made by me; yet he announces it as made in the year 1609. What he neglects to mention to the reader is that since he is outside our church and has not accepted the Gregorian calendar, the seventh day of January of 1610 for us Catholics is the same as the twenty-eighth day of December of 1609 for those heretics. So much for the priority of his pretended observations. 

Once again we have a strange timelapse in Galileo’s outraged response to the publication of Mundus Iovialis, this time of nine years. Galileo had been informed of its publication by two separate people already in 1614. He had already discussed it in his correspondence in that year. If he truly believed that Marius had plagiarised him why didn’t he respond, after all following the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius he had become the most famous astronomer in Europe and was also now mathematicus and philosophicus at the Medici Court in Florence. He could have crushed Marius, the insignificant court mathematicus in Ansbach like a flea. Vindictively crushing his perceived opponent was his favourite pastime in those years. It’s even what he was paid to do, as after diner entertainment in Florence as court philosophicus. So, why did he wait nine years? 

Galileo’s claim his carelessness and lack of understanding, gives me in that very work of his the means of convicting him by irrefutable testimony and revealing unmistakably his error is, of course, pompous bluster. 

As to Galileo’s notice the craft with which he tries to show himself prior to me. In his Mundus Iovialis Marius wrote:

This is the exact truth … In recounting all this, I am not to be understood as wishing to lessen Galileo’s reputation, or to snatch from him the discovery of these Jovian stars among his countrymen in Italy – far from it. My object rather is, that it may be understood that these stars were not shown to me by any mortal in any way, but were discovered and observed by me, by my own investigation, in Germany, almost at the very time, or slightly before it, at which Galileo first saw them in Italy. The credit, therefore, of the first discovery of these stars in Italy is deservedly assigned to Galileo and remains his.

Mundus Ioviales Prickard/Van Helden p. 6

Marius states that his first observation of the moons as moons was on 29 December by the Julian calenda, that’s 8 January by the Gregorian calendar, whereas Galileo’s was on the 7 January, so just one day later, more than justifying his almost at the same time. He also states that he had already been observing them for some days previously, assuming that they were stars, so his earlier is perhaps also valid. What is certain is that he is not trying to claim priority over Galileo by using the Julian calendar to date his observations. Anybody interested in astronomy at the time, who might have read both the Sidereus Nuncius and the Mundus Iovialis would have been well aware that the two astronomers, given their locations and religious affiliations, would be using two different calendars. In fact, many astrologers at the time, and Galileo and Marius were both astrologers, issued their writing calendars and prognostica with two parallel date columns one for Gregorian, new style, dates and one for Julian, old style, dates. Marius didn’t need to tell his readers, they already knew. 

N.E: Nevertheless, at the behest of Johannes Kepler, Marius named the moons after the lovers of Zeus (the Greek equivalent of Jupiter): Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Galileo, predictably enough, steadfastly refused to accept Marius’ names and instead invented the numbering scheme that is still used today, alongside proper moon names. In accordance with this scheme, the Galilean satellites were assigned numbers based on their proximity to their parent planet and increase with distance. Hence, the moons of Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto were designated as Jupiter I, II, III and IV, respectively. 

If our wannabee historian had bothered to read Mundus Iovialis he would know that it was a suggestion of Kepler’s not a behest and was only one of four suggestions made by Marius in his Mundus Iovialis. I’ve written about this before, so quoting myself:

In the Mundus Iovialis Marius makes several naming suggestions. His first suggestion was, like Galileo, to just number the moons I to IV, a system that was actually used by astronomers. His second suggestion follows Galileo in that he wishes to name them after his employer/patron the Margrave of Ansbach’s family and call them the Brandenberger Stars. Marius’ third suggestion is more than somewhat bizarre as he suggests naming them in analogy to the solar system planets, so the moon with the smallest orbit would be the Jupiter Mercury, the next the Jupiter Venus, the third the Jupiter Jupiter and the fourth the Jupiter Saturn. His argument for leaving out Jupiter Mars is too long to include here. As I said bizarre. It is with Marius’ fourth suggestion that we finally arrive at Zeus’ lovers. After talking about Jupiter’s reputation for a bit on the side and describing his most notorious affairs Marius wrote the following:

 In Europa, Ganimedes puer, atque Calisto,

Lascivo nimium perplacuere Jovi.

Io, Europa, the young Ganymede and Calisto

appealed all too much to the lascivious Jove

In the next paragraph Marius goes on to explain that the idea for using these names for the moons was suggested to him by Johannes Kepler when the two of them met at the Imperial Parliament in Regensburg in October 1613. He then names Kepler as co-godfather of these four stars. Marius closes his list of suggestions by saying that the whole thing should not be taken too seriously, and everybody is free to adopt or reject his suggestions as they see fit.

 Please note the final sentence. 

Nobody really used the names Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto before the twentieth century, so claiming that Galileo, predictably enough, steadfastly refused to accept Marius’ names is really a piece of bullshit from our wannabee historian. 

N.E: In retrospect, Galileo probably went a bit overboard in these accusations, in much the same way as he had countered his critics within the Catholic Church, for it appears certain that Marius was independently observing Jupiter’s moons by December 1610. 

A bit overboard? It’s like describing a drugged-up berserker in full battle rage as a bit over excited.

N.E: Mundus Lovialis (sic) does, however, contain a telescopic discovery the priority of which has never been disputed: On December 15, 1612, Marius was the first to observe the Andromeda Nebula, which could not be resolved into stars, describing it as a “flame seen through horn.” Apparently, Marius was not aware that this object had been seen previously by medieval Persian astronomers and described by Al Sufi as early as 964 a. d. 

The comment about al-Sufi is quite frankly bizarre, to quote Wikipedia:

The Andromeda Galaxy has been visible to the naked eye, given dark skies, throughout history; as such, it cannot be said to have been “discovered” by any one individual [my emphasis]. Around the year 964 CE,the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahmen al-Sufi was the first to formally describe the Andromeda Galaxy. He referred to it in his Book of Fixed Stars as a “nebulous smear” or “small cloud”.  

Star charts of that period labelled it as the Little Cloud. In 1612, the German astronomer Simon Marius gave an early description of the Andromeda Galaxy based on telescopic observations.  

I have a post on the history of the Andromeda nebula/galaxy here

N.E: Marius’ telescope showed that even the distant stars appeared as disks, and he interpreted them as such; a notion that persisted for much of the 17th century. Indeed, it was only after a proper theory of diffraction was formulated that these ideas were firmly put to rest. Nonetheless, Marius used this as evidence that the stars were not as far away as would have been required to bolster the Copernican worldview. 

Our wannabee historian should read more Chris Graney.[5] The “big star” argument, as it is known originates with Tycho Brahe, who estimated the diameter of stars based on his naked-eye observations. He argued that if the stars were so far away that they displayed no stellar parallax, as required by the Copernican world system, then they must literally unbelievably immense. Marius’ correct observation of the solid star discs in his telescope supported Tycho’s big star argument and was accepted throughout the seventeenth century.

This argument based on star sizes was what Christiaan Huygens called Brahe’s “principal argument” against the heliocentric system.[6]

That the solid disc that Marius saw was an artefact produced by the optics of the telescope, now known as an Airy Disc, was unknown not only to Marius but to all other users of the telescope at the time. It was first dismissed as an illusion by Edmond Halley at the end of the century. Interestingly, Galileo also observed the Airy discs with his telescopes but, knowing that they lent support to the Tychonic system, deliberately didn’t publish the information. 

I think the best way to describe what follow as “our wannabee historian has jumped the shark!” 

N.E: From several remarks in his works, it appears that Marius was a militant Lutheran. He kept up his correspondence with David Fabricius and Kepler’s former teacher, Michael Maestlin, both of whom were self-proclaimed Lutherans. Furthermore, Marius even defended Tycho Brahe’s Lutheran world system on scriptural as well as astronomical and physical grounds. 

By the time Marius was born, Lutheran Protestantism was an established religion, and he was born and brought up in a Lutheran area; Nürnberg, just down the road from Gunzenhausen, was the very first Lutheran city state. Unlike Kepler or Newton there is nothing in his work to suggest that he was particularly religious let alone militant. I hope David Fabricius and Michael Mästlin were Lutherans, although I don’t know what self-proclaimed is supposed to mean, as the former was a village pastor and the latter professor in Tübingen, a Lutheran university. 

To described Tycho’s world system as Lutheran is a joke. Yes, Tycho was Lutheran, as was the whole of Denmark at that time, but his world system is in no way denominational. Would our wannabee historian call the Copernican system Catholic, just because Copernicus was a Catholic cathedral canon? What about Kepler? He was also a Lutheran, who  had even worked with Tycho, but he propagated a heliocentric system! Maybe our wannabee historian is not aware that the Catholic Church in the early seventeenth century condemned Copernicus’ heliocentric system and the Jesuits adopted Tycho’s geo-heliocentric system as their official view of the cosmos around 1620, making it de facto the official position of the Catholic Church on cosmology. After all it’s a little-known episode in the history of astronomy!

N.E: It is interesting to note that while Marius was undoubtedly an observer of the most important astronomical discoveries of the early 17th century, he opposed the heliocentric view of the cosmos and favoured the Tychonic system. 

There is a light disparaging undertone to all of our wannabee historian’s comments about Marius supporting the Tychonic system. He appears either not to know, or perhaps even worse refuses to accept, that in the early seventeenth century the available empirical evidence was clearly in favour of a Tychonic or semi-Tychonic system over a heliocentric one, and that is why the majority of astronomer, and not just Marius, supported one. Support of a heliocentric system, at that time, was an act of faith. 

N.E: Perhaps it was Marius’ staunch belief in this system over that of the Copernican counterpoint that gave him pause to accept the reality of the eclipsing satellite phenomenon with Jupiter. 

On the subject of Jupiter eclipsing its moons, what Marius actually writes is:

That when near Jupiter something similar happens to them, so that they not only appear smaller, but as seems probable are actually obscured or eclipsed, is clear from the following consideration. Jupiter is not a transparent body, any more than Venus or Mercury; therefore throws a shadow on the side turned away from the Sun. How far such a shadow extends, and whether all four pass into it and are eclipsed once in each revolution, I will now show in as few words as may be.

[There now follow extensive careful considerations and calculations, which I will spare my readers]

Therefore all four Jovian bodies are within the shadow of Jupiter at the beginning of their movement, and are eclipsed.[7]

None of his consideration or calculation have anything whatsoever to do with his acceptance of a Tychonic system or his rejection of the Copernican one.

Neil English does get some of Marius’s life and work right, which I haven’t included in this overlong review of his highly dubious essay. He does, however, end on a positive note, emphasising that Martius was not the villain that Galileo presented him as in The Assayer.

N.E: To this day, Marius’ work is overshadowed by the accusation of plagiarism, even though it was demonstrated by a jury convened in the Netherlands in the early 1900s that he had, in fact, conducted much of his research entirely independently of others. In more recent times, Simon Marius was honoured by the astronomical community by the naming of a lunar crater after him in 1935, the 41-km-diameter Marius Crater. And in 1979 a region on Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede, was named Marius Regio. In 2014, asteroid (7984) Marius was named in his honour, discovered on September 29, 1980, by Czech astronomer Zdenka Vavrova at the Kiel Observatory, and provisionally designated 1980 SM. 

This doesn’t, however, excuse the badly researched garbage that precedes it.

Neil English’s article is four and a quarter-pages long and the quarter would fit easily into  the large gap on the title page between title and text, so actually only four pages long has a grand total of 2071 words [this blog post has 5500 words!] For this extremely short collection of errors, false statements, and at times total hogwash Springer in their wisdom demand, for a pdf, the princely sum of €29,95. The abysmal quality of English’s Marius essay raises, for me, the question as to whether the other essays in his book are also as badly researched? If they are then the €249.09 for the entire book can only be described as a brazen rip off! 

[1] Hans Gaab, Concerning the Biography of Simon Marius (1573–1626) in Hans Gaab & Pierre Leich eds., Simon Marius and His Research, Springer, 2018 pp. 91–92.

[2] J. L. Heilbron, Galileo, OUP, 2010 p. 103

[3] Gaab, Concerning the Biography…, p. 93

[4] Nola Taylor Redd, Who really discovered Jupiter’s four large moons?, Astronomy Magazine, December 15, 2016, quoting Jay Pasachoff. 

[5] Christopher M. Graney, An Astronomer Too Excellent: Simon Marius, the Telescope, and the Problem of the Stars During the Copernican Revolution, in Hans Gaab & Pierre Leich eds., Simon Marius and His Research, Springer, 2018 pp. 239–247

[6] Graney p. 242

[7] The World of Jupiter, English Translation of Mundus Iovialis, Arthur Octavius Prickard and Albert Van Helden, in Hans Gaab & Pierre Leich eds., Simon Marius and His Research, Springer, 2018 pp. 153 quoted passages p. 26 & p. 29

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Filed under Book Reviews, History of Astronomy, Myths of Science, Simon Marius