1 00:00:35,984 --> 00:00:41,743 Whatever your domestic circumstances these days, palace or one room flat, 2 00:00:42,111 --> 00:00:46,809 your life is structured pretty much the same way by science and technology, isn't it? 3 00:00:47,242 --> 00:00:50,836 I mean, look what we all take for granted. 4 00:00:51,485 --> 00:00:55,642 The power that comes out of the wall, that's just a bit of it. 5 00:00:58,695 --> 00:01:01,921 We fly to the moon, engineer genes, 6 00:01:02,159 --> 00:01:06,467 computerise nature to play with it and find out how it works, 7 00:01:06,835 --> 00:01:11,446 we shoot film of the Empress Maria Theresa’s palace in Vienna so you can watch it on TV, 8 00:01:11,792 --> 00:01:18,157 we boil water to make steam, to drive turbines, to produce the current to make music come out of the air. 9 00:01:19,001 --> 00:01:20,170 Or not. 10 00:01:23,093 --> 00:01:26,167 And we expect to go on being able to learn new tricks like that 11 00:01:26,168 --> 00:01:30,086 because one of our science-based abilities is to be able to predict. 12 00:01:30,433 --> 00:01:32,771 That, after all, is what science is about: 13 00:01:32,879 --> 00:01:36,646 learning enough about how a thing works, so you will know what comes next. 14 00:01:36,863 --> 00:01:41,907 Because, as we all know, everything obeys universal laws. 15 00:01:43,877 --> 00:01:46,756 All you need is to understand the laws. 16 00:01:48,900 --> 00:01:52,688 We are healthier, wealthier, more comfortable, better informed 17 00:01:52,689 --> 00:01:55,308 than ever before in history, thanks to science. 18 00:01:55,309 --> 00:02:01,456 And each one of us has more power at a fingertip than any Empress who ever built a palace. 19 00:02:22,716 --> 00:02:28,085 I can, for instance, go to the local library and pick up an almanac that will tell me to the second 20 00:02:28,129 --> 00:02:30,987 what time the sun came up, here in Vienna, this morning. 21 00:02:31,073 --> 00:02:37,005 As a matter of fact, at 6:55, it came up exactly eleven minutes and three seconds ago. 22 00:02:37,178 --> 00:02:43,088 And I know that the Earth’s rotation in solar orbit will cause the Sun to come up when it is supposed to, 23 00:02:43,306 --> 00:02:48,545 whether I see it or not, just as I know why this stone will fall like that. 24 00:02:48,913 --> 00:02:49,844 Gravity. 25 00:02:50,321 --> 00:02:54,196 And we know that like we know almost everything else about science, 26 00:02:54,369 --> 00:02:58,115 thanks to a crisis that was making all the headlines here in Vienna 27 00:02:58,245 --> 00:03:02,445 about 450 years ago. And it was a crisis, funnily enough, 28 00:03:02,596 --> 00:03:08,485 that was to lead to people wondering why stones did what they did when you threw them. 29 00:03:17,924 --> 00:03:23,033 In 1535, if you wanted a very private crisis meeting with the Imperial family, 30 00:03:23,206 --> 00:03:25,609 you went for a hunt by the Vienna lakes. 31 00:03:25,696 --> 00:03:30,935 What crisis? Luther, and what his protestants were doing to the Catholic Church, that's what. 32 00:03:35,114 --> 00:03:38,361 So, here is the Pope’s man, bending the imperial ear with 33 00:03:38,362 --> 00:03:41,955 papal plans for an emergency summit meeting to sort it all out. 34 00:03:41,956 --> 00:03:47,368 Trouble is, the Germans won't come to the Italians who won’t go to the French who can’t stand the English. 35 00:03:48,320 --> 00:03:51,633 After weeks of horse-trading, the imperial decision is 36 00:03:51,654 --> 00:03:55,573 “the northern Italian city of Trento”, and “get on with it”. 37 00:04:11,247 --> 00:04:16,335 In Trento, it all turned into a kind of “don’t do today what you can put-off till tomorrow”. 38 00:04:16,378 --> 00:04:20,037 Imperial reps would turn up, a couple of cardinals, 39 00:04:20,038 --> 00:04:23,237 somebody would go off sick, the Germans would walk out, 40 00:04:23,238 --> 00:04:25,939 nobody would turn up at two meetings in a row! 41 00:04:26,077 --> 00:04:31,429 Summit preparations took on every appearance of musical chairs. 42 00:04:40,799 --> 00:04:44,089 You're not going to believe this, but for ten years, 43 00:04:44,090 --> 00:04:48,506 the Church and the increasingly indifferent Imperial invitees 44 00:04:48,558 --> 00:04:53,148 went on having talks about talks about what the summit meeting would be about. 45 00:04:53,321 --> 00:04:55,227 Never mind when it would actually start. 46 00:04:59,694 --> 00:05:03,591 Finally, here on a bitter December day, in the cathedral, 47 00:05:03,678 --> 00:05:05,825 they stopped hanging about and got the show on the road, 48 00:05:06,414 --> 00:05:09,947 even though only 32 members of the cast had turned up for the opening chorus. 49 00:05:10,225 --> 00:05:12,909 This was where the Church was supposed to get a grip on itself, 50 00:05:13,065 --> 00:05:16,979 and over 30 years, and five Popes, 51 00:05:17,169 --> 00:05:18,971 the council did just that. 52 00:05:19,506 --> 00:05:22,485 They made every priest go to school and pass exams, 53 00:05:22,659 --> 00:05:24,910 cracked down on high living bishops, 54 00:05:24,944 --> 00:05:29,014 beefed up the inquisition and effectively gave it power-of-thumbscrew, 55 00:05:29,343 --> 00:05:31,802 produced a list of the books you could and couldn't read, 56 00:05:32,166 --> 00:05:36,132 laid down dogma on marriage, purgatory, indulgences, 57 00:05:36,202 --> 00:05:38,436 prayer books, worship, you name it, 58 00:05:38,730 --> 00:05:43,199 set up the Jesuits as theological shock troops all over Europe to teach obedience, 59 00:05:43,615 --> 00:05:44,862 and, above all, 60 00:05:45,035 --> 00:05:48,793 they made it crystal clear that anybody who questioned the literal meaning 61 00:05:48,845 --> 00:05:51,131 of one single word in the Bible, 62 00:05:51,270 --> 00:05:54,699 would find himself in the cells before he knew what it hit him. 63 00:05:57,331 --> 00:06:01,644 Now, in all this great counteroffensive against the Protestants, 64 00:06:01,765 --> 00:06:05,921 the council was to okay something that would change the face of Europe. 65 00:06:06,077 --> 00:06:09,403 I mean, put yourself in their position: in a gloomy church. 66 00:06:09,507 --> 00:06:12,849 That was exactly the problem, religion was boring. 67 00:06:12,988 --> 00:06:18,011 And if they were going to get the crowds back in again, they really had to put on a better performance. 68 00:06:18,964 --> 00:06:23,519 So the last vote the council took was just a touch theatrical. 69 00:06:23,883 --> 00:06:27,849 Here is the simple cross in front of which they announced all their decisions. 70 00:06:28,178 --> 00:06:32,508 And here is what they did to it. The council had gone bananas. 71 00:06:32,542 --> 00:06:37,478 They ordered lights, music, drama, razzmatazz into all the churches 72 00:06:37,479 --> 00:06:41,791 to turn them into a kind of 16th century Hollywood heaven. 73 00:06:42,900 --> 00:06:47,749 This was the stuff to pull the crowds in. We call it ‘Baroque Art’. 74 00:07:01,034 --> 00:07:04,481 “Meanwhile”, as they say when the plot is about to thicken, 75 00:07:04,498 --> 00:07:09,088 meanwhile, up here in the Polish port of Frombork, um, 76 00:07:09,296 --> 00:07:11,513 the plot was about to thicken. 77 00:07:15,427 --> 00:07:20,311 The plan, you remember, with all that song and dance stuff, was to get them flocking into church, right? 78 00:07:20,467 --> 00:07:24,208 OK, then what? I mean, when was “then”? 79 00:07:24,415 --> 00:07:28,225 Were you in Easter, Lent, or February the 29th? Because, 80 00:07:28,295 --> 00:07:32,711 salvation-wise, what you did in church depended on what the date was. 81 00:07:32,712 --> 00:07:35,915 And that was just it, they didn't know, exactly. 82 00:07:36,400 --> 00:07:41,977 For instance, if Easter was supposed to fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon 83 00:07:41,978 --> 00:07:43,986 after the beginning of the spring equinox, 84 00:07:44,038 --> 00:07:47,744 which depended on a moon/sun cycle that couldn't be checked correctly, 85 00:07:47,745 --> 00:07:50,411 except every 312 1/2 years, 86 00:07:50,412 --> 00:07:52,697 and anyway, that night, the moon didn’t come up 87 00:07:52,905 --> 00:07:56,854 and the calendar you were using was nine days out, which it was. I mean “what!”? 88 00:07:56,975 --> 00:08:00,958 But Church authority was what held the whole of society together. 89 00:08:00,959 --> 00:08:04,231 Everybody from the Prince in his castle, down and it depended 90 00:08:04,232 --> 00:08:08,318 on the faithful doing what they supposed to do, at the right time. 91 00:08:08,544 --> 00:08:13,203 Small wonder the Pope wanted the Sun and the Moon checked out better than they had been so far. 92 00:08:13,393 --> 00:08:16,355 Well, when they were, here at the castle of Frombork, 93 00:08:16,580 --> 00:08:20,547 his troubles were over. But not for long. 94 00:08:26,401 --> 00:08:29,346 Because the astronomer priest here, 95 00:08:29,502 --> 00:08:34,334 who had a go at clearing up the confusion in the sky, succeeded. 96 00:08:34,630 --> 00:08:39,185 And in doing so, blew everything to kingdom come, if you will forgive the phrase. 97 00:08:40,467 --> 00:08:44,554 Let me explain why his work was so revolutionary. 98 00:08:44,744 --> 00:08:48,918 See, back at the beginning of the 16th century, what was up there 99 00:08:48,988 --> 00:08:52,902 was what Aristotle said there was, had said, 2000 years before. 100 00:08:53,058 --> 00:08:57,232 It was a straight, commonsense, “as I see it” view. 101 00:08:58,428 --> 00:09:00,073 Let me show you a model of it. 102 00:09:05,528 --> 00:09:09,581 Here, at the centre of everything, the Earth. Static. 103 00:09:09,703 --> 00:09:15,314 Well, you can't feel any motion, can you? All around here, on concentric crystal spheres, 104 00:09:15,435 --> 00:09:21,203 pushed through the sky by angels: the Moon, the Sun, the Planets and the Stars. 105 00:09:21,550 --> 00:09:26,624 All wheeling around, once a day, in heavenly, unchanging circles. 106 00:09:26,867 --> 00:09:30,781 Well they do, don't they? Heavenly motion was evidently circular. 107 00:09:31,041 --> 00:09:36,184 Here on Earth, on the other hand, things only moved one way, in straight lines. 108 00:09:36,271 --> 00:09:37,085 Up 109 00:09:38,037 --> 00:09:39,025 or down. 110 00:09:40,358 --> 00:09:43,822 So, if celestial circles were eternal, 111 00:09:43,978 --> 00:09:48,533 obviously, straight-line earthly movement had to be the reason we weren't eternal. 112 00:09:48,654 --> 00:09:50,386 Movement special to Earth. 113 00:09:54,577 --> 00:09:58,162 Okay, this priest here, in 1512 or so, 114 00:09:58,163 --> 00:10:02,821 took a closer look at the heavenly arrangement and didn't much like what he saw. 115 00:10:02,908 --> 00:10:07,532 Which was Mars, for instance, among others, being very un-Aristotle. 116 00:10:07,653 --> 00:10:11,862 I mean, it appeared, sometimes, to go backwards. 117 00:10:12,191 --> 00:10:14,442 Now, that was supposed to be impossible, 118 00:10:14,581 --> 00:10:18,495 so people had got round the difficulty with this little gizmo here. 119 00:10:19,552 --> 00:10:23,622 See? There is Mars. It goes forward on its main circle, 120 00:10:23,709 --> 00:10:28,091 while on an extra mini-circle, it goes backwards, backwards. 121 00:10:29,632 --> 00:10:32,022 Good, eh? Solved the problem. 122 00:10:32,300 --> 00:10:37,807 Trouble was, to make the entire solar system work in pure Aristotle terms like that, 123 00:10:38,154 --> 00:10:40,527 took over 90 of those little fiddly bits. 124 00:10:41,826 --> 00:10:46,416 It occurred to Copernicus, our priest, that there might be a simpler way 125 00:10:46,537 --> 00:10:51,421 that would still be circular and that would allow for things seeming to go backwards. 126 00:10:51,664 --> 00:10:53,552 So he came up with this: 127 00:10:53,846 --> 00:10:57,570 if you put the Sun at the centre, and the Earth in orbit, 128 00:10:57,899 --> 00:11:03,423 then you know what we now know. That that view of Mars going backwards isn't real, 129 00:11:03,424 --> 00:11:06,195 it’s because it's in a slower orbit, further out than Earth. 130 00:11:06,367 --> 00:11:11,476 Most of the time everybody appears to be going forwards, and then when we pass Mars, 131 00:11:11,944 --> 00:11:13,814 it appears to go backwards. 132 00:11:19,478 --> 00:11:22,855 And then, at other times, forwards again. 133 00:11:23,374 --> 00:11:29,401 And similar problems for the whole sky were solved by this Sun-centred system. 134 00:11:33,402 --> 00:11:39,325 Copernicus published his manuscript in 1543, just in time for the Council of Trent. 135 00:11:39,585 --> 00:11:45,179 So, you are a Church father. What this new system of Copernicus is saying is this: 136 00:11:45,455 --> 00:11:48,937 The Earth moves, although the Bible says it doesn’t. 137 00:11:49,197 --> 00:11:53,197 It is no longer at the centre of God’s universe, although the Bible says it is. 138 00:11:53,977 --> 00:11:57,337 It is a planet, so heaven and earth are no longer separate. 139 00:11:58,049 --> 00:12:02,812 And Aristotle is wrong, though Church authority depends on Aristotle being right. 140 00:12:03,661 --> 00:12:05,965 So, you are a Church father, 141 00:12:06,000 --> 00:12:10,104 you pick up this subversive, heretical, revolutionary, lunacy 142 00:12:10,105 --> 00:12:13,153 and what do you do? Foam at the mouth, right? 143 00:12:13,499 --> 00:12:14,867 Wrong. 144 00:12:15,491 --> 00:12:19,024 When the Council of Trent got round to reading what Copernicus had said, 145 00:12:19,111 --> 00:12:24,238 they were delighted. His new system would make calendar-reform more precise. 146 00:12:24,619 --> 00:12:29,295 And the business of turning every basic belief regarding the nature of the universe upside down? 147 00:12:29,694 --> 00:12:34,474 A mere bagatelle. Since, from the Church’s point of view, back here in Fromborg, 148 00:12:34,526 --> 00:12:37,349 Copernicus was talking nonsense. Literally. 149 00:12:37,729 --> 00:12:42,908 After all, astronomy drew lines and circles up there in the sky, but they weren't really there, weren't they? 150 00:12:42,943 --> 00:12:47,844 They were a mathematical convenience for measuring or teaching astronomy. 151 00:12:48,225 --> 00:12:52,156 While the Copernican system might well have been brilliant mathematics, 152 00:12:52,208 --> 00:12:55,637 nobody thought for a second he really meant that the Earth was whizzing around the Sun. 153 00:12:56,503 --> 00:13:00,123 Don't be silly! That kind of talk would blow holes in everything. 154 00:13:00,885 --> 00:13:04,765 Most unfortunately it was already too late for that kind of talk. 155 00:13:04,782 --> 00:13:07,605 Nothing immediately theologically dangerous you understand, 156 00:13:07,606 --> 00:13:12,333 just some people asking questions about what Aristotle had said about motion on Earth. 157 00:13:12,611 --> 00:13:17,426 What were they upto? Nothing much, just blowing holes in everything. 158 00:13:35,888 --> 00:13:40,876 Here is Nicolo Tartaglia, expert on the new terror weapon, the cannon, 159 00:13:40,990 --> 00:13:44,523 trying very sensibly, to find out how to shoot it more accurately, 160 00:13:44,540 --> 00:13:48,784 so his boss, the local Duke, can put his military and political standing up, 161 00:13:48,992 --> 00:13:52,525 by knocking his enemies’ military and political standing down. 162 00:13:57,860 --> 00:14:00,752 In the course of these dynamic deliberations, 163 00:14:00,753 --> 00:14:04,493 Tartaglia was to discover something extremely awkward regarding that 164 00:14:04,494 --> 00:14:09,932 business you remember about what Aristotle said on how things moved when they got propelled. 165 00:14:09,967 --> 00:14:13,448 In straight lines on Earth, and in curves only in heaven. 166 00:14:16,670 --> 00:14:19,960 Well, the more Tartaglia looked at what his cannonballs were doing, 167 00:14:19,995 --> 00:14:24,429 the more it looked like they weren't doing what they were supposed to. 168 00:14:28,915 --> 00:14:31,409 The ball went straight alright, straight out of the muzzle. 169 00:14:31,444 --> 00:14:36,969 But it very definitely didn't just stop in mid-air and fall straight down, it curved. 170 00:14:41,091 --> 00:14:45,680 Now, if the official view of circular motion only happening in heaven was wrong, 171 00:14:45,785 --> 00:14:48,799 then stuff about planets and crystal-spheres was wrong. 172 00:14:48,800 --> 00:14:51,500 And if that was wrong, everything was wrong. 173 00:14:51,812 --> 00:14:56,922 Tartaglia, however, was interested only in what could have created a curving trajectory. 174 00:14:57,199 --> 00:14:59,087 Air resistance? 175 00:15:09,704 --> 00:15:15,350 And then, back in Venice, where he lived, Tartaglia found the answer in the most obvious of Venetian places. 176 00:15:15,471 --> 00:15:21,083 On the canals, or the boats on the canals. And with his mania for practical application, 177 00:15:21,326 --> 00:15:24,703 he made the idea available to everybody, because, in 1551, 178 00:15:24,964 --> 00:15:28,774 he translated into Italian a book in Greek, by Archimedes, about 179 00:15:28,775 --> 00:15:31,424 why boats floated the way they did. 180 00:15:31,979 --> 00:15:36,257 Now, it doesn't take a genius to see why a book like that would go over big with the Venetians: 181 00:15:36,499 --> 00:15:39,721 A) because Tartaglia wrote it in Italian and not Latin, 182 00:15:39,722 --> 00:15:43,115 so the ordinary boat-builders and engineers could understand it, 183 00:15:43,254 --> 00:15:47,532 and B), because messing about in boats is the Venetian line of business. 184 00:15:47,533 --> 00:15:51,723 They were, after all the greatest maritime empire in the world at the time. 185 00:15:53,213 --> 00:15:56,330 So, the book was a rave bestseller. 186 00:15:57,526 --> 00:16:02,011 But the real reason why, was what it said about how, when a boat hit the water, 187 00:16:02,080 --> 00:16:05,787 it got lighter by the weight of the water the hull displaced. 188 00:16:05,788 --> 00:16:09,788 The water, as it were, changes the weight of the boat. 189 00:16:23,678 --> 00:16:27,610 Well, if that happened to boats in one medium, water, 190 00:16:27,800 --> 00:16:33,619 did it happen to different things in another medium, air? Things like flying cannonballs. 191 00:16:33,620 --> 00:16:36,546 Because they were going through the air, just like the boats were going through the water. 192 00:16:36,547 --> 00:16:38,036 That was the burning question. 193 00:16:38,278 --> 00:16:39,906 Well, “the answer,” 194 00:16:40,339 --> 00:16:43,578 said boring, authoritative Aristotle, remember him? 195 00:16:43,579 --> 00:16:45,882 “the answer was ‘no’. 196 00:16:46,037 --> 00:16:51,372 Nothing could change the way an object behaved, because every object had its own unique characteristics 197 00:16:51,373 --> 00:16:54,367 and would always behave the same, in every medium.” 198 00:16:55,077 --> 00:16:59,009 Well, it was time to call Aristotle’s bluff, and you could see he was talking rubbish. 199 00:16:59,494 --> 00:17:05,729 Look, here is a stick, falling through air and not falling through water. 200 00:17:06,907 --> 00:17:12,085 Maybe Tartaglia’s hunch about air resistance having some kind of effect on the flight of cannonballs, 201 00:17:12,137 --> 00:17:16,692 was right after all. The answer had to be out there somewhere on the water. 202 00:17:17,004 --> 00:17:20,052 It was, but on a totally different tack. 203 00:17:26,339 --> 00:17:30,028 It was Tartaglia’s least favourite student, a guy called Benedetti, 204 00:17:30,029 --> 00:17:33,423 who first saw the answer. Well, he could hardly miss it in Venice. 205 00:17:33,647 --> 00:17:38,566 It wasn't weight that effected how anything moved, it was surface area. 206 00:17:40,922 --> 00:17:44,541 Broad bows went slowly, sharp bows went fast. 207 00:17:44,715 --> 00:17:48,906 The more surface area there was, the more resistance. 208 00:17:55,643 --> 00:18:01,982 “Well, if that happened with water”, Benedetti asked himself, “did air offer resistance to surface area? 209 00:18:02,415 --> 00:18:07,143 Was that why, say, a downy feather fell so slowly?” 210 00:18:20,185 --> 00:18:24,775 If falling down behaved like this, what about the general kind of falling down? 211 00:18:25,312 --> 00:18:29,988 Benedetti decided to drop everything and drop everything, if you see what I mean, 212 00:18:30,161 --> 00:18:33,954 with the aid of some trusting friends below. 213 00:18:37,920 --> 00:18:41,730 First of all, the assistants timed the falls of various balls. 214 00:18:46,232 --> 00:18:48,969 They seemed to fall about the same speed. 215 00:18:49,384 --> 00:18:55,325 But dropping one ball at a time wasn't good enough, so Benedetti tried dropping two. 216 00:18:55,948 --> 00:19:01,421 Aristotle said weight mattered, two balls of different weights would fall at different speeds. 217 00:19:03,898 --> 00:19:10,151 Wrong. Maybe Aristotle, whose word had ruled everything scientific for over 2000 years, was wrong elsewhere, too. 218 00:19:10,358 --> 00:19:13,649 As Benedetti dropped his umpteenth ball, 219 00:19:14,151 --> 00:19:17,702 it struck him that circular motion only being in heaven was rubbish. 220 00:19:17,892 --> 00:19:22,499 Here was earthly circular motion. And when he tried making his own circular motion, 221 00:19:22,690 --> 00:19:29,080 he got the answer. Circular motion became straight-line motion, once you released it. 222 00:19:40,632 --> 00:19:42,000 Excuse me. 223 00:19:45,672 --> 00:19:49,066 Well, some more things that weren’t supposed to happen were about to. 224 00:19:49,067 --> 00:19:53,361 Here, on what has to be one of the more underwhelming places on Earth, 225 00:19:53,483 --> 00:19:59,215 the Island of Hven, between Sweden and Denmark, both of whom often claim it belongs to the other. 226 00:19:59,303 --> 00:20:03,875 Still, if it hadn't been quite so featureless, he might have been less observant. 227 00:20:04,083 --> 00:20:07,512 He? Him, the one with a crick in his neck. 228 00:20:08,083 --> 00:20:14,110 Danish nobleman, and the only astronomer in history with a metal replacement nose. Tycho Brahe. 229 00:20:15,149 --> 00:20:20,207 One evening in 1572, in his customary position, staring up, 230 00:20:20,380 --> 00:20:26,026 Brahe noticed a new light in the sky, made a few notes on the subject and became the rage of Europe. 231 00:20:26,269 --> 00:20:31,448 Because Aristotle had said the sky was perfect and unchanging, and new stars couldn't happen. 232 00:20:31,725 --> 00:20:35,812 So what was this? And, it had no parallax. 233 00:20:38,375 --> 00:20:41,891 Parallax is the way a thing seems to shift as you do. 234 00:20:42,029 --> 00:20:47,849 Look: watch this nearby cart compared with that distant lighthouse as I move my view. 235 00:20:49,096 --> 00:20:52,473 See the cart move? That’s a shift in parallax. 236 00:20:57,098 --> 00:21:01,462 The lighthouse doesn't shift, because it's too far away to show on that small move. 237 00:21:01,774 --> 00:21:05,550 Now, you take a giant move, like the Earth going round the Sun. 238 00:21:05,584 --> 00:21:10,746 Anything you watch during that, will have to be a long way away not to shift at all, 239 00:21:11,057 --> 00:21:16,097 and Brahe’s new star didn't. So it was. A star. 240 00:21:16,928 --> 00:21:19,959 Well, the King of Denmark was so impressed, 241 00:21:19,960 --> 00:21:23,752 he offloaded the island on Brahe as a base of operations, 242 00:21:23,942 --> 00:21:29,519 plus a financial sweetener, and Brahe turned up here, dug this hole to put a castle in, 243 00:21:29,520 --> 00:21:32,308 and generally started behaving like a little Hitler. 244 00:21:32,464 --> 00:21:34,369 Nasty piece of work, by all accounts. 245 00:21:35,703 --> 00:21:38,145 Anyway, you will have noticed the wind. 246 00:21:38,405 --> 00:21:39,583 So did he. 247 00:21:39,721 --> 00:21:43,531 And built his observatory down another hole to get away from it. 248 00:21:44,864 --> 00:21:49,852 Went down this second hole every night for 20 years, not much else to do around here. 249 00:21:54,060 --> 00:21:58,927 And, whereas, all other astronomers were content with the odd observation or two, 250 00:21:59,100 --> 00:22:02,980 Brahe watched everything, all night, every night, 251 00:22:03,101 --> 00:22:07,639 with instruments like this, for measuring the angle of the heavenly bodies. 252 00:22:08,315 --> 00:22:12,315 And came up with a mountain of data, which was why he was able to be clever 253 00:22:12,368 --> 00:22:17,598 about next shock-horror in the sky, the comet of 1577. 254 00:22:17,633 --> 00:22:23,626 Which, he said, was also a long way out, and not where Aristotle said it should be, in the atmosphere. 255 00:22:23,764 --> 00:22:27,903 And, it was coming in through Aristotle's crystal spheres, 256 00:22:28,198 --> 00:22:32,164 yet no sound of breaking glass. Maybe there were no crystal spheres. 257 00:22:32,666 --> 00:22:38,883 But his the last discovery really floored Brahe, the comet was going in an oval path. 258 00:22:39,299 --> 00:22:41,828 Well, A) guess who said that was impossible? 259 00:22:41,949 --> 00:22:45,447 and B) how could a non circular orbit be regular, 260 00:22:45,603 --> 00:22:48,357 not wobble about all over the place, hmm? 261 00:22:54,697 --> 00:22:57,364 Meanwhile, the gunners were, unfortunately, 262 00:22:57,365 --> 00:23:00,187 busy demolishing the whole philosophical argy bargy. 263 00:23:00,188 --> 00:23:02,993 “Forget Aristotle,” they said, “watch this.” 264 00:23:14,943 --> 00:23:19,325 If you aimed using the forbidden theory of mixed circular and straight line motion, 265 00:23:19,326 --> 00:23:20,762 you hit. 266 00:23:26,927 --> 00:23:29,265 Well, guess what happened next. 267 00:23:30,685 --> 00:23:34,322 Yes, only this time the mathematics professor involved 268 00:23:34,323 --> 00:23:39,016 slowed the falling ball process down by rolling his balls down a slope, 269 00:23:39,017 --> 00:23:43,138 marked with numbers at equal intervals to see how long it all took. 270 00:23:44,887 --> 00:23:50,274 He used a pendulum swing to get split-second timing on when he released each ball. 271 00:23:52,058 --> 00:23:55,868 He spent months rolling different weight balls down different angled slopes, 272 00:23:55,869 --> 00:23:59,298 hundreds of times, so as to get accurate average figures. 273 00:23:59,402 --> 00:24:03,957 And, each time, watching how long it took the ball to go different lengths of the slope: 274 00:24:04,199 --> 00:24:07,906 a third, quarter, fifth eighth, half and so on. 275 00:24:13,777 --> 00:24:19,146 He measured the time with water. As the ball rolled whatever distance it was supposed to, 276 00:24:19,822 --> 00:24:22,853 he would run water at a steady rate into a measuring jar, 277 00:24:22,957 --> 00:24:25,503 because he could see immediately from each amount, 278 00:24:25,504 --> 00:24:30,300 whether the ball was taking different times to do different bits of the journey. 279 00:24:31,201 --> 00:24:38,180 In other words, if it was accelerating as it went down the slope. 280 00:24:43,671 --> 00:24:49,126 What Galileo was looking for was some kind of law that all falling objects obeyed. 281 00:24:49,420 --> 00:24:52,313 In 1604, he found it. 282 00:24:52,608 --> 00:24:56,262 Everything accelerated as it fell, at exactly the same rate, 283 00:24:56,401 --> 00:25:01,856 by Galileo’s Law we all learnt at school, 32 ft. per second per second. 284 00:25:08,524 --> 00:25:11,001 It was the first time nature had been described 285 00:25:11,002 --> 00:25:15,660 by mathematics that could be used in any circumstance to describe what nature was doing. 286 00:25:15,938 --> 00:25:20,268 The beginning of what we know today as “the scientific revolution”. 287 00:25:34,453 --> 00:25:38,956 Now, all that may look very mathematical and esoteric to you, 288 00:25:39,216 --> 00:25:44,412 but in 1605, doing that kind of thing with balls was dangerous, 289 00:25:44,741 --> 00:25:50,317 because what Galileo had discovered was the thing that Aristotle said couldn't exist: 290 00:25:50,560 --> 00:25:55,514 a universal law of acceleration that every single falling object on Earth would obey. 291 00:25:55,515 --> 00:26:00,553 And never mind all that nonsense about “each object its own unique characteristic”. 292 00:26:01,055 --> 00:26:06,788 Now, contradicting Aristotle like that could have made life very hairy for Galileo, 293 00:26:07,325 --> 00:26:11,828 had events not taken a turn for the safer with a new business proposition. 294 00:26:13,560 --> 00:26:18,531 In July 1609, a friend of his showed him the new wonder machine from Holland, 295 00:26:18,532 --> 00:26:23,363 a telescope. And one month later, Galileo was here in St Mark's Square in Venice, 296 00:26:23,397 --> 00:26:28,333 with a financially very attractive idea in long-range optics. 297 00:26:30,117 --> 00:26:32,213 “Up here”, he said. 298 00:26:40,492 --> 00:26:43,783 “Up here, look through this”, 299 00:26:43,784 --> 00:26:48,113 he suggested to a group of shipping merchants. 300 00:26:53,101 --> 00:26:58,037 Galileo's new, improved version of the optical gizmo, would magnify distant objects nine times, 301 00:26:58,349 --> 00:27:02,488 and that meant that you could spot the ships coming into anchor out there 302 00:27:02,489 --> 00:27:05,987 ooh, a full two hours ahead of the average naked eye. 303 00:27:06,333 --> 00:27:09,589 And that meant that you could get out your little commodity list, 304 00:27:09,590 --> 00:27:14,750 ship symbol, cargo, value and fix the market prices accordingly, 305 00:27:14,976 --> 00:27:18,422 because you knew the ship was coming in, and your customers didn't. 306 00:27:18,924 --> 00:27:23,237 “Nice idea”, they said, “we will take 30, 307 00:27:23,462 --> 00:27:26,995 and here is a fat salary to, err, keep it in the family.” 308 00:27:34,962 --> 00:27:39,881 But, a bull-headed arrogant exhibitionist like Galileo 309 00:27:40,279 --> 00:27:42,669 couldn’t keep his mouth or his options closed. 310 00:27:43,068 --> 00:27:46,306 And in 1610, he did something only a lunatic would do, 311 00:27:46,757 --> 00:27:53,633 he pointed an even better version of his telescope at the one place Aristotle and the Church said not to. 312 00:27:53,909 --> 00:27:59,815 Up there. And when he saw what he saw, he compounded the felony by going public. 313 00:28:00,110 --> 00:28:03,851 In a little 24 page booklet called “The Starry Messenger” 314 00:28:04,076 --> 00:28:10,121 that blew 2500 years of authority and status quo right out of the window, 315 00:28:10,468 --> 00:28:15,421 because in a few scribbled illustrations, Galileo took the universe apart. 316 00:28:15,628 --> 00:28:18,676 Look, here's the Moon. 317 00:28:19,005 --> 00:28:24,738 Not perfect and incorruptible, like Aristotle said it was, but with mountains, just like the Earth. 318 00:28:25,275 --> 00:28:28,098 And millions more stars than there were supposed to be. 319 00:28:28,409 --> 00:28:30,072 And, look at this, the unthinkable, 320 00:28:30,245 --> 00:28:34,765 three or four little satellites going around Jupiter when everything was supposed to go round the Earth. 321 00:28:35,181 --> 00:28:39,546 And a bit later, here he is saying that even the Sun isn’t perfect, 322 00:28:39,650 --> 00:28:45,071 it’s got spots. And then the clincher, Venus looked like the Moon sometimes, 323 00:28:45,072 --> 00:28:51,722 waxing and waning, and that meant that we were seeing it illuminated differently as it went round the Sun. 324 00:28:52,017 --> 00:28:57,057 So, all of this was visible proof that Copernicus was right, after all. 325 00:28:58,633 --> 00:29:00,764 Everything went round the Sun. 326 00:29:03,344 --> 00:29:06,843 Even then, Galileo might have managed to keep things sweet, 327 00:29:07,709 --> 00:29:13,130 had it not been for one breakfast time when his boss’s wife, the Duchess of Tuscany, 328 00:29:13,131 --> 00:29:18,342 asked a friend of his if all this didn't mean that when the Bible said the Earth stood still, 329 00:29:18,758 --> 00:29:20,490 it was wrong. 330 00:29:21,512 --> 00:29:25,253 Well, in a polite letter explaining things to her, 331 00:29:25,495 --> 00:29:29,756 Galileo said, “Yes,” and, not to put too fine a point on it, “scientifically speaking, 332 00:29:29,963 --> 00:29:31,869 the Bible was wrong”. 333 00:29:32,353 --> 00:29:35,090 And then everything hit the fan. 334 00:29:46,019 --> 00:29:49,223 Now, the conventional view of what happened next is that 335 00:29:49,224 --> 00:29:52,704 the Church decided to arrest Galileo and shut his mouth for good. 336 00:29:53,137 --> 00:29:59,511 Well, he was arrested and shut up. But only after an infuriated Church had bent over backwards not to. 337 00:30:04,724 --> 00:30:09,002 They said, “Look, we know you are right, but you can’t just spring it on the masses, 338 00:30:09,003 --> 00:30:11,254 you have got to let us tell them slowly”. 339 00:30:11,548 --> 00:30:15,445 Galileo told them to get lost, then he was arrested. 340 00:30:15,446 --> 00:30:21,144 Copernicus was prohibited, and that, for the Catholic Church, was that. 341 00:30:32,402 --> 00:30:35,883 Well, fortunately, Galileo hadn't blown it for everybody. 342 00:30:35,884 --> 00:30:39,416 Not up here in Austria in the Protestant town of Eferding. 343 00:30:39,417 --> 00:30:45,390 And why are we here? Well, you recall Brahe? He had finally gone off to work in Prague, 344 00:30:45,391 --> 00:30:48,629 still worried about those wobbling orbits. 345 00:30:48,732 --> 00:30:52,958 You remember, the comet he saw coming into the solar system on 346 00:30:52,959 --> 00:30:58,726 an oval orbit and couldn't figure out how an oval path could remain stable without rolling around. 347 00:30:59,453 --> 00:31:02,363 Like an oval wine barrel did when you put it down. 348 00:31:02,466 --> 00:31:07,714 Well, it was wine barrels that provided the answer. The same shaped barrels they are delivering here now, 349 00:31:07,922 --> 00:31:13,187 brought to this castle back then in 1613, for a wedding. 350 00:31:16,461 --> 00:31:20,878 The groom was a local maths teacher, a fellow called Johann Keppler, 351 00:31:21,016 --> 00:31:25,312 and his blushing bride, the adopted daughter of the people who lived in this castle. 352 00:31:25,606 --> 00:31:30,161 Now, Keppler had just come back from Prague, where he had been Brahe’s assistant 353 00:31:30,162 --> 00:31:34,647 and being a short sighted fellow, had tended to concentrate on the paperwork and calculations, 354 00:31:34,803 --> 00:31:37,055 rather than actually staring up at the sky. 355 00:31:37,505 --> 00:31:40,362 So when he saw the local Eferding delivery men 356 00:31:40,570 --> 00:31:44,952 checking the wine in his barrels in what he took to be a rather imprecise manner, 357 00:31:45,178 --> 00:31:47,654 I mean, same dipstick 358 00:31:49,542 --> 00:31:55,535 but different shaped barrels, he decided to take a look at wine barrel mathematics. 359 00:31:55,621 --> 00:31:59,206 A piece of cake when you had cut your teeth on measuring planetary orbits, 360 00:31:59,207 --> 00:32:01,735 which is what he had been doing night and day for eleven years, 361 00:32:01,822 --> 00:32:04,905 trying to make sense of what Brahe had left behind when he died, 362 00:32:05,095 --> 00:32:08,455 a giant pile of nocturnal note takings. 363 00:32:13,443 --> 00:32:17,583 Apart from convincing Keppler that the planets did go round the sun, 364 00:32:17,773 --> 00:32:21,947 Brahe's mountain of data revealed something that shocked Keppler rigid. 365 00:32:22,137 --> 00:32:27,247 Mars was circling the Sun, but it was speeding up and slowing down as it went. 366 00:32:27,472 --> 00:32:31,005 And when he checked the figures to see if he had made a horrendous mistake, 367 00:32:31,213 --> 00:32:34,608 he realised, that all the planets were going at different speeds, 368 00:32:34,763 --> 00:32:39,041 the further out from the Sun, the slower. But why? 369 00:32:41,587 --> 00:32:46,159 The only explanation for the figures was a kind of magnetic force from the Sun, 370 00:32:46,263 --> 00:32:49,259 strong near it and weaker further out. A force 371 00:32:49,276 --> 00:32:53,156 pulling the planets into orbital paths like Benedetti's swinging stones. 372 00:32:53,380 --> 00:32:59,511 Or, into lopsided orbits that sped-up close-in and slowed down further-out and stayed that way 373 00:32:59,512 --> 00:33:05,504 because the force was always there to keep the planets repeating exactly the same path. 374 00:33:05,505 --> 00:33:08,258 But, was he right? 375 00:33:10,025 --> 00:33:13,125 It took Keppler four years to work it out. 376 00:33:13,350 --> 00:33:17,922 Mars wasn’t changing speed at irregular rate in a circle, and nor were the other planets. 377 00:33:18,147 --> 00:33:22,425 It was doing it in an ellipse and it doing it like clockwork, 378 00:33:22,477 --> 00:33:26,564 the change in speed exactly relative to the distance from the Sun. 379 00:33:26,859 --> 00:33:30,911 Close-in, going fast, taking a month from there to there. 380 00:33:31,085 --> 00:33:34,185 Far-out, going slow, a month from here to here. 381 00:33:34,496 --> 00:33:38,601 But these areas, exactly equal. 382 00:33:38,999 --> 00:33:41,614 You will notice that I am drawing little triangles like Keppler was. 383 00:33:41,719 --> 00:33:46,655 That's because that's how they measured orbits: you split the orbit into zillions of little triangles 384 00:33:46,656 --> 00:33:51,401 and used them to tell you the area and the approximate length of the orbit. 385 00:33:51,799 --> 00:33:54,882 And that is why Keppler 's new method for measuring wine barrels, 386 00:33:54,933 --> 00:33:59,402 which incidentally proved the dipstick method was fine, was such a big deal for astronomy, 387 00:33:59,471 --> 00:34:00,874 it was immensely accurate. 388 00:34:01,116 --> 00:34:01,601 Look, 389 00:34:02,537 --> 00:34:04,823 Keppler split each barrel 390 00:34:05,153 --> 00:34:08,010 into zillions of little cross sections, like that, 391 00:34:08,391 --> 00:34:12,028 each one of which, on the edge, would look something like this. 392 00:34:13,674 --> 00:34:19,719 Now, a rectangle is easy to measure and you fill this one almost with a little triangle. 393 00:34:19,720 --> 00:34:22,143 That little leftover bit there is minimal. 394 00:34:22,663 --> 00:34:25,988 That's why I keep using the technical term “zillions”. 395 00:34:26,490 --> 00:34:31,391 The more sections you make, the smaller those little leftover bits there become. 396 00:34:31,599 --> 00:34:35,565 And if you have an infinite number of sections, you get no leftover bits at all, 397 00:34:35,669 --> 00:34:42,320 and total accuracy on the curve of a barrel, or the curve of an orbit. 398 00:34:42,978 --> 00:34:47,776 Which was amazing stuff and advanced the state of the art of ‘orbital dynamics’, as it is called. 399 00:34:47,897 --> 00:34:51,811 But it did create a problem almost as big as the one it solved. 400 00:34:53,561 --> 00:34:58,081 Keppler might have been a genius at getting the sky to work according to his sums, 401 00:34:58,082 --> 00:35:01,736 which left the only the mind-boggling problem of working the sums out. 402 00:35:01,927 --> 00:35:05,322 Every time you wanted to check something, you were back to that ridiculous 403 00:35:05,323 --> 00:35:08,353 business of horsing around with zillions of little triangles. 404 00:35:08,682 --> 00:35:11,020 There had to be a better way than this. 405 00:35:20,961 --> 00:35:24,148 Well, when it came to sums is, here was the place, 406 00:35:24,269 --> 00:35:27,907 Holland, the home of sums. Commercial sums. 407 00:35:27,908 --> 00:35:33,899 And, flat, sober and cosmopolitan, the Dutch loved science, if it made money. 408 00:35:33,900 --> 00:35:40,117 That's really all Amsterdam got worked up about. Financial matters cashflow, bridging loans. 409 00:35:40,705 --> 00:35:45,901 Incredibly, they didn't care about what the rest of Europe was burning and torturing people for. 410 00:35:46,074 --> 00:35:51,322 The dull, middle-class Dutch let you say and do and think almost anything you liked, 411 00:35:51,323 --> 00:35:56,864 the first truly tolerant nation in Europe. And because of it, knee deep in refugees. 412 00:35:57,037 --> 00:36:02,389 One of which, a French thinker called Rene Descartes, in 1637, 413 00:36:02,597 --> 00:36:07,377 came up with an entirely new way of looking at everything. Including, of course, balls in the sky. 414 00:36:07,672 --> 00:36:12,608 Look, however I move, I'm either going along or up, aren’t I? 415 00:36:12,989 --> 00:36:17,024 Descartes tried setting that movement against two scales. 416 00:36:17,076 --> 00:36:20,886 One showing how far up, the other, how far along. 417 00:36:21,492 --> 00:36:27,277 So, run me by again with numbers. Up one, along five. 418 00:36:27,659 --> 00:36:33,063 Up two, along 16. Up three, along 25. 419 00:36:33,201 --> 00:36:38,206 And you could describe any movement like that on Descartes's new graph. 420 00:36:38,673 --> 00:36:41,375 Now, suppose I want to do that with a cannonball. 421 00:36:41,600 --> 00:36:45,601 Say I want to shoot it out at 100 feet per second, like this. 422 00:36:47,108 --> 00:36:52,979 Here is the trajectory, here is the scales. Call up, “y” and along, “x”. 423 00:36:53,032 --> 00:36:56,305 So you can describe this trajectory in xs and ys. 424 00:36:56,306 --> 00:37:01,172 And you could put in Galileo's law, Tartaglia’s air resistance, speed, anything, 425 00:37:01,173 --> 00:37:03,424 and fire your cannon on paper, 426 00:37:03,425 --> 00:37:06,922 because now you could fire it in an equation. 427 00:37:08,862 --> 00:37:13,192 Now, you see what that means, with a system like that, there is no more mumbo-jumbo. 428 00:37:13,193 --> 00:37:18,284 Just mathematics, that you can now use to describe and predict everything, 429 00:37:18,491 --> 00:37:21,332 even the stuff you can't handle, like the planets. 430 00:37:40,713 --> 00:37:45,701 All you needed to get the really precise data you could now handle with your fancy new maths, 431 00:37:45,702 --> 00:37:51,746 was instruments and there were none better than those made in mid 17th century England. 432 00:37:58,570 --> 00:38:03,142 Calculators, logorithms, slide rules, vacuum pumps, microscopes, 433 00:38:03,143 --> 00:38:06,848 theodolites, quadrants, thermometers, barometers, clocks, 434 00:38:06,849 --> 00:38:10,536 the new instruments and techniques made it possible to examine everything 435 00:38:10,537 --> 00:38:13,879 from the microscopically small, to, more important for us, 436 00:38:13,880 --> 00:38:18,607 the astronomically large. And start getting really accurate figures. 437 00:38:33,507 --> 00:38:36,624 The fellow who put it all together, literally, 438 00:38:36,641 --> 00:38:42,547 why Benedetti’s stones went off in a straight line when you let them go; why Galleleo’s balls fell at the same rate; 439 00:38:42,548 --> 00:38:46,895 why Keppler’s planets went fast in round the Sun and slow far out from it; 440 00:38:46,896 --> 00:38:50,723 and the clever way that Descartes could turn trajectories into algebra, 441 00:38:50,724 --> 00:38:54,117 the fellow who put all that together was the first person in history 442 00:38:54,118 --> 00:38:57,304 who could have explained mathematically what I am about to go through now. 443 00:38:57,305 --> 00:39:01,409 And why the whole universe goes through it. What am I talking about? 444 00:39:01,721 --> 00:39:02,864 This. 445 00:39:03,765 --> 00:39:07,402 Galileo's accelerating fall, now, 446 00:39:09,221 --> 00:39:12,234 Benedetti’s outward swing, now, 447 00:39:13,637 --> 00:39:17,032 Keppler’s orbits with their changing speeds, 448 00:39:20,149 --> 00:39:22,834 Keppler’s slow down as I go over the top. 449 00:39:26,314 --> 00:39:29,518 Fortunately for the fellow who made sense of it all, 450 00:39:29,692 --> 00:39:32,030 he didn't have to go through this. 451 00:39:32,429 --> 00:39:36,568 He says he just sat and watched this: 452 00:39:40,985 --> 00:39:44,674 He reckoned the force that made things fall was the same downward 453 00:39:44,675 --> 00:39:48,778 pull as the one Keppler said held the planets as they swung around the Sun 454 00:39:48,779 --> 00:39:51,636 and stopped them flying off like Benedetti’s stones, 455 00:39:51,637 --> 00:39:55,532 because this force attracted everything to everything else. 456 00:39:55,584 --> 00:40:00,745 He worked out a formula for how the force should operate based on how far apart things were. 457 00:40:01,143 --> 00:40:04,348 Well, he knew the Moon was 60 times further out from the centre of the Earth 458 00:40:04,349 --> 00:40:07,205 than he was, so he tried his formula on the Moon. 459 00:40:07,656 --> 00:40:10,947 The pull of the Earth ought to be acting like a hold on the Moon, 460 00:40:11,033 --> 00:40:14,220 counteracting its tendency to fly straight off into space, 461 00:40:14,341 --> 00:40:18,965 by exactly the amount of force required to keep it in orbit at that distance. 462 00:40:19,121 --> 00:40:23,329 So our genius, using an advanced form of infinitestimal calculation 463 00:40:23,434 --> 00:40:28,578 you remember Keppler and the wine barrels, worked out where the Moon’s path ought to go 464 00:40:28,579 --> 00:40:32,527 if the force acted, as his formula said it should, that far from Earth 465 00:40:32,528 --> 00:40:35,592 at 44 thousandths of a foot per second. 466 00:40:35,593 --> 00:40:38,242 Bending the Moon’s path inwards. 467 00:40:38,484 --> 00:40:42,225 Sure enough, that was just what the Moon did. To the inch. 468 00:40:44,719 --> 00:40:47,490 His formula explained what everything else did, too. 469 00:40:47,491 --> 00:40:51,993 Planets, pendulums, apples, fairground swings, everything. 470 00:40:53,171 --> 00:40:58,246 The force Newton named ‘gravity’ kept the universe balanced, made it work, 471 00:40:58,247 --> 00:41:02,905 and brought heaven and earth together in one great equation. 472 00:41:04,101 --> 00:41:08,033 And, just as his formula would tell you when what went up would come down, 473 00:41:08,034 --> 00:41:10,302 so it told his friend Edmund Halley, 474 00:41:10,303 --> 00:41:14,666 when the great comet he saw leaving the solar system in 1680 would come back, 475 00:41:14,667 --> 00:41:17,697 exactly 77 years later. 476 00:41:21,577 --> 00:41:24,262 We end the story where we began. 477 00:41:24,781 --> 00:41:28,470 Here, in the Empress Maria Therea’s palace in Vienna. 478 00:41:28,851 --> 00:41:32,523 Because the year the Halley's comet was due back, 1757, 479 00:41:32,749 --> 00:41:37,269 there was a fellow here who was, so to speak, to dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s on the whole affair. 480 00:41:37,546 --> 00:41:39,416 He was a Jesuit astronomer 481 00:41:39,675 --> 00:41:44,404 and mathematician, engineer, geographer, geodesist, and general genius 482 00:41:44,508 --> 00:41:46,344 called Roger Boscovich. 483 00:41:46,500 --> 00:41:50,051 Now, Boscovich had done a lot of work on comets, like 484 00:41:50,052 --> 00:41:54,484 how to get a very accurate handle on their trajectory from any three observations. 485 00:41:54,969 --> 00:41:59,108 And he had put in a prize-winning paper to the French Academy of Sciences, 486 00:41:59,109 --> 00:42:03,698 he was one of their foreign correspondents, on the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn, 487 00:42:03,802 --> 00:42:07,681 and it was through that enormous gravitational tug-of-war, 488 00:42:07,682 --> 00:42:11,838 that the returning Halley’s comet had to come on its way back into the solar system. 489 00:42:11,839 --> 00:42:14,556 The question was, when? 490 00:42:18,730 --> 00:42:23,873 That's why the Boscovich’s work was kind of vital to the French astronomers watching for Halley, 491 00:42:24,116 --> 00:42:26,714 because it told them that the comet would be returning late. 492 00:42:27,060 --> 00:42:33,399 Even before they picked it up on their telescopes, thanks to Boscovich, they knew it would be 19 months late. 493 00:42:33,866 --> 00:42:37,694 I said Boscovich ended the story for another reason too. 494 00:42:37,780 --> 00:42:42,560 He was, among his many talents, like fixing the cracks in Maria Theresa’s library, 495 00:42:42,561 --> 00:42:46,630 also science adviser to the Pope, and it was mainly due to him, 496 00:42:46,631 --> 00:42:50,753 that the prohibition on Copernicus would be lifted. 497 00:42:52,692 --> 00:42:58,373 Fittingly, the great work went back into general circulation on the library shelves of Europe 498 00:42:58,996 --> 00:43:00,365 in 1758. 499 00:43:00,677 --> 00:43:03,206 The same year Halley’s comet finally came back. 500 00:43:03,327 --> 00:43:09,805 Ultimate physical proof that Newton had been right, that the universe was ruled by mathematics. 501 00:43:10,116 --> 00:43:15,104 Well, that was the end of friend Aristotle, and magic crystal spheres in the sky, 502 00:43:15,190 --> 00:43:21,477 and questions science shouldn't ask. And the beginning of our modern world dominated by science and technology, 503 00:43:21,719 --> 00:43:25,789 and the confidence they give us to explore everything from sub-atomic particles 504 00:43:25,790 --> 00:43:28,318 to the ends of outer space, without fear. 505 00:43:28,630 --> 00:43:31,799 Mind you, you need the confidence. 506 00:43:31,886 --> 00:43:36,458 If, as Keppler said and Newton proved, it all does work like clockwork, 507 00:43:36,579 --> 00:43:39,402 there is nobody out there to care. 508 00:43:39,645 --> 00:43:45,188 Well, it may be fun to explore nature, to boldly go where no man has gone before, 509 00:43:45,378 --> 00:43:49,864 but in Newton's universe, you are no longer the centre of attention while you do it. 510 00:43:50,124 --> 00:43:55,354 You are on your own. Just a cog in the cosmic clock.