Review: Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel

Submitted by Anon on 30 September, 2001 - 12:27

In 1610, Galileo Galilei, as Bertolt Brecht put it, “abolished Heaven” — by proving the Earth was not the centre of the universe and that the Church’s entire theory of the cosmos, based on Aristotle and Ptolemy, was false. By pointing his telescope at the moons of Jupiter, he proved the celestial spheres were not immutable. Some Church astronomers refused to look. Eventually he was accused of heresy.
Dava Sobel, author of Longitude, recently dramatised on Channel Four, has written a fascinating biography of the man Einstein called the father of modern science. She has chosen also to deal with Galileo’s relationship with his eldest daughter, a nun known as Suor Maria Celeste — a relationship preserved through the daughter’s rather beautiful letters to her father during her adult life. But it is the story of the father which is most gripping.

Galileo provided physical evidence for the view of the universe of Copernicus, namely that the Earth was not the centre of it, but moved around the sun. It was revolutionary not only because it was true, but because it represented a sharp break with medieval science, which depended on the textual authority of ancient thinkers; instead, Galileo looked to observation and the evidence of his senses. He had already disproved, if not to clerical satisfaction, such Aristotelian theories as that objects of different weight fall at different speeds and that ice floats because it is flat.

The Catholic Church considered the notion that “the Earth moves” contrary to Scripture, but at first the Copernican system was permitted to be discussed “as a hypothesis”. When Galileo produced his magnum opus, Dialogue on the two world systems, in which a Copernican thrashed an Aristotelian, however, the Inquisition decided he had gone too far and forced him to recant. Galileo did recant, promising that Copernicus was wrong. His books were officially prohibited by the Church, a ban not lifted for two hundred years.
One of the many interesting things in Sobel’s book is that she places this conflict in a clear historical context. The Pope, Urban VIII — who in his days as a Cardinal had been friendly to Galileo and enlightened on the matter of Copernicus — had inadvisedly taken sides in the Thirty Years War in Germany, and was under pressure from critics to prove his ability to defend the Catholic faith. Galileo was thus something of a scapegoat.

Galileo was not an anti-religious thinker; far from it. Sobel shows in considerable detail how, throughout his life, he tried to reconcile his discoveries with his belief in God. Thus the threat he received from the Inquisition was not a purely physical one. Sobel goes into some depth regarding Galileo’s trial in 1633, even reproducing verbatim reports of it. She is sympathetic to his decision to capitulate, in part because he was old and sick, in part because he was concerned to prevent the banning of his book, but mostly because, from her account, he rightly felt he had broken no Church law in any case: he had presented the Copernican case, as they had insisted, as an unproven “hypothesis” only.

This is therefore a far cry from Brecht’s version in which Galileo’s capitulation is a betrayal of the struggle for truth against medieval obscurantism (or at least is seen as such by his followers).
She makes no suggestion, either, of any ideological conflict between Galileo and his favourite daughter. Maria Celeste’s letters are used to bring to life seventeenth century Italy — in particular the terrible plague which swept the country in the 1630s.

Other accounts of Galileo’s life suggest he was, among other things, an inveterate womaniser. Sobel says almost nothing of this, presenting instead a man who was ill for almost his entire life. I think there is a tendency here only to tell us sympathetic things about the great scientist.

But she has tremendous skill in explaining Galileo’s path-breaking ideas, not only about the Copernican system, but a wide range of other matters, including his final treatise on motion, which paved the way for Isaac Newton (who was born the year Galileo died).

Gerry Bates

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