You’d think a wall panel in the Galileo gallery in the Galileo wing of the Galileo Museum would be a good place to get an accurate context for Galileo’s historical significance.
You’d be wrong:
“These astronomical discoveries heralded a revolution destined to demolish an image of the universe that had lasted for two thousand years. The profound shock of that revolution, undermining faith in man’s privileged position in the universe, aroused violent antagonism that was to claim Galileo himself as victim.”
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
One of the expectations we bring to museums is that we might learn something. Of course, that expectation isn’t always met. A few years ago I went to a fashion exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; to judge from the accompanying descriptions on the wall, the purpose of the exhibit was to convince the public that humans on occasion alter their outward appearance in order to enhance their sexual attractiveness.
At least that information was accurate. After the February 2000 opening of the Rose Center for Earth and Space—the giant glass cube that fronts the 81st Street side of the American Museum of Natural History in New York—friends would occasionally ask me to take them on an informal tour. The tour always had to include a stop at the Big Bang Theater because we, like all visitors, had no choice but to pass through it in order to reach the Heilbrun Cosmic Pathway, a spiral exhibit that provides a timeline of the universe. And so the friend and I would dutifully stand, gripping a railing, staring down at a 36-foot-diameter screen in a bowl. We would see a recreation of the birth of the universe. We would also hear it: a deafening BOOM! Or, I guess, BANG!
Wrong.
“The Big Bang didn’t make a noise,” I would inform the friend when the lights came up, and then we’d step out of the theater and continue with the rest of our journey through the timeline of the universe.
Still, the inaccuracy in that presentation amounts to exactly one. I don’t mean to single out the Galileo Museum, in Florence; I’ve written about it before, and I can safely swear that it would fulfill the expectation that a museum will teach everybody something. But the misinformation on that wall panel is so extensive, and so mutually, maddeningly reinforcing over the course of the second sentence in particular, that I don’t know where to begin.
Actually, that’s not true. After some thought, I do know where I want to begin: the end. Because that’s where I can start to retrace the chain of illogic to its source.
Wrong #3: that “the profound shock of the revolution . . . was to claim Galileo himself as victim.” What landed Galileo before the Inquisition and then under house arrest for the rest of his life wasn’t any “shock of the revolution” but his challenge to the Church authority in matters astronomical. He insisted he was qualified not simply to present evidence that the Earth orbits the Sun—the job that traditionally was the purview of mathematicians like himself—but to interpret that evidence—the job that traditionally was the purview of the Church elders, relying on Scripture. (That Galileo modeled a hapless character in his Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems on the pope and then gave him the name Simplicio didn’t help.)
Wrong #2: that “the profound shock of that revolution . . . aroused violent antagonism.” Actually, the Church had no problem with the evidence that Galileo gathered through the telescope. Shorty after Galileo published his initial findings about the moons of Jupiter and other phenomena, the Jesuit mathematicians at the Collegio Romano reported to their superior, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, that their own observations through telescopes corroborated Galileo’s. The Collegio then threw a banquet at which Galileo was guest of honor.
Wrong #1: that “the profound shock of that revolution” was due to Galileo’s “undermining faith in man’s privileged position in the universe.” Man’s position wasn’t privileged, except in a negative way. According to the prevailing philosophical beliefs at the time, the celestial realm was perfect, the terrestrial (literally, “of the earth”) not just imperfect, but worse: “the filth and mire of the world, the worst, lowest, most lifeless part of the universe, the bottom story of the house,” as the French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote in 1576. If Galileo’s evidence wound up showing that the Earth wasn’t at the center of the universe—a possibility that Galileo made explicit in his Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger, the 1610 pamphlet in which he reported his initial discoveries—it would actually be doing Earth a favor: “she is not the dump heap of the filth and dregs of the universe.”
Which brings me to the source of the confusion in the writing on the Galileo Museum’s wall: “the profound shock of that revolution.” Galileo’s revolutionary observations provided many a “profound shock,” just not the fictitious ones that the panel cites.
Myths happen. They arise because they seem to reinforce a useful universal lesson, and they endure if we really want to believe that lesson—in this case, that earlier generations, not knowing any better, suffered the sin of pride, thereby providing a cautionary tale for us later generations as we consider our own interpretation of our place in the universe. The sin of pride, though, more correctly belongs to the myth perpetuators who would have us believe we are less hubristic than our ancestors.
What Galileo did was big enough. What the Big Bang did was even bigger. Neither needs any help from the likes of us.
* * *
Credits: DIY graffiti courtesy of http://www.fontsquirrel.com/; American Museum of Natural History.
On your comment about myths: There are myths, and there are myths. One type is exactly the type you present here, the reinforcement-of-useful-lesson myth. Another, probably the most simplistic and least useful, is the “myth = lie” model. A third, my hands-down favorite use of the word, is the myth that explains simply a truth that in its factual detail is just too complex for the audience to understand. Best example: all the various Creation myths. “It may not have happened just this way, but I know these things are true.”
I love those distinctions, Steve. Thanks.
My buddy just came back from Romania and visited some of the Vlad (The Impaler) Tepes tourist sites. Even though ol’ Vlad was originally a hero, like a Romanian Robin Hood, these days all the Romanians can talk about is Dracula. It woud be like going to a “George Washington was actually a zombie” museum in DC. Myths are a pain.
“The sin of pride, though, more correctly belongs to the myth perpetuators who would have us believe we are less hubristic than our ancestors.”
I quite like the sound of that line, but upon reflection, I’m not sure I agree with it. Seems to me — and I say this as an atheist who’d rather be living now than at any time in the past, particularly Galileo’s — that people were more humble back then, if for no reason other than fear of gods and kinigs, and that today, we suffer no shortage of warnings about our impending doom in a myriad of scenarios, almost all of which are traced to us going too fast or too far or messing with nature, because now that we’ve invented {steam engines | the automobile | the airplane | atomic bombs | computers | the Internet | genetic engineering | etc.}, we think we’ve got it all figured out and this is just the sort of misguided pride that goeth before …
It also seems to me that there was never a time in school when the ancient Greeks were under discussion when there wasn’t rather obvious point being made about what they’d have to say about kids today. It was all hubris, all the time.
Brendan, I think you might be actually agreeing with my point. Seeing oneself at the center of the universe has two different associations, depending on when you live. If you live now–the “myth perpetuators” I mention in the line you quote–then you say the center of the universe was a privileged position in a positive way. If you lived then–the “ancestors” from the same sentence–it was a privileged position in a negative way (a way that would make you feel “humbled,” as you say). I was trying to suggest that imposing one’s own meaning on the past, and using that misinterpretation to cast the people of the past as hubristic, is itself hubristic.
Yes, in some sense, I think you’re right, Richard. I still feel that there’s a difference, but I can’t really articulate it, even after a couple of days of thought. Maybe it’s the uneasiness I feel when trying to make pronouncements about what [all] people think or thought.
One specific thing I can say, though: while I agree that the typical Christian person 500 years ago would likely have thought of the Earth as a place of imperfection, compared to heaven or the heavens, I also think there are a lot of references to beliefs about the Earth have been made, special, by God, for his children, imperfect though they might have been. (I hasten to add that one could easily find other references where the Earth/this life was purposefully made to be an ordeal, or at best a place to wait before getting to a better place.)
Thanks for this thoughtful follow-up, Brendan. I really appreciate your taking the time to articulate your thinking. It’s been a useful exchange for me. Hope it has for you, too.