Whatever your domestic circumstances these days, palace or one room flat,
your life is structured pretty much the same way by science and technology, isn't it?
I mean, look what we all take for granted.
The power that comes out of the wall, that's just a bit of it.
We fly to the moon, engineer genes,
computerise nature to play with it and find out how it works,
we shoot film of the Empress Maria Theresa’s palace in Vienna so you can watch it on TV,
we boil water to make steam, to drive turbines, to produce the current to make music come out of the air.
Or not.
And we expect to go on being able to learn new tricks like that
because one of our science-based abilities is to be able to predict.
That, after all, is what science is about:
learning enough about how a thing works, so you will know what comes next.
Because, as we all know, everything obeys universal laws.
All you need is to understand the laws.
We are healthier, wealthier, more comfortable, better informed
than ever before in history, thanks to science.
And each one of us has more power at a fingertip than any Empress who ever built a palace.
I can, for instance, go to the local library and pick up an almanac that will tell me to the second
what time the sun came up, here in Vienna, this morning.
As a matter of fact, at 6:55, it came up exactly eleven minutes and three seconds ago.
And I know that the Earth’s rotation in solar orbit will cause the Sun to come up when it is supposed to,
whether I see it or not, just as I know why this stone will fall like that.
Gravity.
And we know that like we know almost everything else about science,
thanks to a crisis that was making all the headlines here in Vienna
about 450 years ago. And it was a crisis, funnily enough,
that was to lead to people wondering why stones did what they did when you threw them.
In 1535, if you wanted a very private crisis meeting with the Imperial family,
you went for a hunt by the Vienna lakes.
What crisis? Luther, and what his protestants were doing to the Catholic Church, that's what.
So, here is the Pope’s man, bending the imperial ear with
papal plans for an emergency summit meeting to sort it all out.
Trouble is, the Germans won't come to the Italians who won’t go to the French who can’t stand the English.
After weeks of horse-trading, the imperial decision is
“the northern Italian city of Trento”, and “get on with it”.
In Trento, it all turned into a kind of “don’t do today what you can put-off till tomorrow”.
Imperial reps would turn up, a couple of cardinals,
somebody would go off sick, the Germans would walk out,
nobody would turn up at two meetings in a row!
Summit preparations took on every appearance of musical chairs.
You're not going to believe this, but for ten years,
the Church and the increasingly indifferent Imperial invitees
went on having talks about talks about what the summit meeting would be about.
Never mind when it would actually start.
Finally, here on a bitter December day, in the cathedral,
they stopped hanging about and got the show on the road,
even though only 32 members of the cast had turned up for the opening chorus.
This was where the Church was supposed to get a grip on itself,
and over 30 years, and five Popes,
the council did just that.
They made every priest go to school and pass exams,
cracked down on high living bishops,
beefed up the inquisition and effectively gave it power-of-thumbscrew,
produced a list of the books you could and couldn't read,
laid down dogma on marriage, purgatory, indulgences,
prayer books, worship, you name it,
set up the Jesuits as theological shock troops all over Europe to teach obedience,
and, above all,
they made it crystal clear that anybody who questioned the literal meaning
of one single word in the Bible,
would find himself in the cells before he knew what it hit him.
Now, in all this great counteroffensive against the Protestants,
the council was to okay something that would change the face of Europe.
I mean, put yourself in their position: in a gloomy church.
That was exactly the problem, religion was boring.
And if they were going to get the crowds back in again, they really had to put on a better performance.
So the last vote the council took was just a touch theatrical.
Here is the simple cross in front of which they announced all their decisions.
And here is what they did to it. The council had gone bananas.
They ordered lights, music, drama, razzmatazz into all the churches
to turn them into a kind of 16th century Hollywood heaven.
This was the stuff to pull the crowds in. We call it ‘Baroque Art’.
“Meanwhile”, as they say when the plot is about to thicken,
meanwhile, up here in the Polish port of Frombork, um,
the plot was about to thicken.
The plan, you remember, with all that song and dance stuff, was to get them flocking into church, right?
OK, then what? I mean, when was “then”?
Were you in Easter, Lent, or February the 29th? Because,
salvation-wise, what you did in church depended on what the date was.
And that was just it, they didn't know, exactly.
For instance, if Easter was supposed to fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon
after the beginning of the spring equinox,
which depended on a moon/sun cycle that couldn't be checked correctly,
except every 312 1/2 years,
and anyway, that night, the moon didn’t come up
and the calendar you were using was nine days out, which it was. I mean “what!”?
But Church authority was what held the whole of society together.
Everybody from the Prince in his castle, down and it depended
on the faithful doing what they supposed to do, at the right time.
Small wonder the Pope wanted the Sun and the Moon checked out better than they had been so far.
Well, when they were, here at the castle of Frombork,
his troubles were over. But not for long.
Because the astronomer priest here,
who had a go at clearing up the confusion in the sky, succeeded.
And in doing so, blew everything to kingdom come, if you will forgive the phrase.
Let me explain why his work was so revolutionary.
See, back at the beginning of the 16th century, what was up there
was what Aristotle said there was, had said, 2000 years before.
It was a straight, commonsense, “as I see it” view.
Let me show you a model of it.
Here, at the centre of everything, the Earth. Static.
Well, you can't feel any motion, can you? All around here, on concentric crystal spheres,
pushed through the sky by angels: the Moon, the Sun, the Planets and the Stars.
All wheeling around, once a day, in heavenly, unchanging circles.
Well they do, don't they? Heavenly motion was evidently circular.
Here on Earth, on the other hand, things only moved one way, in straight lines.
Up
or down.
So, if celestial circles were eternal,
obviously, straight-line earthly movement had to be the reason we weren't eternal.
Movement special to Earth.
Okay, this priest here, in 1512 or so,
took a closer look at the heavenly arrangement and didn't much like what he saw.
Which was Mars, for instance, among others, being very un-Aristotle.
I mean, it appeared, sometimes, to go backwards.
Now, that was supposed to be impossible,
so people had got round the difficulty with this little gizmo here.
See? There is Mars. It goes forward on its main circle,
while on an extra mini-circle, it goes backwards, backwards.
Good, eh? Solved the problem.
Trouble was, to make the entire solar system work in pure Aristotle terms like that,
took over 90 of those little fiddly bits.
It occurred to Copernicus, our priest, that there might be a simpler way
that would still be circular and that would allow for things seeming to go backwards.
So he came up with this:
if you put the Sun at the centre, and the Earth in orbit,
then you know what we now know. That that view of Mars going backwards isn't real,
it’s because it's in a slower orbit, further out than Earth.
Most of the time everybody appears to be going forwards, and then when we pass Mars,
it appears to go backwards.
And then, at other times, forwards again.
And similar problems for the whole sky were solved by this Sun-centred system.
Copernicus published his manuscript in 1543, just in time for the Council of Trent.
So, you are a Church father. What this new system of Copernicus is saying is this:
The Earth moves, although the Bible says it doesn’t.
It is no longer at the centre of God’s universe, although the Bible says it is.
It is a planet, so heaven and earth are no longer separate.
And Aristotle is wrong, though Church authority depends on Aristotle being right.
So, you are a Church father,
you pick up this subversive, heretical, revolutionary, lunacy
and what do you do? Foam at the mouth, right?
Wrong.
When the Council of Trent got round to reading what Copernicus had said,
they were delighted. His new system would make calendar-reform more precise.
And the business of turning every basic belief regarding the nature of the universe upside down?
A mere bagatelle. Since, from the Church’s point of view, back here in Fromborg,
Copernicus was talking nonsense. Literally.
After all, astronomy drew lines and circles up there in the sky, but they weren't really there, weren't they?
They were a mathematical convenience for measuring or teaching astronomy.
While the Copernican system might well have been brilliant mathematics,
nobody thought for a second he really meant that the Earth was whizzing around the Sun.
Don't be silly! That kind of talk would blow holes in everything.
Most unfortunately it was already too late for that kind of talk.
Nothing immediately theologically dangerous you understand,
just some people asking questions about what Aristotle had said about motion on Earth.
What were they upto? Nothing much, just blowing holes in everything.
Here is Nicolo Tartaglia, expert on the new terror weapon, the cannon,
trying very sensibly, to find out how to shoot it more accurately,
so his boss, the local Duke, can put his military and political standing up,
by knocking his enemies’ military and political standing down.
In the course of these dynamic deliberations,
Tartaglia was to discover something extremely awkward regarding that
business you remember about what Aristotle said on how things moved when they got propelled.
In straight lines on Earth, and in curves only in heaven.
Well, the more Tartaglia looked at what his cannonballs were doing,
the more it looked like they weren't doing what they were supposed to.
The ball went straight alright, straight out of the muzzle.
But it very definitely didn't just stop in mid-air and fall straight down, it curved.
Now, if the official view of circular motion only happening in heaven was wrong,
then stuff about planets and crystal-spheres was wrong.
And if that was wrong, everything was wrong.
Tartaglia, however, was interested only in what could have created a curving trajectory.
Air resistance?
And then, back in Venice, where he lived, Tartaglia found the answer in the most obvious of Venetian places.
On the canals, or the boats on the canals. And with his mania for practical application,
he made the idea available to everybody, because, in 1551,
he translated into Italian a book in Greek, by Archimedes, about
why boats floated the way they did.
Now, it doesn't take a genius to see why a book like that would go over big with the Venetians:
A) because Tartaglia wrote it in Italian and not Latin,
so the ordinary boat-builders and engineers could understand it,
and B), because messing about in boats is the Venetian line of business.
They were, after all the greatest maritime empire in the world at the time.
So, the book was a rave bestseller.
But the real reason why, was what it said about how, when a boat hit the water,
it got lighter by the weight of the water the hull displaced.
The water, as it were, changes the weight of the boat.
Well, if that happened to boats in one medium, water,
did it happen to different things in another medium, air? Things like flying cannonballs.
Because they were going through the air, just like the boats were going through the water.
That was the burning question.
Well, “the answer,”
said boring, authoritative Aristotle, remember him?
“the answer was ‘no’.
Nothing could change the way an object behaved, because every object had its own unique characteristics
and would always behave the same, in every medium.”
Well, it was time to call Aristotle’s bluff, and you could see he was talking rubbish.
Look, here is a stick, falling through air and not falling through water.
Maybe Tartaglia’s hunch about air resistance having some kind of effect on the flight of cannonballs,
was right after all. The answer had to be out there somewhere on the water.
It was, but on a totally different tack.
It was Tartaglia’s least favourite student, a guy called Benedetti,
who first saw the answer. Well, he could hardly miss it in Venice.
It wasn't weight that effected how anything moved, it was surface area.
Broad bows went slowly, sharp bows went fast.
The more surface area there was, the more resistance.
“Well, if that happened with water”, Benedetti asked himself, “did air offer resistance to surface area?
Was that why, say, a downy feather fell so slowly?”
If falling down behaved like this, what about the general kind of falling down?
Benedetti decided to drop everything and drop everything, if you see what I mean,
with the aid of some trusting friends below.
First of all, the assistants timed the falls of various balls.
They seemed to fall about the same speed.
But dropping one ball at a time wasn't good enough, so Benedetti tried dropping two.
Aristotle said weight mattered, two balls of different weights would fall at different speeds.
Wrong. Maybe Aristotle, whose word had ruled everything scientific for over 2000 years, was wrong elsewhere, too.
As Benedetti dropped his umpteenth ball,
it struck him that circular motion only being in heaven was rubbish.
Here was earthly circular motion. And when he tried making his own circular motion,
he got the answer. Circular motion became straight-line motion, once you released it.
Excuse me.
Well, some more things that weren’t supposed to happen were about to.
Here, on what has to be one of the more underwhelming places on Earth,
the Island of Hven, between Sweden and Denmark, both of whom often claim it belongs to the other.
Still, if it hadn't been quite so featureless, he might have been less observant.
He? Him, the one with a crick in his neck.
Danish nobleman, and the only astronomer in history with a metal replacement nose. Tycho Brahe.
One evening in 1572, in his customary position, staring up,
Brahe noticed a new light in the sky, made a few notes on the subject and became the rage of Europe.
Because Aristotle had said the sky was perfect and unchanging, and new stars couldn't happen.
So what was this? And, it had no parallax.
Parallax is the way a thing seems to shift as you do.
Look: watch this nearby cart compared with that distant lighthouse as I move my view.
See the cart move? That’s a shift in parallax.
The lighthouse doesn't shift, because it's too far away to show on that small move.
Now, you take a giant move, like the Earth going round the Sun.
Anything you watch during that, will have to be a long way away not to shift at all,
and Brahe’s new star didn't. So it was. A star.
Well, the King of Denmark was so impressed,
he offloaded the island on Brahe as a base of operations,
plus a financial sweetener, and Brahe turned up here, dug this hole to put a castle in,
and generally started behaving like a little Hitler.
Nasty piece of work, by all accounts.
Anyway, you will have noticed the wind.
So did he.
And built his observatory down another hole to get away from it.
Went down this second hole every night for 20 years, not much else to do around here.
And, whereas, all other astronomers were content with the odd observation or two,
Brahe watched everything, all night, every night,
with instruments like this, for measuring the angle of the heavenly bodies.
And came up with a mountain of data, which was why he was able to be clever
about next shock-horror in the sky, the comet of 1577.
Which, he said, was also a long way out, and not where Aristotle said it should be, in the atmosphere.
And, it was coming in through Aristotle's crystal spheres,
yet no sound of breaking glass. Maybe there were no crystal spheres.
But his the last discovery really floored Brahe, the comet was going in an oval path.
Well, A) guess who said that was impossible?
and B) how could a non circular orbit be regular,
not wobble about all over the place, hmm?
Meanwhile, the gunners were, unfortunately,
busy demolishing the whole philosophical argy bargy.
“Forget Aristotle,” they said, “watch this.”
If you aimed using the forbidden theory of mixed circular and straight line motion,
you hit.
Well, guess what happened next.
Yes, only this time the mathematics professor involved
slowed the falling ball process down by rolling his balls down a slope,
marked with numbers at equal intervals to see how long it all took.
He used a pendulum swing to get split-second timing on when he released each ball.
He spent months rolling different weight balls down different angled slopes,
hundreds of times, so as to get accurate average figures.
And, each time, watching how long it took the ball to go different lengths of the slope:
a third, quarter, fifth eighth, half and so on.
He measured the time with water. As the ball rolled whatever distance it was supposed to,
he would run water at a steady rate into a measuring jar,
because he could see immediately from each amount,
whether the ball was taking different times to do different bits of the journey.
In other words, if it was accelerating as it went down the slope.
What Galileo was looking for was some kind of law that all falling objects obeyed.
In 1604, he found it.
Everything accelerated as it fell, at exactly the same rate,
by Galileo’s Law we all learnt at school, 32 ft. per second per second.
It was the first time nature had been described
by mathematics that could be used in any circumstance to describe what nature was doing.
The beginning of what we know today as “the scientific revolution”.
Now, all that may look very mathematical and esoteric to you,
but in 1605, doing that kind of thing with balls was dangerous,
because what Galileo had discovered was the thing that Aristotle said couldn't exist:
a universal law of acceleration that every single falling object on Earth would obey.
And never mind all that nonsense about “each object its own unique characteristic”.
Now, contradicting Aristotle like that could have made life very hairy for Galileo,
had events not taken a turn for the safer with a new business proposition.
In July 1609, a friend of his showed him the new wonder machine from Holland,
a telescope. And one month later, Galileo was here in St Mark's Square in Venice,
with a financially very attractive idea in long-range optics.
“Up here”, he said.
“Up here, look through this”,
he suggested to a group of shipping merchants.
Galileo's new, improved version of the optical gizmo, would magnify distant objects nine times,
and that meant that you could spot the ships coming into anchor out there
ooh, a full two hours ahead of the average naked eye.
And that meant that you could get out your little commodity list,
ship symbol, cargo, value and fix the market prices accordingly,
because you knew the ship was coming in, and your customers didn't.
“Nice idea”, they said, “we will take 30,
and here is a fat salary to, err, keep it in the family.”
But, a bull-headed arrogant exhibitionist like Galileo
couldn’t keep his mouth or his options closed.
And in 1610, he did something only a lunatic would do,
he pointed an even better version of his telescope at the one place Aristotle and the Church said not to.
Up there. And when he saw what he saw, he compounded the felony by going public.
In a little 24 page booklet called “The Starry Messenger”
that blew 2500 years of authority and status quo right out of the window,
because in a few scribbled illustrations, Galileo took the universe apart.
Look, here's the Moon.
Not perfect and incorruptible, like Aristotle said it was, but with mountains, just like the Earth.
And millions more stars than there were supposed to be.
And, look at this, the unthinkable,
three or four little satellites going around Jupiter when everything was supposed to go round the Earth.
And a bit later, here he is saying that even the Sun isn’t perfect,
it’s got spots. And then the clincher, Venus looked like the Moon sometimes,
waxing and waning, and that meant that we were seeing it illuminated differently as it went round the Sun.
So, all of this was visible proof that Copernicus was right, after all.
Everything went round the Sun.
Even then, Galileo might have managed to keep things sweet,
had it not been for one breakfast time when his boss’s wife, the Duchess of Tuscany,
asked a friend of his if all this didn't mean that when the Bible said the Earth stood still,
it was wrong.
Well, in a polite letter explaining things to her,
Galileo said, “Yes,” and, not to put too fine a point on it, “scientifically speaking,
the Bible was wrong”.
And then everything hit the fan.
Now, the conventional view of what happened next is that
the Church decided to arrest Galileo and shut his mouth for good.
Well, he was arrested and shut up. But only after an infuriated Church had bent over backwards not to.
They said, “Look, we know you are right, but you can’t just spring it on the masses,
you have got to let us tell them slowly”.
Galileo told them to get lost, then he was arrested.
Copernicus was prohibited, and that, for the Catholic Church, was that.
Well, fortunately, Galileo hadn't blown it for everybody.
Not up here in Austria in the Protestant town of Eferding.
And why are we here? Well, you recall Brahe? He had finally gone off to work in Prague,
still worried about those wobbling orbits.
You remember, the comet he saw coming into the solar system on
an oval orbit and couldn't figure out how an oval path could remain stable without rolling around.
Like an oval wine barrel did when you put it down.
Well, it was wine barrels that provided the answer. The same shaped barrels they are delivering here now,
brought to this castle back then in 1613, for a wedding.
The groom was a local maths teacher, a fellow called Johann Keppler,
and his blushing bride, the adopted daughter of the people who lived in this castle.
Now, Keppler had just come back from Prague, where he had been Brahe’s assistant
and being a short sighted fellow, had tended to concentrate on the paperwork and calculations,
rather than actually staring up at the sky.
So when he saw the local Eferding delivery men
checking the wine in his barrels in what he took to be a rather imprecise manner,
I mean, same dipstick
but different shaped barrels, he decided to take a look at wine barrel mathematics.
A piece of cake when you had cut your teeth on measuring planetary orbits,
which is what he had been doing night and day for eleven years,
trying to make sense of what Brahe had left behind when he died,
a giant pile of nocturnal note takings.
Apart from convincing Keppler that the planets did go round the sun,
Brahe's mountain of data revealed something that shocked Keppler rigid.
Mars was circling the Sun, but it was speeding up and slowing down as it went.
And when he checked the figures to see if he had made a horrendous mistake,
he realised, that all the planets were going at different speeds,
the further out from the Sun, the slower. But why?
The only explanation for the figures was a kind of magnetic force from the Sun,
strong near it and weaker further out. A force
pulling the planets into orbital paths like Benedetti's swinging stones.
Or, into lopsided orbits that sped-up close-in and slowed down further-out and stayed that way
because the force was always there to keep the planets repeating exactly the same path.
But, was he right?
It took Keppler four years to work it out.
Mars wasn’t changing speed at irregular rate in a circle, and nor were the other planets.
It was doing it in an ellipse and it doing it like clockwork,
the change in speed exactly relative to the distance from the Sun.
Close-in, going fast, taking a month from there to there.
Far-out, going slow, a month from here to here.
But these areas, exactly equal.
You will notice that I am drawing little triangles like Keppler was.
That's because that's how they measured orbits: you split the orbit into zillions of little triangles
and used them to tell you the area and the approximate length of the orbit.
And that is why Keppler 's new method for measuring wine barrels,
which incidentally proved the dipstick method was fine, was such a big deal for astronomy,
it was immensely accurate.
Look,
Keppler split each barrel
into zillions of little cross sections, like that,
each one of which, on the edge, would look something like this.
Now, a rectangle is easy to measure and you fill this one almost with a little triangle.
That little leftover bit there is minimal.
That's why I keep using the technical term “zillions”.
The more sections you make, the smaller those little leftover bits there become.
And if you have an infinite number of sections, you get no leftover bits at all,
and total accuracy on the curve of a barrel, or the curve of an orbit.
Which was amazing stuff and advanced the state of the art of ‘orbital dynamics’, as it is called.
But it did create a problem almost as big as the one it solved.
Keppler might have been a genius at getting the sky to work according to his sums,
which left the only the mind-boggling problem of working the sums out.
Every time you wanted to check something, you were back to that ridiculous
business of horsing around with zillions of little triangles.
There had to be a better way than this.
Well, when it came to sums is, here was the place,
Holland, the home of sums. Commercial sums.
And, flat, sober and cosmopolitan, the Dutch loved science, if it made money.
That's really all Amsterdam got worked up about. Financial matters cashflow, bridging loans.
Incredibly, they didn't care about what the rest of Europe was burning and torturing people for.
The dull, middle-class Dutch let you say and do and think almost anything you liked,
the first truly tolerant nation in Europe. And because of it, knee deep in refugees.
One of which, a French thinker called Rene Descartes, in 1637,
came up with an entirely new way of looking at everything. Including, of course, balls in the sky.
Look, however I move, I'm either going along or up, aren’t I?
Descartes tried setting that movement against two scales.
One showing how far up, the other, how far along.
So, run me by again with numbers. Up one, along five.
Up two, along 16. Up three, along 25.
And you could describe any movement like that on Descartes's new graph.
Now, suppose I want to do that with a cannonball.
Say I want to shoot it out at 100 feet per second, like this.
Here is the trajectory, here is the scales. Call up, “y” and along, “x”.
So you can describe this trajectory in xs and ys.
And you could put in Galileo's law, Tartaglia’s air resistance, speed, anything,
and fire your cannon on paper,
because now you could fire it in an equation.
Now, you see what that means, with a system like that, there is no more mumbo-jumbo.
Just mathematics, that you can now use to describe and predict everything,
even the stuff you can't handle, like the planets.
All you needed to get the really precise data you could now handle with your fancy new maths,
was instruments and there were none better than those made in mid 17th century England.
Calculators, logorithms, slide rules, vacuum pumps, microscopes,
theodolites, quadrants, thermometers, barometers, clocks,
the new instruments and techniques made it possible to examine everything
from the microscopically small, to, more important for us,
the astronomically large. And start getting really accurate figures.
The fellow who put it all together, literally,
why Benedetti’s stones went off in a straight line when you let them go; why Galleleo’s balls fell at the same rate;
why Keppler’s planets went fast in round the Sun and slow far out from it;
and the clever way that Descartes could turn trajectories into algebra,
the fellow who put all that together was the first person in history
who could have explained mathematically what I am about to go through now.
And why the whole universe goes through it. What am I talking about?
This.
Galileo's accelerating fall, now,
Benedetti’s outward swing, now,
Keppler’s orbits with their changing speeds,
Keppler’s slow down as I go over the top.
Fortunately for the fellow who made sense of it all,
he didn't have to go through this.
He says he just sat and watched this:
He reckoned the force that made things fall was the same downward
pull as the one Keppler said held the planets as they swung around the Sun
and stopped them flying off like Benedetti’s stones,
because this force attracted everything to everything else.
He worked out a formula for how the force should operate based on how far apart things were.
Well, he knew the Moon was 60 times further out from the centre of the Earth
than he was, so he tried his formula on the Moon.
The pull of the Earth ought to be acting like a hold on the Moon,
counteracting its tendency to fly straight off into space,
by exactly the amount of force required to keep it in orbit at that distance.
So our genius, using an advanced form of infinitestimal calculation
you remember Keppler and the wine barrels, worked out where the Moon’s path ought to go
if the force acted, as his formula said it should, that far from Earth
at 44 thousandths of a foot per second.
Bending the Moon’s path inwards.
Sure enough, that was just what the Moon did. To the inch.
His formula explained what everything else did, too.
Planets, pendulums, apples, fairground swings, everything.
The force Newton named ‘gravity’ kept the universe balanced, made it work,
and brought heaven and earth together in one great equation.
And, just as his formula would tell you when what went up would come down,
so it told his friend Edmund Halley,
when the great comet he saw leaving the solar system in 1680 would come back,
exactly 77 years later.
We end the story where we began.
Here, in the Empress Maria Therea’s palace in Vienna.
Because the year the Halley's comet was due back, 1757,
there was a fellow here who was, so to speak, to dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s on the whole affair.
He was a Jesuit astronomer
and mathematician, engineer, geographer, geodesist, and general genius
called Roger Boscovich.
Now, Boscovich had done a lot of work on comets, like
how to get a very accurate handle on their trajectory from any three observations.
And he had put in a prize-winning paper to the French Academy of Sciences,
he was one of their foreign correspondents, on the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn,
and it was through that enormous gravitational tug-of-war,
that the returning Halley’s comet had to come on its way back into the solar system.
The question was, when?
That's why the Boscovich’s work was kind of vital to the French astronomers watching for Halley,
because it told them that the comet would be returning late.
Even before they picked it up on their telescopes, thanks to Boscovich, they knew it would be 19 months late.
I said Boscovich ended the story for another reason too.
He was, among his many talents, like fixing the cracks in Maria Theresa’s library,
also science adviser to the Pope, and it was mainly due to him,
that the prohibition on Copernicus would be lifted.
Fittingly, the great work went back into general circulation on the library shelves of Europe
in 1758.
The same year Halley’s comet finally came back.
Ultimate physical proof that Newton had been right, that the universe was ruled by mathematics.
Well, that was the end of friend Aristotle, and magic crystal spheres in the sky,
and questions science shouldn't ask. And the beginning of our modern world dominated by science and technology,
and the confidence they give us to explore everything from sub-atomic particles
to the ends of outer space, without fear.
Mind you, you need the confidence.
If, as Keppler said and Newton proved, it all does work like clockwork,
there is nobody out there to care.
Well, it may be fun to explore nature, to boldly go where no man has gone before,
but in Newton's universe, you are no longer the centre of attention while you do it.
You are on your own. Just a cog in the cosmic clock.