[Vision2020] The Starry Messenger

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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January 18, 2013
The Starry Messenger

This is a month when anyone with a telescope or good binoculars can gaze up
at one of the brightest objects in the night sky and revisit a staggering
achievement in astronomy: Galileo’s
discovery<http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/jupiter_satellites.html>,
over several January days in 1610, of Jupiter’s four largest moons.

At first, Galileo thought he was seeing stars. But watching them move in
relation to Jupiter, he figured out what they really were — an epiphany
that began to upend the given view of the universe. Here was a celestial
body with other celestial bodies circling it. For a biblical cosmology that
placed Earth at the center of all that moved, the implications would prove
devastating.

The Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan has a beautifully preserved
relic of that scientific triumph: the scrap of an
envelope<http://www.themorgan.org/collections/collections.asp?id=149>on
which Galileo, in 1611, tracked the shifting positions of the Jovian
moons. He had published his findings about the moons the year before in
“The Starry Messenger,” and he was working, night after night, to better
define the periods of the moons’ orbits. In his (literally!)
back-of-the-envelope jottings and little pictures, one can sense a great
mind puzzling out a perplexing story.

Galileo’s achievement was the end of geocentrism, but it was hardly the end
of ignorance and magical thinking. When obstinacy places reason under
siege, as it does to this day — when fundamentalism defames biological
science in the classroom, or the politics of denial prevent action to deal
with a changing climate, it helps to recall our debt to a man who set a
different example more than 400 years ago. It took just a wooden tube and
some polished lenses, a critical and inquisitive mind, and four points of
light that didn’t behave the way they were supposed to.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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