Hello, and welcome to Western Sieve Episode two hundred and sixty three Facts and
Experiments. In our last three episodes, we took a look at the beginning
of the scientific revolution by examining first the nature of discovery, then how Europeans
changed their views of our planet, and finally how math, for really the
first time in history, started to become an essential and independent branch of science,
from perspective painting to ballistics. No one doubted in sixteen hundred how important
mathematics had become to humans existence. But if the revolution begun by the mathematicians
was to be successful, it needed to identify other ways of establishing and communicating
universal truths, and that is what we will be covering today. One day
early in sixteen ten, Johannes Kepler was walking across a bridge in Prague when
a few snowflakes settled upon his coat. Watching them, Kepler evidently grasped two
things more or less simultaneously. Each snowflake was unique, but they were all
like, and that they were all six cornered. This got Kepler thinking about
two dimensional six cornered shapes and how they formed. A latis, the cells
of a honeycomb or seeds of a pomegranate, and about how the only shapes
that one can use to tile a floor if all the tiles are the same
triangles, squares, and hexagons, And about the patterns you can make if
you pile cannonballs on top of one another. Kepler thought he could work out
the most space saving way of piling spheres. His claim would later become known
as the Kepler conjecture, and was finally proven true for any regular latise in
eighteen thirty one and for any possible arrangement of spheres in nineteen ninety eight.
For Kepler, this was applied mathematics. Like Galileo, Kepler believed that nature
was based in geometry. If God was a mathematician and phooka to out that,
then one would expect to find math everywhere, from the organization of our
solar system to the smallest snowflake. Math. In this case, geometry has
to be there. We're going to go more in detail into Galileo a little
bit later on, but to get to the idea of experimentation and fact,
here's a quick overview. The story of Galileo's discoveries is straightforward. In sixteen
o eight, the telescope was invented in the Netherlands as sort of a chance
discovery. Galileo's first telescope had a usable magnification of eight times by the beginning
of six ten, and eventually he managed to produce one that had a magnification
of thirty times, with which he could begin to explore the heavens. There's
a standard phrase used over and over again in literature. Quote Galileo turned his
telescope to the heavens end quote, of course he did same thing, or
going on in England, where another astronomer named Harriet did the same thing four
months before Galileo, and his first telescope had a magnification of six times.
The puzzle lies in the enormous effort that Galileo put into improving his telescope,
grinding on his own equipment two hundred lenses in order to end up with ten
telescopes with a magnification of twenty times or better. For what is strange about
these ten telescopes is that they're too good for their obvious military use. Their
filled of view was tiny. Galileo could only see a small part of the
Moon at one time. Held with two hands, they shook and wobbled so
that anything you looked at kept slipping out of the field of view. He
realized some sort of tripod or mount was essential. It is important here for
a moment to distinguish between the impact of the telescope and the microscope. The
two are basically the same thing. So as soon as Galileo had a telescope,
he could use it to study flies. For example. He later devised
a better tabletop instrument and studied how flies could climb up glass. But the
first publication to represent who could be seen through a microscope, a single broadsheet
which was entitled the Apareum about Bees in honor of Pope Urban the Eighth didn't
appear until sixteen twenty five, and the first major publication was called Micrographia,
and that wasn't published until sixteen sixty five. It's interesting because the telescope,
on the other hand, transformed astronomy almost overnight, while the microscope was slow
to be adopted and actually, toward the end of the century, quick to
be abandoned. The reason for this, I think is simple. There was
an established body of astronomical theory, and what was seen with the telescope was
at odds with it. Astronomers could scarcely dispute the relevancy of the telescope to
their studies, but the microscope brought into view a world that was previously unknown.
It was how to establish how the new information it produced related to established
knowledge. The telescope addressed directly issues that were already under discussion. The microscope,
on the other hand, opened up new lines of inquiry whose relevancy to
current concerns wasn't as obvious. A microscope simply isn't as helpful when you're trying
to cite your cannonballs. That the telescope flourished and the microscope languished is one
of the signs that the scientific revolution can be properly understood as a revolution,
a revolt against the previous order. I think that's something that I've come back
to every episode in this whether we're talking about math or the planet Earth.
The reality is the scientific revolution is a revolution because it's a rejection of what
we're thousands upon thousands of years of assumed knowledge. Both the telescope and the
microscope produced new knowledge, but in the seventeenth century only the telescope directly endangered
the existing order. When Galileo pointed his improved telescope at the Moon in sixteen
o nine, he spotted something much more striking than he had seen before.
Where there should have been light on the surface of the Moon, there was
darkness, and vice versa. What Galileo realized immediately was that the Moon wasn't
flat, not flat at all, which had previously been taken for granted.
There were mountains and craters. The Moon, in other words, was much
more like our planet Earth than we had previously thought. And it just so
happened that in England the astronomer Harriot had seen exactly what Galileo had seen.
We have a sketch that he drew on the twenty sixth of July sixteen o
nine. Looking at it, it's perfectly clear that the terminator, that is,
the part where you can see light, is not regular. It's irregular.
This is confirmed in another sketch by the same man, dated the seventeenth
of July sixteen ten. The difference is by the time of the second sketch,
Harriet had read Galileo's Starry Messenger, which had been published in the spring.
Now, looking at it from Galileo's perspective, he saw exactly what Galileo
had seen. It seems clear that what he was doing was comparing Galileo's illustration
with what he could see through his telescope, for both Galileo's illustration and Harriet's
illustration feature a large circular shape. In fact, there's no such prominent object
on the Moon, and scholars have suggested that Galileo did lively enlarged a crater
to enable the viewer to, as it were, zoom in. Harriet,
looking at the Moon, saw the same the highlights and shadows, the mountain
ranges, the valleys that Galileo described, and he also convinced himself that he
had seen Galileo's imaginary crater. Once Galileo had described what he had seen,
once he had trained viewers on how to look, it was almost impossible to
dispute that the Moon had mountains and valleys, even one that didn't really exist.
Of course, all this paled in comparison to the revelations that lie ahead.
In October sixteen eleven, Galileo came to the conclusion that one could predict
the location and movement of the heavens, and one could do it with much
greater accuracy than had been hitherto thought. By this point, Galileo realized Venus
had phases, and that these phases were totally incompatible with ptolemaic astronomy, which
assumed Venus had to orbit around the Earth. Looking at these phases, Galileo
realized Venus absolutely had to orbit around the Sun. Early the following year,
when Galileo told a prominent group of Jesuit astronomers about this discovery and they confirmed
it, they threw him a party. Not everyone, as we will see,
even within the Church was hostile to new ideas about the universe. Just
some people, But make no mistake, after sixteen eleven sixteen twelve, the
ptolemaic conception of the universe had been fatally wounded. Interestingly enough, Galileo's discovery
also marked the first time in the history of the world. In sixteen twenty
eight, Francis Goodwin published the first ever work of science fiction, titled The
Man in the Moon. Later on, these mathematical innovations would lead to the
creation of the metric system in the early eighteenth century, so that scientists could
consistently measure and explain their new discoveries. Previously, historians thought that Copernicus was
responsible for the destruction of the correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm. This
is a mistake. There was only one small major shift in copernicus universe.
The stars were required to be at a vast distance from the Solar System,
given that there was no measurable change in their relationship to each other in the
sky, while the Earth orbited the Sun in the course of a year,
and consequently they must be very big if they're not invisible. But the Sun
and the planets remained the same size, and Copernicus still continued. It seems
to believe that the universe consisted of nested spheres, which was ptolemaic. Kapernicus
universe was no longer Earth centered, but it was Earth friendly, and there
was no reason to think that it was not the product of benevolent design.
There was nothing in his argument that might imply that Earth was just another planet,
or that the universe had not been created for the benefit of human beings.
The universe had a center, and the Sun and the Earth were still
unique objects. The key change occurred in sixteen o eight with the invention of
the telescope and the microscope. Before sixteen o eight, the standard scientific instruments
crossed apps, Astra labs and so forth were all designed to make naked eye
measurements of degrees of the circle. Even the vast sextants and quadrants built by
Tico Brahe were simply in large sighting devices. These instruments were really no different
in principle than those used by Ptolemy, and although by making parallax investigations of
the comet and stars they could be used to undermine traditional belief in translucent spheres
that supported all the planets, as was still accepted by Copernicus, they reinforced
the assumption that human beings were the perfect observers of the cosmos, and the
cosmos itself was designed to support human life. But after sixteen o eight,
a new range of instruments made the invisible visible. The thermometer sixteen eleven and
barometer sixteen forty three made it possible to see temperature and air pressure for the
first time. All of these intellectual changes have consequences. The discovery of America
killed off the two sphere theory of the Earth. Copernicanism led to the belief
that the planet shined by reflecting light, which was confirmed by the discovery of
the phases of Venus, and this would kill off the Ptolemaic system. But
the phases of Venus, which is what really kills off the Ptolemaic system,
was only made possible because of the telescope. Innovation and invention changed the conception
of the universe. The reality is Totolemaic astronomy was unaffected by Copernicus. Certainly,
it went into crisis when the star was discovered in fifteen seventy two,
but by the end of the sixteenth century it had fully recovered. The telescope,
on the other hand, brought about its immediate and irreversible collapse. And
this is another fascinating point about the scientific revolution. Once mankind figured out that
it could look to the hea, what it decided to do was find new,
innovative and better ways of doing so, and that brings about a further
shift in consciousness, which brings about more investigation. In other words, for
the first time, as we're going to see, humankind is starting to experiment
with science, and that experimentation is going to blow the lid off everything medieval
Europe believed. We take facts for granted. Nowadays, there have been few
attempts to rate the history of facts, and all of them are frankly terrible.
Yet our culture is as dependent on facts as it is on crude oil.
It's almost impossible to imagine doing without facts. And yet there was a
time when facts didn't exist. What did the map of knowledge look like before
the invention of the fact. On the one hand, there was truth on
the other, opinion on the other hand, There was knowledge. On the
other there was experience. On the one hand, there was proof. On
the other there was persuasion. Opinion, experience, persuasion. All of these
were necessarily unreliable and unsatisfactory. Knowledge had to be built on firmer foundations.
The story of the fact is a story in which the lowest and most unreliable
form of knowledge was magically transformed into the highest and most reliable. What we're
concerned with here is what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as fact quote A thing
that has really occurred or is actually the case end quote. Although dictionaries don't
distinguish clearly enough between an agency of a fact something that has occurred because someone
has done it, and an impersonal idea of fact something that has occurred in
the course of nature. How did you refer to this something? Before facts
were invented? In Greek there was the phenomenon, But phenomenon were malleable.
They could be saved or solved, while facts are stubborn. In Latin,
there is the thing rests. The Romans said race ipsilocuter, which means the
facts speak for themselves. Of course, when they wrote this, there was
no such word as fact in English. Before the fact there were particulars.
Phenomenon are too subjective, They are appearances, not realities. Things in particulars
are too much in the real world. None of them corresponds to that peculiar
blend of reality and thought, which is the fact. This peculiar blend is
what some have referred to when describing facts as linguistic but claiming to be copies
of the real. In a society becoming increasingly interested in experience, it should
come as no surprise that the term fact was taking on a new significance.
Facts identify a type of knowledge which is grounded in experience. Whereas before Europeans
might have obsessed about relations of ideas, now they wanted matters of fact.
In fact pun intended, Hume indicated the distinction between relationships and ideas and matters
of fact was fundamentally the intellectual conflict that gives rise to the Scientific Revolution.
Amazingly to us today, before the Scientific Revolution, facts were few and far
between. They had to be handmade for example, they were hard to distribute,
and they were unreliable. A good instance of this is just simply the
fact that prior to eighteen o one, it's impossible for us to say from
a historical perspective. Even though we have a lot of facts about the industrialized
West before eighteen o one, we cannot definitively say what the population of Great
Britain was. Crucially, facts are not only established, they can be disestablished.
A fact can be confirmed by experience, and that it can be refuted
by experience. When and where was the language of the fact invented? Only
quite recently historians thought there was a straightforward answer to this question. Francis Bacon
invented the fact. From Bacon, the fact entered the English language and was
adopted by the Royal Society. So historians started to write about seriously quote Baconian
facts end quote. English philosophy has always been thought to be almost peculiarly empiricist,
and therefore it made sense that on this count England would have created and
invented the culture of the fact. Unfortunately, this story, as with most
straightforward answers, is just way too simplistic to be accurate. The fact doesn't
belong to the English language. Galileo and his correspondence happily discussed facts, but
there are Italian usages from much earlier, from the fifteen seventies. According to
established scholarship, the French discovered the New World only in the sixteen sixties,
but Montague used the word fact fact to mean fact no less than five times,
one of which actually dates from as early as fifteen eighty, well before
the sixteen sixties. When it comes to linguistics, you really have to get
the initial usage, which it turns out is a lot earlier than what we
thought. In fact, the word fact itself doesn't come from Bacon. He
never uses the word in its modern meaning in English. He uses factum three
or four times in print. The man with the stronger claim to the word
fact is Thomas Hobbs. He uses the word in Elements of Law, Natural
and Politic, written in sixteen forty but not published until sixteen fifty. Of
course, there were facts, as I mentioned, in Italian, French,
and Latin, long before there were facts in English. The word fact only
becomes more respectable in English after sixteen sixty one. And again here the printing
press is extremely important. The printing press made facts. According to one historian,
Harder before printing facts were too soft, they were too malleable. What
made the scientific revolution, this historian argues, is not the experimental method or
commercial society, both of those have been around for centuries, but again the
printing press, which turned private information into public knowledge, private experience into communal
experience. For my case, I don't think that this takes the argument far
enough. The printing press didn't necessarily make facts stronger. It made them outside
a very few specialized fields possible. Without the printing press, I'm not sure
the modern conception of fact ever comes into being, because you just can't disseminate
enough knowledge along enough of the population. Just isn't going to work, not
without the way to mass produce facts. And the printing press allowed for the
mass production of facts in the way that the factory system is going to allow
for the mass production of Model T cars. Later on, Guttenberg's Bible was
completed in fourteen fifty four or fourteen fifty five. That was, of course
a watershed moment. But consider this when a major comment passed by Earth in
fifteen seventy seven, thanks to the printing press, which had now been operation
for at least twenty two years, more than one hundred and eighty publications debated
the meaning of its existence. Thus, the printing press took astronomers and astrologers
scientists from two different fields, and put them together to exchange ideas. Thus
was the power of printing. Book Fairs then accelerated the growth in the international
trade of books. Books strengthened innovation, making it possible for innovators to work
together and pool ideas. It made it possible to attack the monopoly of information
previously held only by the universities. And of course, what I mean by
that is that prior to the printing press, very few people had access to
ideas and to education. Those with previous access had a vested interest in protecting
that access. The printing press democratized this information and eliminated this monopoly. The
printing press also created a sort of intellectual arms race, kings and queens needed
these new weapons. They needed to be the first to discover a new land
and use a new navigational system. This competition would go a long way to
fuel the incessant wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but would also transform
Europe into the world's dominant continent for centuries. But if there are now facts,
then Europeans needed a way to test those facts. We call that process
today experimentation. The first proper experiment in European history that we know of,
took place on September nineteenth, sixteen forty eight, and was performed by Florin
Perrier, a French scientist and actually brother in law to Blaze Pascal. He
used a sealed tube and mercury to study changes in air pressure and density based
on height. To be a proper experiment, you need one a carefully designed
procedure, two verification i e. Onlookers, three repetition, four independent replication,
and five result dissemination. Harrier was the first to combine all these facts
ors in his altitude experiment. Now, certainly philosophers had tested theories before.
Ptolemy and Galen did so centuries earlier, and the Great Arab scientist Ibn al
Hayafen had done some rudimentary experiments in the eleventh century. The puzzle was not
whether there was any experimentation prior to the scientific Revolution, but why there was
so little. One reason is that experimentation required manual labor, and the reality
was Medieval and Renaissance culture was resistant to physical work. This only starts to
change in the mid to late fifteenth century. Second, again, the emphasis
in medieval Europe was on Aristotelian logic and using logic to prove points. Before
the fifteenth century, it was assumed there was no need to physically test something.
You could prove it true or false based on argument and reason. Third,
experimentation requires one to move back and forth between concrete facts on the one
hand, and abstract theory and hypothesis on the other. Experimentation requires a balancing
act between platonic idealism and crude empiricism. You need to be able to make
the claim that general conclusions can be drawn from specific examples. Europeans simply weren't
accustomed to doing this before the fifteenth century. Finally, as we have already
covered, there was no culture of discovery in the Middle Ages, so what
would be the point in experimentation. Society was entirely backward looking. And I
cannot stress this enough. I know that it's I keep repeating it over and
over again, but it's so important that prior to let's say, the late
fifteenth century, European society had its head turned backwards. They were always looking
to the glories of the past. After the end of the fifteenth century,
that's when the idea of progress and looking forward becomes the new year European mindset.
And that, my friends, is an amazing and important shift. Even
Arab scientists, certainly the most advanced in the High Middle Ages, struggled to
make discoveries somehow fit into their past based cultures. The first major field for
experimental inquiry in the early modern period was with the magnet and navigation. This
was an easy starting point for Europeans because there was no such thing as the
compass in the ancient world, so clearly one couldn't look to Ptolemay for help.
Plus, the compass and the magnet were essential in navigation, which suddenly
everyone cared a lot about, giving the economics. By fifteen twenty two,
Sebastian Cabot, who sailed from England to Nova Scotia realized that magnets do not
point true north, but rather east or west of true north, depending on
where you were in the globe. This was a crucial discovery because now,
depending on the level of variation in your compass, you could use it to
determine longitude. Hence, experimentation in that case led to a novel discovery.
All right, now that we've covered some of the basics of the early scientific
Revolution, I want to take a look at two key figures from that period,
Copernicus and Galileo. Copernicus because he's arguably the father of modern astronomy,
though that award might fairly go to Tico Brahe. Galileo because he gets us
into the history of the reaction to the scientific Revolution, which of course there
was that brings the church an inquisition onto the board end. You know,
I can't wait to talk about that knee interim. If you'd like some more
content, check out the links in the show notes. Got two down there
for two seven day free trials. The Westerns of two point zero and the
Patreon account both offer that option. Now, if you're looking for additional ways
to support the program. The other thing that's there is the link to the
website. If you would just like some additional stuff, go ahead and check
it out.