The 19th century saw the culmination of what we now call Classical physics and the high water mark of the mechanistic view of the universe. Clergy remained important contributors of science, even as the field (now called, for the first time, “science”) was becoming a viable way for laypeople to make a living. Two giants of this era were Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics (and a priest), and Angelo Secchi, the father of astrophysics (and also a priest).
Tradition and Today: Religion and Science
- Article (PDF)
- 12 pages
- University and higher level
Fr. George Coyne SJ presents four case histories which indicate that the relationship between religion and science has, in the course of three centuries, passed from one of conflict to one of compatible openness and dialogue, to show that the natural sciences have played a significant role in helping to establish the kind of dialogue that is absolutely necessary for the enrichment of the multifaceted aspects of human culture, whether traditional or modern. He argues that the approach of science to religion in each of these periods can be characterized respectively as: (l) temptress; (2) antagonist; (3) enlightened teacher; (4) partner in dialogue.
Pope Leo XIII
(1810-1903; elected Pope, 1878)
“Among all of these [natural] studies astronomy holds a preeminent position. It proposes to investigate those inanimate creatures which more than all others proclaim the glory of God and which gave marvelous delight to the wisest of beings, the one who exulted in his divinely inspired knowledge, especially of the yearly cycles and of the positions of the heavenly bodies (Wisdom VII.19).” – De Vaticana Specula Astronomica Restituenda Et Amplificanda, 14 March 1891
Full text of the Motu Proprio establishing the Vatican Observatory in 1891 can be found at http://www.vaticanobservatory.va/content/specolavaticana/en/who-are-we-/history/125th-anniversary.html
The Modern Solar System, the Diversity of Worlds, and William Whewell (II)
- Article (blog post)
- 1000 words
- General Audience
A post by Chris Graney on The Catholic Astronomer website.
Last week I introduced readers to a newly published paper by Michael J. Crowe entitled “William Whewell, the Plurality of Worlds, and the Modern Solar System.” Crowe is the Rev. John Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Professor Emeritus in the Program of Liberal Studies and the Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame, and one of a relatively small number of scholars who study the history of human thought concerning intelligent life on other worlds, and Crowe suggests that Whewell (1794–1866), Master of Trinity College of Cambridge University, was the first person to envision the modern solar system. As noted last week, from Copernicus up through the early nineteenth century astronomers assumed that intelligent life was abundant outside of Earth—and in particular, abundant within the solar system. To use the language of the times, they believed in a “Plurality of Worlds” like Earth. Of course today we know that the solar system is not full of worlds like Earth. We have so far found no extraterrestrial life at all within the solar system. We do not expect to find any intelligent life here, and it is possible we will never find any extraterrestrial life of any sort within the solar system. Crowe notes that in 1853 Whewell anonymously published his Of the Plurality of Worlds: An Essay, attacking the idea of a universe widely inhabited with intelligent life. Crowe writes that a key argument of Whewell’s was applications of the inverse-square-law as it relates to gravitational force, light, and heat radiation. This is the law that says that if planet B is twice the distance from the sun as planet A, it will receive one quarter the heat and light from the sun, all else equal. Thus, were the Earth a little closer to the sun, or a little further away, it would be significantly hotter or colder than it is now. Crowe argues that Whewell was one of the first people to consider the idea of a “habitable zone” around a star—an idea he put forward in the Essay. Whewell also used geology to argue against widespread extraterrestrial intelligence. Crowe notes that Whewell had been elected president of England’s Geological Society and that—
Whewell’s argument was that evidence for the age of the Earth showed that throughout most of Earth’s history it had been bereft of intelligent life, which suggested that the Creator’s plan for the cosmos was capacious enough to leave vast regions of it lacking ETIs [intelligent extraterrestrials] for long periods of time.
Whewell did not rule out the idea of lower life forms within the solar system. For example, he speculated on life existing on Jupiter, writing that Jovian life forms might be “aqueous, gelatinous creatures; too sluggish, almost, to be deemed alive, floating on their ice-cold water, shrouded forever by their humid skies.” However, time has not been good to even the idea of lower forms of extraterrestrial life within the solar system; were we to find even a microscopic gelatinous creature on Mars, that would be considered a monumental discovery.
Huygens diagram.
Crowe argues that the evidence for a diversity of worlds—that is, for planets that are not like Earth, as opposed to planets that are like Earth—was present long before Whewell. For example, Christiaan Huygens, in the same later seventeenth-century book in which he wrote—
A Man that is of Copernicus’s Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a planet, carry’d round and enlighten’d by the Sun, like the rest of them, cannot but sometimes have a fancy, that it’s not improbable that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, nay and their Inhabitants too as well as this Earth of ours: Especially if he considers the later Discoveries made since Copernicus’s time of the Attendents of Jupiter and Saturn, and the Champain and hilly Countrys in the Moon, which are an Argument of a relation and kind between our Earth and them….
—includes a fairly accurate diagram of relative sizes of the planets. Likewise, says Crowe, Isaac Newton included in the third edition of his Principia calculations showing the substantial differences in the mass, density, and surface gravity of different solar system bodies. Both Huygens’ diagram and Newton’s numbers illustrate planetary diversity, not planetary homogeneity. They in fact suggest reason to admit that, unlike our Earth, the other planets might be devoid of dress and furniture and inhabitants.
From the Principia.
But Huygens and Newton lived a century prior to Whewell. Why did Whewell come to reject the idea of a plurality of worlds when so many others did not? Crowe argues that what brought on Whewell’s resistance to the idea was that Whewell, a priest in the Church of England, came to believe that a plurality of worlds posed problems for Christianity. For, he said, Earth is—
—the Stage of the Great Drama of God’s Mercy and Man’s Salvation; the Sanctuary of the Universe; the Holy Land of Creation; the Royal Abode, for a time at least, of the Eternal King. This being the character which has thus been conferred upon it, how can we assent to the assertions of Astronomers, when they tell us that it is only one among millions of similar habitations…?
Thus Crowe argues that Whewell’s religious convictions prompted him to question the ruling paradigms of the day (the “Copernican Principle” that said there is nothing special about Earth, and the “Principle of Plenitude” that said that God or Nature would not waste the efforts involved in producing the universe without placing within it widespread intelligent life) and to look at the existing data in a new light. Whewell wrote, “I obtain my views of the physical universe from the acknowledged genuine sources: observation and calculation.” Whewell was right, and those who argued that the solar system would abound with intelligent life were wrong. Crowe concludes that Whewell’s work played a key role in our coming to the modern view of the solar system as “a rather desolate place…. wherein there is intelligent life but only on one object, and that object of rather unimpressive size.”
Author: Christopher.Graney
Source: http://www.vofoundation.org/blog/modern-solar-system-diversity-worlds-william-whewell-ii/
Published: 2016-07-13 05:00:06
Searching the Heavens and the Earth: The History of Jesuit Observatories. 2003 [with book reviews]
- Book (links to publisher, reviews)
- 369 pp
- University level
Searching the Heavens and the Earth: The History of Jesuit Observatories. Augustín Udías SJ. (Astrophysics and Space Science Library, Kluwer, 2003) 369 pp. ISBN 1-4040-1189-X
Click here to go to the publisher’s web site.
“Jesuits established a large number of astronomical, geophysical and meteorological observatories during the 17th and 18th centuries and again during the 19th and 20th centuries throughout the world. The history of these observatories has never been published in a complete form. Many early European astronomical observatories were established in Jesuit colleges. During the 17th and 18th centuries Jesuits were the first western scientists to enter into contact with China and India. It was through them that western astronomy was first introduced in these countries. They made early astronomical observations in India and China and they directed for 150 years the Imperial Observatory of Beijing. In the 19th and 20th centuries a new set of observatories were established. Besides astronomy these now included meteorology and geophysics. Jesuits established some of the earliest observatories in Africa, South America and the Far East.
Jesuit observatories constitute an often forgotten chapter of the history of these sciences.”
Below are two reviews of this book:
Book Review in the Journal for the History of Astronomy:
Maffeo-Udias-ReviewAuthor: Guy Consolmagno
Book Review in Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 76, 159-161.(2007)
This compendium of information about astronomical and geophysical observatories founded or run by members of the Jesuit order since the 16th century is not so much a book of history as the extended appendix for a book still to be written. It is filled with an enormous amount of data, and fascinating anecdotes, but it raises many questions that cry out for a deeper analysis.
The Jesuit observatories are significant for a number of reasons. Simply by sheer number, they make up an impressive fraction of the astronomy and geophysics done from the 16th through the 20th century. At a time when most working scientists were clergymen (in the 18th century, who else had the education, the inclination, and the free time to do science?), it has been estimated that the majority of such clergymen were Jesuits. A quarter of all the astronomical observatories in Europe during the 17th century transits of Venus were run by Jesuits.
While a few notable scientists like Grimaldi or Kircher or Boscoviç were Jesuits, perhaps even more important in the history of science were the contributions made by all the lesser-known workers who provided, brick by brick, the materials from which modern science was constructed. Especially important in this regard is the scientific work done by Jesuits in mission territories. Jesuits were often the only scientists to be found outside of Europe during that epoch, and their work in the third world was essential even well into the early 20th century. Besides their more famous contributions such as directing the Imperial Observatory of Beijing from 1644 to 1805, they also provided important meteorological and geophysical observations in dozens of posts from Madagascar to Havana.
The book is divided into three sections. The first seven chapters narrate in a workmanlike fashion brief histories of every Jesuit observatory since 1540, both independent institutions and those affiliated with Jesuit colleges and universities. The second part essentially repeats this information in a more tabular form for those observatories in operation after the refoundation of the Jesuit order in 1814. The third section provides brief biographies for nearly 60 Jesuit scientists, primarily the directors of the observatories described in part II.
The discussion of observatories before the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 is admittedly merely a review of other secondary literature, though it is a useful compendium of data. The section after the restoration is based on a significant amount of original research, including a systematic search through the annual catalogues of each Jesuit province held in the archives of the Jesuit curia in Rome, as well as other documentary material from the Jesuit archives in Cologne, Paris, and London. These were supplemented by many other letters and reports, and personal contacts with Jesuits still living who had worked in these institutions.
The personal details found in these letters and interviews provide the greatest strength of this book. Commonly, a given observatory was founded on the interests, and personality, of an individual Jesuit. The success of such institutions depended on the personal contacts and friendships (or animosities) among these individuals. And these observatories often failed to survive the passing of that key person. Udías, through his research into the lives of these individuals, often can point out places where these men studied together and worked together — or, in a few cases, worked at cross purposes.
In this wealth of detail, however, many questions are raised that never get answered. “Jesuit observatories are seldom mentioned in the history of astronomy,” Udías notes at the beginning of the text. Probably this is true; but why is this so? The book describes several instances where non-Jesuit observatories were in open conflict with previously-established Jesuit institutions, for example the case of the agitation on the part of certain British authorities against the meteorological station at Zikawei, China. But what was the source of this conflict? And, of course, the history of all these observatories was colored completely by the events that led to the suppression of the Jesuit order from 1773 to 1814; but the context of that suppression, and any possible role that the Jesuit scientists of the time may have played, is never described.
Udías was not served well by his copy editor at Kluwer, as unfortunately the book is peppered with typographical errors. For example: we read on p. 20 that “Kircher… occupied the chair of mathematics in 1639-1630” (sic). Trnava is located in the Czech Republic on p. 27, but – correctly – in Slovakia on p. 31. On p. 95 we are told that “In 1870 Dressel and Wulf went to Quito, Ecuador…” which is unlikely, since on the previous page the date of Wulf’s birth is list as 1868. (Both dates appear to be correct; the identification of the same “Wulf” traveling to Quito appears to be in error.) I mention these because they are examples (and not the only ones) of many minor inconsistencies that an internal reading of the book shows up. How many other typos involve dates or the spelling of names are there, that an unwary reader may not be able to check?
Ultimately, this book is a resource, not a history. Ideally, given these descriptions of their local histories institute by institute, a full analysis of the Jesuit observatories would place all of them chronologically in the context of the contemporary historical events — scientific, political, and ecclesiastical. Such a history of the Jesuit observatories, centered on an overarching theme with a careful selection and analysis of this wonderful compilation of data, remains to be written.
Udías is a geophysicist, not a historian, and clearly this book (nearly 20 years in the making) was a labor of love as much as scholarship. It points the way to a field that deserves an even deeper more scholarly analysis. If it can inspired such an analysis by a trained historian, it will have accomplished a great service to our understanding of the history of science and its relationship with both religion and culture.
Pope Leo XIII
(1810-1903; elected Pope, 1878)
“Among all of these [natural] studies astronomy holds a preeminent position. It proposes to investigate those inanimate creatures which more than all others proclaim the glory of God and which gave marvelous delight to the wisest of beings, the one who exulted in his divinely inspired knowledge, especially of the yearly cycles and of the positions of the heavenly bodies (Wisdom VII.19).” – De Vaticana Specula Astronomica Restituenda Et Amplificanda, 14 March 1891
Full text of the Motu Proprio establishing the Vatican Observatory in 1891 can be found at http://www.vaticanobservatory.va/content/specolavaticana/en/who-are-we-/history/125th-anniversary.html
The Modern Solar System, the Diversity of Worlds, and William Whewell (II)
- Article (blog post)
- 1000 words
- General Audience
A post by Chris Graney on The Catholic Astronomer website.
Last week I introduced readers to a newly published paper by Michael J. Crowe entitled “William Whewell, the Plurality of Worlds, and the Modern Solar System.” Crowe is the Rev. John Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Professor Emeritus in the Program of Liberal Studies and the Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame, and one of a relatively small number of scholars who study the history of human thought concerning intelligent life on other worlds, and Crowe suggests that Whewell (1794–1866), Master of Trinity College of Cambridge University, was the first person to envision the modern solar system. As noted last week, from Copernicus up through the early nineteenth century astronomers assumed that intelligent life was abundant outside of Earth—and in particular, abundant within the solar system. To use the language of the times, they believed in a “Plurality of Worlds” like Earth. Of course today we know that the solar system is not full of worlds like Earth. We have so far found no extraterrestrial life at all within the solar system. We do not expect to find any intelligent life here, and it is possible we will never find any extraterrestrial life of any sort within the solar system. Crowe notes that in 1853 Whewell anonymously published his Of the Plurality of Worlds: An Essay, attacking the idea of a universe widely inhabited with intelligent life. Crowe writes that a key argument of Whewell’s was applications of the inverse-square-law as it relates to gravitational force, light, and heat radiation. This is the law that says that if planet B is twice the distance from the sun as planet A, it will receive one quarter the heat and light from the sun, all else equal. Thus, were the Earth a little closer to the sun, or a little further away, it would be significantly hotter or colder than it is now. Crowe argues that Whewell was one of the first people to consider the idea of a “habitable zone” around a star—an idea he put forward in the Essay. Whewell also used geology to argue against widespread extraterrestrial intelligence. Crowe notes that Whewell had been elected president of England’s Geological Society and that—
Whewell’s argument was that evidence for the age of the Earth showed that throughout most of Earth’s history it had been bereft of intelligent life, which suggested that the Creator’s plan for the cosmos was capacious enough to leave vast regions of it lacking ETIs [intelligent extraterrestrials] for long periods of time.
Whewell did not rule out the idea of lower life forms within the solar system. For example, he speculated on life existing on Jupiter, writing that Jovian life forms might be “aqueous, gelatinous creatures; too sluggish, almost, to be deemed alive, floating on their ice-cold water, shrouded forever by their humid skies.” However, time has not been good to even the idea of lower forms of extraterrestrial life within the solar system; were we to find even a microscopic gelatinous creature on Mars, that would be considered a monumental discovery.
Huygens diagram.
Crowe argues that the evidence for a diversity of worlds—that is, for planets that are not like Earth, as opposed to planets that are like Earth—was present long before Whewell. For example, Christiaan Huygens, in the same later seventeenth-century book in which he wrote—
A Man that is of Copernicus’s Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a planet, carry’d round and enlighten’d by the Sun, like the rest of them, cannot but sometimes have a fancy, that it’s not improbable that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, nay and their Inhabitants too as well as this Earth of ours: Especially if he considers the later Discoveries made since Copernicus’s time of the Attendents of Jupiter and Saturn, and the Champain and hilly Countrys in the Moon, which are an Argument of a relation and kind between our Earth and them….
—includes a fairly accurate diagram of relative sizes of the planets. Likewise, says Crowe, Isaac Newton included in the third edition of his Principia calculations showing the substantial differences in the mass, density, and surface gravity of different solar system bodies. Both Huygens’ diagram and Newton’s numbers illustrate planetary diversity, not planetary homogeneity. They in fact suggest reason to admit that, unlike our Earth, the other planets might be devoid of dress and furniture and inhabitants.
From the Principia.
But Huygens and Newton lived a century prior to Whewell. Why did Whewell come to reject the idea of a plurality of worlds when so many others did not? Crowe argues that what brought on Whewell’s resistance to the idea was that Whewell, a priest in the Church of England, came to believe that a plurality of worlds posed problems for Christianity. For, he said, Earth is—
—the Stage of the Great Drama of God’s Mercy and Man’s Salvation; the Sanctuary of the Universe; the Holy Land of Creation; the Royal Abode, for a time at least, of the Eternal King. This being the character which has thus been conferred upon it, how can we assent to the assertions of Astronomers, when they tell us that it is only one among millions of similar habitations…?
Thus Crowe argues that Whewell’s religious convictions prompted him to question the ruling paradigms of the day (the “Copernican Principle” that said there is nothing special about Earth, and the “Principle of Plenitude” that said that God or Nature would not waste the efforts involved in producing the universe without placing within it widespread intelligent life) and to look at the existing data in a new light. Whewell wrote, “I obtain my views of the physical universe from the acknowledged genuine sources: observation and calculation.” Whewell was right, and those who argued that the solar system would abound with intelligent life were wrong. Crowe concludes that Whewell’s work played a key role in our coming to the modern view of the solar system as “a rather desolate place…. wherein there is intelligent life but only on one object, and that object of rather unimpressive size.”
Author: Christopher.Graney
Source: http://www.vofoundation.org/blog/modern-solar-system-diversity-worlds-william-whewell-ii/
Published: 2016-07-13 05:00:06
Searching the Heavens and the Earth: The History of Jesuit Observatories. 2003 [with book reviews]
- Book (links to publisher, reviews)
- 369 pp
- University level
Searching the Heavens and the Earth: The History of Jesuit Observatories. Augustín Udías SJ. (Astrophysics and Space Science Library, Kluwer, 2003) 369 pp. ISBN 1-4040-1189-X
Click here to go to the publisher’s web site.
“Jesuits established a large number of astronomical, geophysical and meteorological observatories during the 17th and 18th centuries and again during the 19th and 20th centuries throughout the world. The history of these observatories has never been published in a complete form. Many early European astronomical observatories were established in Jesuit colleges. During the 17th and 18th centuries Jesuits were the first western scientists to enter into contact with China and India. It was through them that western astronomy was first introduced in these countries. They made early astronomical observations in India and China and they directed for 150 years the Imperial Observatory of Beijing. In the 19th and 20th centuries a new set of observatories were established. Besides astronomy these now included meteorology and geophysics. Jesuits established some of the earliest observatories in Africa, South America and the Far East.
Jesuit observatories constitute an often forgotten chapter of the history of these sciences.”
Below are two reviews of this book:
Book Review in the Journal for the History of Astronomy:
Maffeo-Udias-ReviewAuthor: Guy Consolmagno
Book Review in Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 76, 159-161.(2007)
This compendium of information about astronomical and geophysical observatories founded or run by members of the Jesuit order since the 16th century is not so much a book of history as the extended appendix for a book still to be written. It is filled with an enormous amount of data, and fascinating anecdotes, but it raises many questions that cry out for a deeper analysis.
The Jesuit observatories are significant for a number of reasons. Simply by sheer number, they make up an impressive fraction of the astronomy and geophysics done from the 16th through the 20th century. At a time when most working scientists were clergymen (in the 18th century, who else had the education, the inclination, and the free time to do science?), it has been estimated that the majority of such clergymen were Jesuits. A quarter of all the astronomical observatories in Europe during the 17th century transits of Venus were run by Jesuits.
While a few notable scientists like Grimaldi or Kircher or Boscoviç were Jesuits, perhaps even more important in the history of science were the contributions made by all the lesser-known workers who provided, brick by brick, the materials from which modern science was constructed. Especially important in this regard is the scientific work done by Jesuits in mission territories. Jesuits were often the only scientists to be found outside of Europe during that epoch, and their work in the third world was essential even well into the early 20th century. Besides their more famous contributions such as directing the Imperial Observatory of Beijing from 1644 to 1805, they also provided important meteorological and geophysical observations in dozens of posts from Madagascar to Havana.
The book is divided into three sections. The first seven chapters narrate in a workmanlike fashion brief histories of every Jesuit observatory since 1540, both independent institutions and those affiliated with Jesuit colleges and universities. The second part essentially repeats this information in a more tabular form for those observatories in operation after the refoundation of the Jesuit order in 1814. The third section provides brief biographies for nearly 60 Jesuit scientists, primarily the directors of the observatories described in part II.
The discussion of observatories before the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 is admittedly merely a review of other secondary literature, though it is a useful compendium of data. The section after the restoration is based on a significant amount of original research, including a systematic search through the annual catalogues of each Jesuit province held in the archives of the Jesuit curia in Rome, as well as other documentary material from the Jesuit archives in Cologne, Paris, and London. These were supplemented by many other letters and reports, and personal contacts with Jesuits still living who had worked in these institutions.
The personal details found in these letters and interviews provide the greatest strength of this book. Commonly, a given observatory was founded on the interests, and personality, of an individual Jesuit. The success of such institutions depended on the personal contacts and friendships (or animosities) among these individuals. And these observatories often failed to survive the passing of that key person. Udías, through his research into the lives of these individuals, often can point out places where these men studied together and worked together — or, in a few cases, worked at cross purposes.
In this wealth of detail, however, many questions are raised that never get answered. “Jesuit observatories are seldom mentioned in the history of astronomy,” Udías notes at the beginning of the text. Probably this is true; but why is this so? The book describes several instances where non-Jesuit observatories were in open conflict with previously-established Jesuit institutions, for example the case of the agitation on the part of certain British authorities against the meteorological station at Zikawei, China. But what was the source of this conflict? And, of course, the history of all these observatories was colored completely by the events that led to the suppression of the Jesuit order from 1773 to 1814; but the context of that suppression, and any possible role that the Jesuit scientists of the time may have played, is never described.
Udías was not served well by his copy editor at Kluwer, as unfortunately the book is peppered with typographical errors. For example: we read on p. 20 that “Kircher… occupied the chair of mathematics in 1639-1630” (sic). Trnava is located in the Czech Republic on p. 27, but – correctly – in Slovakia on p. 31. On p. 95 we are told that “In 1870 Dressel and Wulf went to Quito, Ecuador…” which is unlikely, since on the previous page the date of Wulf’s birth is list as 1868. (Both dates appear to be correct; the identification of the same “Wulf” traveling to Quito appears to be in error.) I mention these because they are examples (and not the only ones) of many minor inconsistencies that an internal reading of the book shows up. How many other typos involve dates or the spelling of names are there, that an unwary reader may not be able to check?
Ultimately, this book is a resource, not a history. Ideally, given these descriptions of their local histories institute by institute, a full analysis of the Jesuit observatories would place all of them chronologically in the context of the contemporary historical events — scientific, political, and ecclesiastical. Such a history of the Jesuit observatories, centered on an overarching theme with a careful selection and analysis of this wonderful compilation of data, remains to be written.
Udías is a geophysicist, not a historian, and clearly this book (nearly 20 years in the making) was a labor of love as much as scholarship. It points the way to a field that deserves an even deeper more scholarly analysis. If it can inspired such an analysis by a trained historian, it will have accomplished a great service to our understanding of the history of science and its relationship with both religion and culture.
Tradition and Today: Religion and Science
- Article (PDF)
- 12 pages
- University and higher level
Fr. George Coyne SJ presents four case histories which indicate that the relationship between religion and science has, in the course of three centuries, passed from one of conflict to one of compatible openness and dialogue, to show that the natural sciences have played a significant role in helping to establish the kind of dialogue that is absolutely necessary for the enrichment of the multifaceted aspects of human culture, whether traditional or modern. He argues that the approach of science to religion in each of these periods can be characterized respectively as: (l) temptress; (2) antagonist; (3) enlightened teacher; (4) partner in dialogue.