Preface of Pioneers of Science. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ava'i in March 2010. Pioneers of Science by Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor of Physics in Victoria University College, Liverpool. Preface. This book takes its origin in a course of lectures on the history and progress of astronomy, arranged for me in the year 1887 by three of my colleagues, ACB, JM, GHR, one of whom gave the course its name. The lectures having been found interesting, it was natural to write them out in full and publish. If I may claim for them any merit, I should say it consists in their simple statement and explanation of scientific facts and laws. The biographical details are compiled from already available sources. There is no novelty or originality about them, though it is hoped that there may be some vividness. I have simply tried to present a living figure of each pioneer in turn and to trace his influence on the progress of thought. I am indebted to many biographers and writers, among others to Mr. E. J. C. Morton, whose excellent set of lives published by the SPCK saved me much trouble in the early part of the course. As we approach recent times, the subject grows more complex and the men more nearly contemporaries, hence the biographical aspect diminishes and the scientific treatment becomes fuller, but in no case has it been allowed to become technical and generally unreadable. To the friends CCC, FWHM, EFR, who with great kindness have revised the proofs and have indicated places where the facts could be made more readily intelligible by a clearer statement, I express my genuine gratitude. University College, Liverpool November 1892 End of preface Lecture 1 of the Pioneers of Science This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Lecture 1, The Pioneers of Science by Sir Oliver Lodge Dates and Summary of Facts for Lecture 1 Physical Science of the Ancients Tales, 640 BC Anaximander, 610 BC Pythagoras, 600 BC Anaxagoras, 500 BC Eudoxis, 400 BC Aristotle, 384 BC Aristarchus, 300 BC Archimedes, 287 BC Eradistines, 276 BC Hipparchus, 160 BC Ptolemy, 180 BC Science of the Middle Ages, cultivated only among the Arabs, largely in the forms of astrology, alchemy, and algebra. Return of Science to Europe Roger Bacon, 1240 Leonardo da Vinci, 1480 Printing, 1455 Columbus, 1492 Copernicus, 1543 A sketch of Copernic's life and work Born 1473 at Torn in Poland Studied mathematics at Bologna Became an ecclesiastic Lived at Frauenberg near Mouth of Vistula Substituted for the apparent motion of the heavens, the real motion of the earth Published tables of planetary motions Motion still supposed to be in epicycles Worked out his ideas for 36 years and finally dedicated his work to the Pope Died just as his book was printed, aged 72 A century before the birth of Newton A colossal statue by Thorwaldson erected at Warsaw in 1830 Lecture 1 Copernicus and the Motion of the Earth The ordinary run of men live among phenomena of which they know nothing and care less They see bodies fall to the earth They hear sounds, they kindle fires They see the heavens roll above them But of the causes and inner working of the whole they are ignorant And with their ignorance they are content Understand the structure of a soap bubble? Said a cultivated literary man whom I know I wouldn't cross the street to know it And if this is a prevalent attitude now What must have been the attitude in ancient times When mankind was emerging from savagery And when history seems composed of harassments by wars abroad and revolutions at home In the most violently disturbed times indeed Those with which ordinary history is mainly occupied, science is quite impossible It needs as its condition in order to flourish a fairly quiet untroubled state Or else a cloister or university removed from the den and bustle of the political and commercial world In such places it has taken its rise And in such peaceful places and quiet times true science will continue to be cultivated The great bulk of mankind must always remain, I suppose More or less careless of scientific research and scientific result Except in so far as it affects their modes of locomotion, their health and pleasure, or their purse But among a people hurried and busy and preoccupied Some in the pursuit of riches, some in the pursuit of pleasure And some, the majority, in the struggle for existence There arise in every generation, here and there One or two great souls, men who seem of another age and country Who look upon the bustle in feverish activity and are not infected by it Who watch others achieving prizes of riches and pleasure and are not disturbed Who look on the world and universe they are born in with quite other eyes To them it appears not as a bazaar to buy and to sell in Not as a ladder to scramble up or down, helter-skelter Without knowing wither or why, but as a fact A great and mysterious fact, to be pondered over, studied and perchance In some small measure understood By the multitude these men were sneered at as eccentric or feared as supernatural Their calm, clear, contemplative attitude seemed either insane or diabolic And accordingly they have been pitied as enthusiasts or killed as blasphemers One of these great souls may have been a prophet or preacher And have called to his generation to bethink them of why and what they were To struggle less and meditate more, to search for things of true value and not for dross Another has been a poet or musician and has uttered in words or in song Thoughts dimly possible to many men, but by them unutterable and left inarticulate Another has been influenced still more directly by the universe around him Has felt at times overpowered by the mystery and solemnity of it all And has been impelled by a force stronger than himself to study it Patiently, slowly, diligently Content if he could gather a few crumbs of the great harvest of knowledge Happy if he could grasp some great generalization or wide embracing law And so in some small measure enter into the mind and thought of the designer of all this wondrous frame of things These last have been the men of science, the great and heaven-born men of science, and they are few In our own day amid the throng of inventions there are a multitude of small men using the name of science But working for their own ends Jostling and scrambling just as they would jostle and scramble in any other trade or profession These may be workers, they may and do advanced knowledge, but they are never pioneers Not to them is it given to open out great tracks of unexplored territory Or to view the promised land as from a mountaintop Of them we shall not speak We will concern ourselves only with the greatest, the epic-making men, to whose life and work we and all who come after them owe so much Such a man was Tails, such was Archimedes, Hipparchus, Copernicus, such preeminently was Newton Now I am not going to attempt a history of science, such a work in ten lectures would be absurd I intend to pick out a few salient names here and there and to study these in some detail Rather than by attempting to deal with too many to lose individuality and distinctness We know so little of the great names of antiquity that they are for this purpose scarcely suitable In some departments the science of the Greeks was remarkable, though it is completely overshadowed by their philosophy Yet it was largely based on what has proved to be a wrong method of procedure V. the introspective and conjectural, rather than the inductive and experimental methods They investigated nature by studying their own minds, by considering the meanings of words Rather than by studying things and recording phenomena This wrong, though by no means on the face of it absurd, method was not pursued exclusively Else would their science have been valueless But the influence it had was such as materially to detract from the value of their speculations and discoveries For when truth and falsehood are inextricably woven into a statement The truth is as hopelessly hidden as if it had never been stated For we have no criterion to distinguish the false from the true Besides this, however, many of their discoveries were ultimately lost to the world Some, as at Alexandria, by fire, the bigoted work of a Muhammadian conqueror Some by eruption of barbarians and all were buried so long and so completely by the night of the Dark Ages That they had to be rediscovered almost as absolutely and completely as though they had never been Some of the names of antiquity we shall have occasion to refer to So I have arranged some of them in chronological order on page 4 And as a representative, one I may specially emphasize are comedies One of the greatest men of science there has ever been and the father of physics The only effective link between the old and the new science is afforded by the Arabs The Dark Ages come as an utter gap in the scientific history of Europe And for more than a thousand years there was not a scientific man of note except in Arabia And with the Arabs knowledge was so mixed up with magic and enchantment That one cannot contemplate it with any degree of satisfaction And little real progress was made In some of the Waverly novels you can realize the state of matters in these times And you know how the only approach to science is through some Arab sorcerer or astrologer Maintained usually by a monarch and consulted upon all great occasions as the oracles were of old In the 13th century, however, a really great scientific man appeared Who may be said to herald the dawn of modern science in Europe He cannot be said to do more than herald it, however, for we must wait 200 years for the next name of great magnitude Moreover, he was isolated and so far in advance of his time that he left no followers His own work suffered from the prevailing ignorance, for he was persecuted and imprisoned Not for the commonplace and natural reason that he frightened the church But merely because he was eccentric in his habits and knew too much The man I spoke of as coming 200 years later is Leonardo da Vinci True, he is best known as an artist, but if you read his works you will come to the conclusion that he was the most scientific artist who ever lived He teaches the laws of perspective, then new, of light and shade, of color, of the equilibrium of bodies, and of a multitude of other matters where science touches on art Not always quite correctly according to modern ideas, but in beautiful and precise language For clear and conscious power, for wide embracing knowledge and skill, Leonardo is one of the most remarkable men that ever lived About this time the tremendous invention of printing was achieved and Columbus unwittingly discovered the new world The middle of the next century must be taken as the real dawn of modern science For the year 1543 marks the publication of the life work of Copernicus Nicholas Copernic was his proper name. Copernicus is merely the Latinized form of it according to the then prevailing fashion He was born at Torn in Polish Prussia in 1473 His father is believed to have been a German. He graduated at Krakow as a doctor in arts and medicine and was destined for the ecclesiastical profession The details of his life are few. It seems to have been quiet and uneventful, and we know very little about it He was instructed in astronomy at Krakow and learned mathematics at Bologna Hence he went to Rome, where he was made professor of mathematics, and soon afterwards he went into orders On his return home he took charge of the principal church in his native place and became a canon At Frauenberg, near the mouth of the Vistula, he lived the remainder of his life We find him reporting on coinage for the government, but otherwise he does not appear as having entered into the life of the times He was a quiet scholarly monk of studious habits and with a reputation which drew to him several earnest students Who received Viva Voce instruction from him, so in study and meditation his life passed He compiled tables of the planetary motions which were far more correct than any which had hitherto appeared And which remained serviceable for long afterwards The Ptolemaic system of the heavens, which had been the orthodox system all through the Christian era He endeavored to improve and simplify by the hypothesis that the sun was the center of the system instead of the earth And the first consequences of this change he worked out for many years, producing in the end a great book, his One Life Work This famous work, Day Revolution of Us, Orbium Celestium, embodied all his painstaking calculations Applied his new system to each of the bodies in the solar system in succession, and treated besides of much other recondite matter Towards the close of his life it was put into type He can scarcely be said to have lived to see it appear, for he was stricken with paralysis before its completion But a printed copy was brought to his bedside and put into his hands, so that he might just feel it before he died That Copernicus was a giant in intellect or power, such as had lived in the past and were destined to live in the near future I see no reason whatever to believe He was just a quiet, earnest, patient, and God-fearing man, a deep student, an unbiased thinker, although with no specially brilliant or striking gifts Yet to him it was given to effect such a revolution in the whole course of man's thought as is difficult to parallel You know what the outcome of his work was, it proved He did not merely speculate, he proved, that the earth is a planet like the others, and that it revolves around the sun Yes, it can be summed up in a sentence, but what a revelation it contains If you have never made an effort to grasp the full significance of this discovery, you will not appreciate it The doctrine is very familiar to us now, we have heard it, I suppose, since we were four years old But can you realize it? I know it was a long time before I could Think of the solid earth, with trees and houses, cities and countries, mountains and seas Think of the vast tracts of land in Asia, Africa, and America, and then picture the whole mass spinning like a top And rushing along its annual course round to the sun at the rate of 19 miles every second Were we not accustomed to it, the idea would be staggering No wonder it was received within credulity But the difficulties of the conception are not only physical, they are still more felt from the speculative and theological points of view With this last, indeed, the reconcilment cannot be considered complete even yet Theologians do not indeed now deny the fact of the earth's subordination in the scheme of the universe But many of them ignore it and pass it by So soon as the church awoke to a perception of the tremendous and revolutionary import of the new doctrines It was bound to resist them, or be false to its traditions For the whole tenor of men's thought must have been changed had they accepted it If the earth were not the central and all important body in the universe If the sun and planets and stars were not attendant and subsidiary lights But were other worlds larger and perhaps superior to ours Where was man's place in the universe? And where were the doctrines they had maintained as irrefragable? I, by no means, assert that the new doctrines were really utterly irreconcilable With the more essential parts of the old dogmas If only theologians had had patience and genius enough to consider the matter calmly I suppose that in that case they might have reached the amount of reconciliation at present attained And not only have left scientific truth in peace to spread as it could But might perhaps themselves have joined the band of earnest students and workers As so many of the higher Catholic clergy do at the present day But this was too much to expect Such a revelation was not to be accepted in a day or in a century The easiest plan was to treat it as a heresy and to try to crush it out Not in Copernick's life, however, did they perceive the dangerous tendency of the doctrine Partly because it was buried in a ponderous and learned treatise not likely to be easily understood Partly perhaps because its propounder was himself an ecclesiastic Mainly because he was a patient and judicious man, not given a loud or intolerant assertion But content to state his views in quiet conversation and to let them gently spread for thirty years before he published them And, when he did publish them, he used the happy device of dedicating his great book to the Pope And a cardinal bore the expense of printing it Thus did the Roman Church stand sponsor to a system of truth against which it was destined in the next century to hurl its anathemas And to inflict on its conspicuous adherence torture imprisonment and death To realize the change of thought, the utterly new view of the universe which the Copernican theory introduced We must go back to preceding ages and try to recall the views which had been held as probable concerning the form of the earth and the motion of the heavenly bodies The earliest recorded notion of the earth is the very natural one that it is a flat area floating in an illimitable ocean The sun was a God who drove his chariot across the heavens once a day and a Naxagoras was threatened with death and punished with banishment For teaching that the sun was only a ball of fire and that it might perhaps be as big as the country of Greece The obvious difficulty as to how the sun got back to the east again every morning was got over Not by the conjecture that he went back in the dark nor by the idea that there was a fresh sun every day Though indeed it was once believed that the moon was created once a month and periodically cut up into stars But by the doctrine that in the northern part of the earth was a high range of mountains And that the sun traveled round on the surface of the sea behind these Sometimes indeed you find a representation of the sun being rode round in a boat Later on it was perceived to be necessary that the sun should be able to travel beneath the earth And so the earth was supposed to be supported on pillars or on roots Or to be a dome shaped body floating in the air much like Dean Swift's Island of Laputa The elephant and tortoise of the Hindu earth are no doubt emblematic or typical, not literal Aristotle however taught that the earth must be a sphere And used all the orthodox arguments of the present children's geography books about the way you see ships at sea And about lunar eclipses To imagine a possible antipodes must however have been a tremendous difficulty in the way of this conception of a sphere And I scarcely suppose that anyone can at that time have contemplated the possibility of such an upside down regions being inhabited I find that intelligent children invariably feel the greatest difficulty in realizing the existence of inhabitants on the opposite side of the earth Stupid children like stupid persons in general will of course believe anything they are told and much good may the belief do them But the kind of difficulties felt by intelligent and thoughtful children are most instructive Since it is quite certain that the early philosophers must have encountered and overcome those very same difficulties by their own genius However somehow or other the conception of a spherical earth was gradually grasped And the heavenly bodies were perceived all to revolve around it Some moving regularly as the stars all fixed together into one spherical shell or firmament Some moving irregularly and apparently anomalously These irregular bodies were therefore called planets or wanderers Seven of them were known, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn And there is little doubt that this number seven so suggested is the origin of the seven days of the week The above order of the ancient planets is that of their supposed distance from the earth Not always however are they thus quoted by the ancients Sometimes the Sun is supposed nearer than Mercury or Venus It has always been known that the Moon was the nearest of the heavenly bodies And some rough notion of its distance was current Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were placed in that order because that is the order of their apparent motions And it was natural to suppose that the slowest moving bodies were the furthest off The order of the days of the week shows what astrologers considered to be the order of the planets On their system of each successive hour of the day being ruled over by the successive planets taken in order The diagram, figure seven, shows that if the Sun ruled the first hour of a certain day Thereby giving its name to the day, Venus will rule the second hour, Mercury the third and so on The Sun will thus be found to rule the 8th, 15th and 22nd hour of that day Venus the 23rd and Mercury the 24th hour So the Moon will rule the first hour of the next day, which will therefore be Monday On the same principle, numbering round the hour successively with the arrows The first hour of the next day will be found to be ruled by Mars or by the Saxon deity corresponding there too The first hour of the day after by Mercury, Mjölkredi and so on, following the straight lines of the pattern The order of the planets round the circle counterclockwise, i.e. the direction of their proper motions Is that quoted above in the text To explain the motion of the planets and reduce them to any sort of law was a work of tremendous difficulty The greatest astronomer of ancient times was Hipparchus and to him the system known as the Ptolemaic system is no doubt largely due But it was delivered to the world mainly by Ptolemy and goes by his name This was a fine piece of work and a great advance on anything that had gone before For although it is of course saturated with error, still it is based on a large substratum of truth Its superiority to all the previously mentioned systems is obvious and it really did in its more developed form describe the observed motions of the planets Each planet was in the early stages of the system as taught, say by Eudoxus Supposed to be set in a crystal sphere, which revolved so as to carry the planet with it The sphere had to be a crystal to account for the visibility of the other planets and the stars through it Outside the seven planetary spheres arranged one inside the other was still a larger one in which were set the stars This was believed to turn all the others and it was called the premium mobile The whole system was supposed to produce in its revolution for the few privileged to hear the music of the spheres a sound of some magnificent harmony The enthusiastic disciples of Pythagoras believed that their master was privileged to hear this noble chant And far be it from us to doubt that the rapt and absorbing pleasure of contemplating the harmony of nature to a man so eminently great as Pythagoras Must be truly and adequately represented by some such poetic conception The precise kind of motion supposed to be communicated from the premium mobile to the other spheres so as to produce the observed motions of the planets Was modified and improved by various philosophers until it developed into the epicyclic train of Hipparchus and of Ptolemy It is very instructive to observe a planet say Mars or Jupiter night after night and plot down its place with reference to the fixed stars on a celestial globe or star map Or instead of direct observation by alignment with known stars it is easier to look out its right ascension and declination in Whitaker's Almanac and plot these down If this be done for a year or two it will be found that the motion of the planets is by no means regular but that on the whole it advances it sometimes is stationary and sometimes goes back These stations and retrogressions of the planet were well known to the ancients It was not to be supposed for a moment that the crystal spheres were subject to any irregularity Neither was uniform circular motion to be readily abandoned So it was surmised that the main sphere carried not the planet itself but the center or axis of a subordinate sphere and that the planet was carried by this The minor sphere could be allowed to revolve at a different uniform pace from the main sphere and so a curve of some complexity could be obtained A curve described in space by a point of a circle or sphere which itself is carried along at the same time is some kind of cycloid If the center of the tracing circle travels along a straight line we get the ordinary cycloid The curve traced in air by a nail on a coach wheel But if the center of the tracing circle be carried round another circle the curve described is called an epicycloid By such curves the planetary stations and retrogressions could be explained A large sphere would have to revolve once for a year of the particular planet carrying with it a subsidiary sphere in which the planet was fixed This latter sphere revolving once for a year of the earth The actual looped curve thus described is depicted for Jupiter and Saturn in the annex diagram, figure 10 It was long ago perceived that real material spheres were unnecessary Such spheres indeed, though possibly transparent to light, would be impermeable to comments Any other epicyclic gearing would serve and as a mere description of the motion it is simpler to think of a system of jointed bars One long arm carrying a shorter arm, the two revolving at different rates, and the end of the short one carrying the planet This does all that is needful for the first approximation to a planet's motion Insofar as the motion cannot be thus truly stated, the short arm may be supposed to carry another, and that another, and so on So that the resultant motion of the planet is compounded of a large number of circular motions of different periods By this device any required amount of complexity could be attained We shall return to this at greater length in lecture 3 The main features of the motion, as shown in the diagram, required only two arms for their expression One arm revolving with the average motion of the planet, and the other revolving with the apparent motion of the sun And always pointing in the same direction as the single arm supposed to carry the sun This last fact is of course because the motion to be represented does not really belong to the planet at all, but to the earth And so all the main epicyclic motions for the superior planets were the same As for the inferior planets, Mercury and Venus, they only appear to oscillate like the bob of a pendulum about the sun And so it is very obvious that they must be really revolving round it An ancient Egyptian system perceived this truth, but the Ptolemaic system imagined them to revolve round the earth like the rest With an artificial system of epicycles to prevent their ever getting far away from the neighborhood of the sun It is easy now to see how the Copernican system explains the main features of planetary motions The stations and retrogressions quite naturally and without any complexity Let the outer circle represent the orbit of Jupiter, and the inner circle the orbit of the earth Which is moving faster than Jupiter since Jupiter takes 4,332 days to make one revolution Then remember that the apparent position of Jupiter is referred to in the infinitely distant fixed stars and referred to figure 12 Let E1, E2 and company be successive positions of the earth J1, J2 and company corresponding positions of Jupiter Produce the lines E1, J1, E2 and J2 and company to an enormously greater circle outside And it will be seen that the termination of these lines, representing apparent positions of Jupiter among the stars Advances while the earth goes from E1 to E3 It is almost stationary from somewhere about E3 to E4 and recedes from E4 to E5 So that evidently the recessions of Jupiter are only apparent and are due to the orbital motion of the earth The apparent complications in the path of Jupiter shown in figure 10 are seen to be caused simply by the motion of the earth And to be thus completely and easily explained The same thing for an inferior planet, say Mercury, is even still more easily seen Via de figure 13 The motion of Mercury is direct from M2 to M3 Retrograde from M3 to M2 and stationary at M2 and M3 It appears to oscillate taking 72.5 days for its direct swing and 43.5 for its return swing On this system, no artificiality is required to prevent Mercury's ever getting far from the sun The radius of its orbit limits its real and apparent excursions Even if the earth were stationary, the motions of Mercury and Venus would not be essentially modified But the stations and retrogressions of the superior planets, Mars, Jupiter and company, would wholly cease The complexity of the old mode of regarding apparent motion may be illustrated by the case of a traveler in a railway train unaware of his own motion It is though trees, hedges, distant objects were all flying past him and contorting themselves as you may see the furrows of a plowed field do when traveling While you yourself seem stationary amidst it all How great a simplicity would be introduced by the hypothesis that, after all, these things might be stationary and one's self-moving Now you are not to suppose that the system of Copernicus swept away the entire doctrine of epicycles That doctrine can hardly be said to be swept away even now As a description of a planet's motion it is not incorrect, though it is geometrically cumbrous If you describe the motion of a railway train by stating that every point on the rim of each wheel describes a cycloid with reference to the earth And a circle with reference to the train and that the motion of the train is compounded of these cycloidal and circular motions You will not be saying what is false, only what is cumbrous The Ptolemaic system demanded large epicycles, depending on the motion of the earth These are what Copernicus overthrew But to express the minuter details of the motion if smaller epicycles remained And grew more and more complex as observations increased in accuracy until a greater man than either Copernicus or Ptolemy, V. Kepler, replaced them all by a simple ellipse One point I must not omit from this brief notice of the work of Copernicus Hipparchus had, by most sagacious interpretation of certain observations of his, discovered a remarkable phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes It was a discovery of the first magnitude and such as would raise to great fame the man who should have made it in any period of the world's history, even the present It is scarcely expressible in popular language and without some technical terms, but I can try The plane of the earth's orbit produced into the sky gives the apparent path of the sun throughout a year This path is known as the ecliptic, because eclipses only happen when the moon is in it The sun keeps to it accurately, but the planets wander somewhat above and below it, figure nine, and the moon wanders a good deal It is manifest, however, in order that there may be an eclipse of any kind, that a straight line must be able to be drawn through the earth and moon and sun Not necessarily through their centers, of course, and this is impossible unless some parts of the three bodies are in one plane, via the ecliptic or something very near it The ecliptic is a great circle of the sphere and is usually drawn on both celestial and terrestrial globes The earth's equator also produced into the sky, where it may still be called the equator, sometimes it is awkwardly called the equinoctal Givens another great circle inclined to the ecliptic and cutting it at two opposite points labeled respectively Aries and Libra, and together called the equinoxes The reason for the name is that when the sun is in that part of the ecliptic, it is temporarily also on the equator, and hence is symmetrically situated with respect to the earth's axis of rotation And consequently day and night are equal all over the earth Mark is found by plotting the position of the sun for a long time that these points of intersection or equinoxes were not stationary from century to century, but slowly moved among the stars, moving as it were to meet the sun So that he gets back to one of these points again 20 minutes, 23 and a quarter seconds before it has really completed a revolution, i.e. before the true year is fairly over The slow movement forward of the goalpost is called precession, the precession of the equinoxes One result of it is to shorten our years by about 20 minutes each, for the shortened period has to be called a year, because it is on the position of the sun with respect to the earth's axis that our seasons depend Copernicus perceived that, assuming the motion of the earth, a clearer account of this motion could be given The ordinary approximate statement concerning the earth's axis is that it remains parallel to itself, i.e. has a fixed direction as the earth moves around the sun But if, instead of being thus fixed, it is supposed to have a slow movement of revolution, so that it traces out a cone in the course of about 26,000 years Then, since the equator of course goes with it, the motion of its intersection with the fixed ecliptic is so far accounted for That is to say, the precession of the equinoxes is seen to be dependent on, and caused by, a slow conical movement of the earth's axis The prolongation of each end of the earth's axis into the sky, or the celestial north and south poles, will thus slowly trace out an approximate circle among the stars And the course of the north pole during historic time is exhibited in the annex diagram It is now situated near one of the stars of the lesser bear, which we therefore call the pole star, but not always was it so, nor will it be so in the future The position of the north pole 4,000 years ago is shown in the figure, and a revolution will be completed in something like 26,000 years The perception of the conical motion of the earth's axis was a beautiful generalization of Copernics, whereby a multitude of facts were grouped into a single phenomenon Of course, he did not explain the motion of the axis itself He stated the fact that it so moved, and I do not suppose it ever struck him to seek for an explanation An explanation was given later, and that a most complete one, but the idea even of seeking for it is a brilliant and striking one The achievement of the explanation by a single individual in the way it actually was accomplished is one of the most astounding things in the history of science And were it not that the same individual accomplished a dozen other things, equally and some still more extraordinary, we should rank that man as one of the greatest astronomers that ever lived As it is, he is Sir Isaac Newton We are to remember then, as the life work of Copernicus, that he placed the sun in its true place as the center of the solar system instead of the earth That he greatly simplified the theory of planetary motion by this step, and also by the simpler epicyclic chain, which now sufficed, and which he worked out mathematically That he exhibited the procession of the equinoxes, discovered by Hipparchus, as due to a conical motion of the earth's axis And that, by means of his simpler theory and more exact planetary tables, he reduced to some sort of order the confused chaos of the Ptolemaic system Whose accumulation of complexity and of outstanding errors threatened to render astronomy impossible by the mere burden of its detail There are many imperfections in his system, it is true, but his great merit is that he dared to look at the facts of nature with his own eyes Unhampered by the prejudice of centuries, a system venerable with age and supported by great names was universally believed and had been believed for centuries To doubt this system, and to seek after another and better one, at a time when all men's minds were governed by tradition and authority, and went to doubt with sin This required a great mind and a high character. Such a mind and such a character had this monk of Frouenberg And it is interesting to notice that the so-called religious scruples of smaller and less truly religious men did not affect Copernicus It was no dread of consequence to one form of truth that led him to delay the publication of the other form of truth specially revealed to him In his dedication, he says, if there be some babblers who, though ignorant of all mathematics, take upon them to judge of these things and dare to blame and cavill at my work Because of some passage of scripture which they have rested to their own purpose, I regard them not and will not scruple to hold their judgment in contempt I will conclude with the words of one of his biographers, Mr. E. J. C. Morton Copernicus cannot be said to have flooded with light the dark places of nature in the way that one stupendous mind subsequently did But still as we look back through the long vista of the history of science, the dim titanic figure of the old monk seems to rear itself out of the dull flats around it Pierces with its head the mists that overshadow them and catches the first gleam of the rising sun, like some iron peak by the creator, fired with the red glow of the rushing morn End of Lecture 1 of The Pioneers of Science by Sir Oliver Lodge Recording by Kathleen Nelson, Austin, Texas, April 2010 Dates and Summary of Facts for Lecture 2 Copernicus lived from 1473 to 1543 and was contemporary with Paracelsus and Raphael Tycho Brahe from 1546 to 1601 Kepler from 1571 to 1630 Galileo from 1564 to 1642 Gilbert from 1540 to 1603 Francis Bacon from 1561 to 1626 Descartes from 1596 to 1650 A Sketch of Tycho Brahe's Life and Work Tycho was a Danish noble born on his ancestral estate at Knutstorp near Helsenberg in 1546 Adopted by his uncle and sent to the University of Copenhagen to study law Attracted to astronomy by the occurrence of an eclipse on its predicted day, August 21st, 1560 Began to construct astronomical instruments, especially a quadrant and a sextant Observed at Augsburg and Wittenberg Studied alchemy but was recalled to astronomy by the appearance of a new star Overcame his aristocratic prejudices and delivered a course of lectures at Copenhagen at the request of the king After this he married a peasant girl Again traveled and observed in Germany In 1576 was sent forth to Denmark by Frederick II and established in the island of Heuen with an endowment enabling him to devote his life to astronomy Built Uranberg, furnished it with splendid instruments and became the founder of accurate instrumental astronomy His theories were poor but his observations were admirable In 1592 Frederick died and five years later Tycho was impoverished and practically banished After wandering till 1599 he was invited to Prague by the Emperor Rudolf and there received John Kepler among other pupils But the sentence of exile was too severe and he died in 1601 aged 54 years A man of strong character, untiring energy and devotion to accuracy, his influence on astronomy has been immense Lecture 2 Tycho Brahe and the earliest observatory We have seen how Copernicus placed the earth in its true position in the solar system Making it merely one of a number of other worlds revolving around the central luminary And observe that there are two phenomena to be thus accounted for and explained First, the diurnal revolution of the heavens Second, the annual motion of the sun among the stars The effect of the diurnal motion is conspicuous to everyone and explains the rising, southing and setting of the whole visible firmament The effect of the annual motion i.e. of the apparent annual motion of the sun among the stars is less obvious But it may be followed easily enough by observing the stars visible at any given time of evening at different seasons of the year At midnight for instance the position of the sun is definite, vis due north always But the constellation which at that time is due south or is rising or setting varies with the time of year An interval of one month producing just the same effect on the appearance of the constellations as an interval of two hours does Because the day contains twice as many hours as the year contains months E.g. the sky looks the same at midnight on the first of October as it does at 10 p.m. on the first of November All these simple consequences of the geocentric as opposed to the heliocentric point of view were pointed out by Copernicus In addition to his greater work of constructing improved planetary tables on the basis of his theory But it must be admitted that he himself felt the hypothesis of the motion of the earth to be a difficulty Its acceptance is by no means such an easy and childish matter as we are apt now to regard it And the hostility to it is not at all surprising The human race after having ridiculed and resisted the truth for a long time is apt to end in accepting it so blindly and unimaginatively As to fail to recognize the real achievement of its first propounders or the difficulties which they had to overcome The majority of men at the present day have grown accustomed to hear the motion of the earth spoken of Their acceptance of it means nothing The attitude of the paradoxer who denies it is more intelligent It is not to be supposed that the idea of thus explaining some of the phenomena of the heavens Especially the daily motion of the entire firmament by a diurnal rotation of the earth had not struck anyone It was often at this time referred to as the Pythagorean theory and it had been taught I believe by Aristarchus But it was new to the modern world and it had the great weight of Aristotle against it Consequently for long after Copernicus only a few leading spirits could be found to support it And the long established venerable Ptolemaic system continued to be taught in all universities The main objections to the motion of the earth were such as the following One, the motion is unfelt and difficult to imagine That it is unfelt is due to its uniformity and can be explained mechanically That it is difficult to imagine is and remains true But a most important lesson we have to learn is that difficulty of conception is no valid argument against reality Two, that the stars do not alter their relative positions according to the season of the year But the constellations preserve always the same aspect precisely even to careful measurement This is indeed a difficulty and a great one In June the earth is 184 million miles away from where it was in December How can we see precisely the same fixed stars? It is not possible unless they are at a practically infinite distance That is the only answer that can be given It was the tentative answer given by Copernicus It is the correct answer Not only from every position of the earth but from every planet of the solar system The same constellations are visible and the stars have the same aspect The whole immensity of the solar system shrinks to practically a point when confronted with the distance of the stars Not, however, so entirely a speck as to resist the terrific accuracy of the present century And their microscopic relative displacement with the season of the year has now at length been detected And the distance of many thereby measured Three, that if the earth revolved around the sun, Mercury and Venus ought to show phases like the moon So they ought. Any globe must show phases if it lived near the sun than we do and if we go around it For we shall see varying amounts of its illuminated half The only answer that Copernicus could give to this was that they might be difficult to see without extra powers of sight But he ventured to predict that the phases would be seen if ever our powers of vision should be enhanced Four, that if the earth moved or even revolved on its own axis, a stone or other dropped body ought to be left far behind This difficulty is not a real one, like the two last, and it is based on an ignorance of the laws of mechanics Which had not at that time been formulated We know now that a ball dropped from a high tower, so far from lagging, drops a minute trifle in front of the foot of a perpendicular Because the top of the tower is moving a trace faster than the bottom, by reason of the diurnal rotation But ignoring this, a stone dropped from the lamp of a railway carriage drops in the center of the floor Whether the carriage be moving steadily or standing still A slant direction of fall could only be detected if the carriage were being accelerated or if the brake were applied A body dropped from a moving carriage shares the motion of the carriage and starts with that as its initial velocity A ball dropped from a moving balloon does not simply drop, but starts off in whatever direction the car was moving Its motion being immediately modified by gravity, precisely in the same way as that of a thrown ball is modified This is indeed the whole philosophy of throwing, to drop a ball from a moving carriage The carriage is the hand, and to throw far, a run is taken, and the body is jerk forward The arm is also moved as rapidly as possible on the shoulder as a pivot The forearm can be moved still faster, and the wrist joint gives yet another motion The art of throwing is to bring all these to bear at the same instant And then, just as they have all attained their maximum velocity, to let the ball go It starts off with the initial velocity thus imparted, and is abandoned to gravity If the vehicle were able to continue its motion steadily, as a balloon does The ball, when let go from it, would appear to the occupant simply to drop And it would strike the ground at a spot vertically under the moving vehicle, though by no means vertically below the place where it started The resistance of the air makes observations of this kind inaccurate, except when performed inside a carriage, so that the air shares in the motion Otherwise, a person could toss and catch a ball out of a train window, just as well as if you were stationary Though to a spectator outside, he would seem to be using great skill to throw the ball in a parabola adapted to bring it back to his hand The same circumstance enhances the apparent difficulty of the circus rider's jumping feats All he has to do is to jump up and down on the horse The forward motion which carries him through hoops belongs to him by virtue of the motion of the horse, without effort on his part Thus then, it happens that a stone drops 16 feet on the earth, appears to fall straight down Although its real path in space is a very flat trajectory of 19 miles base and 16 feet height 19 miles, being the distance traversed by the earth every second in the course of its angled journey around the sun No wonder that it was thought that bodies must be left behind if the earth was subject to such terrific speed as this All that Copernicus could suggest on this head was that perhaps the atmosphere might help to carry things forward and enable them to keep pace with the earth There were thus several outstanding physical difficulties in the way of the acceptance of the Copernican theory besides the biblical difficulty It was quite natural that the idea of the earth's motion should be repugnant and take a long time to sink into the minds of men And as scientific progress was vastly slower then than it is now, we find not only all priests but even some astronomers 100 years afterwards still imagining the earth to be at rest And among them was a very eminent one, Tycho Brahe It is interesting to note moreover that the argument about the motion of the earth being contrary to scripture appealed not only to ecclesiastics in those days But to scientific men also, and Tycho Brahe being a man of great piety and highly superstitious also Was so much influenced by it that he endeavored to devise some scheme by which the chief practical advantage of the Copernican system could be retained And yet the earth be kept still at the center of the whole This was done by making all the celestial sphere with stars and everything rotate round the earth once a day as in the Ptolemaic scheme And then besides this, making all the planets revolve round the sun, and thus to revolve round the earth Such as a Tychonic system So far as relative motion is concerned, it comes to the same thing Just as when you drop a book, you may say either that the earth rises to meet the book, or that the book falls to meet the earth Or when a fly buzzes round your head, you may say that you are revolving round the fly But the absurdity of making the whole gigantic system of sun and planets and stars revolve round our insignificant earth Was too great to be swallowed by other astronomers after they had once had a taste of the Copernican theory And accordingly, the Tychonic system died of speedy and an easy death at the same time as its inventor Wherein then lay the magnitude of the man Not in its theories, words were purile, but in his observations, which were magnificent He was the first observational astronomer, the founder of the splendid system of practical astronomy Which has culminated in the present Greenwich Observatory Up to Tycho, the only astronomical measurements had been of the rudest kind Copernicus even improved upon what had gone before, with measuring rules made with his own hands Ptolemy's observations could never be trusted to half a degree Tycho introduced accuracy before undreamed of And though his measurements, reckoned by modern ideas, are of course almost ludicrously rough Remember no such thing as a telescope or microscope was then dreamed of Yet, estimated by the error in which they were made, they are marvels of accuracy And not a single mistake, due to carelessness, has ever been detected in them In fact, they may be dependent on to almost minutes of arc, i.e., to sixteenths of a degree For certain purposes, connected with a proper motion of stars, they are still appeal to And they served as the certain and trustworthy data for succeeding generations of theorists to work upon It was long indeed after Tycho's death before observations approaching in accuracy to his were made again In every sense, therefore, he was a pioneer, let us proceed to trace his history Born the eldest son of a noble family, as noble and ignorant as sixteen undisputed quarterlings could make them As one of his biographers says, in a period when, even more than at present Killing and hunting were the only natural aristocratic pursuits When all study was regarded as something only fit for monks And was science was looked at a scance as something unsavory, useless, and semi-diabolic There was little in his introduction to the world urging him in the direction where his genius lay Of course, he was destined for a soldier But fortunately, his uncle, George Brahe, a more educated man than his father Having no son of his own, was anxious to adopt him And though not permitted to do so for a time, succeeded in getting his way on the birth of a second son Steno, who by the way, ultimately became privy counselor to the king of Denmark Tycho's uncle gave him what he would never have got at home A good education, and ultimately put him to study law At the age of thirteen, he entered the University of Copenhagen And while there, occurred the determining influence of his life An eclipse of the sun in those days was not regarded with a cold-blooded inquisitiveness or matter-of-fact apathy According as there is or is not anything to be learnt from it, with which such an event is now regarded Every occurrence in the heavens was then believed to carry with it the destiny of nations And the fate of individuals, and accordingly was of surpassing interest Ever since the time of Hipparchus, it has been possible for some capable man here and there To predict the occurrence of eclipses pretty closely The thing is not difficult The prediction was not indeed to the minute and second as it is now But the day could usually be hit upon pretty accurately sometime ahead Much as we now managed to hit upon the return of a comet, barring accidents And the hour could be predicted as the event approached Well, the boy Tycho, among others, watched for this eclipse on August 21st, 1560 And when it appeared at its appointed time, every instinct for the marvelous, dormant in his strong nature Awoke to stringuous life, and he determined to understand for himself A science permitting such wonderful possibilities of prediction He was sent to Leipzig with a tutor to go on with a study of law But he seems to have done as little law as possible He spent all his money on books and instruments, and set up half a night studying and watching the stars In 1563, he observed the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, the precursor and cause as he thought it, of the Great Plague He found that the old planetary tables were as much as a month in error in fixing this event And even the Copernican tables were several days out So he formed the resolve to devote his life to improving astronomical tables This resolve he executed with a vengeance His first instrument was a jointed ruler for sites for fixing the position of planets with respect to the stars And observing their stations in retroaggressions By thus measuring the angles between a planet and two fixed stars Its position can be plotted down on a celestial map or globe In 1565, his uncle George died and made Tycho his heir He returned to Denmark but met with nothing but ridicule and contempt for his absurd driveling away of time over useless pursuits So he went back to Germany, first to Wittenberg, thence driven by the plague to Rostock Here his fiery nature led him into an absurd though somewhat dangerous adventure A quarrel at some feast on a mathematical point with a countryman, Mandorupius, led to the fixing of a duel And it was fought with swords at 7 p.m. at the end of December When, if there was any light at all, it must have been a flickering and unsatisfactory nature The result of this insane performance was that Tycho got his nose cut clean off He managed, however, to construct an artificial one Some say of gold and silver Some say of putty and brass But whatever it was made of, there is no doubt that he wore it for the rest of his life And it is a most famous feature It excited generally far more interest than his astronomical researches It is said, moreover, to have fairly resembled the original But whether this remark was made by a friend or by an enemy, I cannot say One account says that he used to carry about him a box of cement to apply whenever his nose came off, which it periodically did About this time, he visited Augsburg, met with some kindred and enlightened spirits in that town And with much enthusiasm and spirit, constructed a great quadrant These early instruments were tremendous affairs A great number of workmen were employed upon this quadrant And it took twenty men to carry it to its place and erect it It stood in the open air for five years and was then destroyed by a storm With it, he made many observations On his return to Denmark in 1571, his fame preceded him and he was much better received And in order to increase his power of constructing instruments, he took up the study of alchemy and, like the rest of the persuasion, tried to make gold The precious metals were by many old philosophers considered to be related in some way to the heavenly bodies Silver to the moon, for instance, as we still see by the name lunar caustic applied to nitrate of silver Gold to the sun, copper to Mars, lead to Saturn Hence astronomy and alchemy often went together Tycho, all his life, combined a little alchemy with his astronomical labors And he constructed a wonderful patent medicine to cure all disorders Which had as wide a circulation in Europe in its time as Holloway's pills He gives a tremendous receipt for it, with liquid gold and all manner of ingredients in it Among them, however, occurs a little antimony, a well-known sederific And to this, no doubt, whatever efficacy the medicine possessed was due So he might have gone on wasting his time, were it not in that November 1572 A new star made its appearance, as they have done occasionally before and since On the average, one may say that about every fifty years, a new star of fair magnitude makes its temporary appearance They are now known to be the result of some catastrophe or collision, whereby immense masses of incandescent gas are produced This one, seen by Tycho, became as bright as Jupiter and then died away in about a year and a half Tycho observed all its changes and endeavored to measure its distance from the Earth With the result that it was proved to belong to the region of the fixed stars At an immeasurable distance and was not some nearer and more trivial phenomenon He was asked by the University of Copenhagen to give a course of lectures on astronomy But this was a step he felt some aristocratic aversion to, until a little friendly pressure was bought to bear upon him by a request from the king and delivered they were He now seems to have finally thrown off his aristocratic prejudices and to have indulged himself in treading on the corns of nearly all the high and mighty people he came into contact with In short, he became what we might now call a violent radical But he was a good-hearted man nevertheless and many are the tales told of his visits to sick peasants, of his consulting the stars as to their fate All in perfect good faith and of the medicines which he concocted and prescribed for them The daughter of one of these peasants he married and very happy the marriage seems to have been Now comes the crowning episode in Tycho's life Frederick II realizing how imminent a man they had among them and how much he could do if only he had the means For we must understand that Tycho though of good family and well-off was by no means what we would call a wealthy man Frederick II made him a splendid and enlightened offer The offer was this that if Tycho would agree to settle down and make his astronomical observations in Denmark He should have an estate in Norway settled upon him, a pension of 400 pounds a year for life, a site for a large observatory and 20,000 pounds to build it with Well if ever money was well spent this was, by its means Denmark before long headed the nations of Europe in the matter of science A thing it has not done before or since The site granted was the island of Heuen between Copenhagen and Elsinore And here the most magnificent observatory ever built was raised and called Uranaberg the castle of the heavens It was built on a hill in the center of the island and included gardens, printing shops, laboratory, dwelling houses and four observatories All furnished with the most splendid instruments that Tycho could devise and that then could be constructed It was decorated with pictures and sculptures of eminent men and altogether was the most gorgeous place 20,000 pounds no doubt went far in those days but the original grant was supplemented by Tycho himself Who was said to have spent another equal sum out of his own pocket on the place For 20 years this great temple of science was continually worked in by him and he soon became the foremost scientific man in Europe Philosophers, statesmen and occasionally kings came to visit the great astronomer and to inspect his curiosities And very wholesome for some of these great personages must have been the treatment they met with For Tycho was no respecter of persons His humbly born wife sat at the head of the table whoever was there and he would snub and contradict a chancellor just as soon as he would a surf Whatever form his pride may have taken when a youth in his maturity and impelled him to ignore differences of rank not substantially justified And he seemed to take a delight in exposing the ignorance of shallow titled persons to whom contradiction and exposure were most unusual experiences For sick peasants he would take no end of trouble and went about doctoring them for nothing till he set all the professional doctors against him So that when his day of misfortune came as come it did their influence was not wanting to help to ruin one who spoiled their practice and whom they derided as a quack But some of the great ignorant folk who came to visit his temple of science and to inspect its curiosities felt themselves insulted not always without reason He kept a tame maniac in the house named Lep and he used to regard the sayings of this personage as a regular presaging future events and far better worth listening to than ordinary conversation Consequently he used to have him at his banquets and feed him himself and whenever Lep opened his mouth to speak everyone else was preemptively ordered to hold his tongue so that Lep's words might be written down In fact it was something like an exaggerated addition of Betsy Trotwood and Mr. Dick It must have been an odd dinner party says Professor Stewart with this strange wild terribly clever man with his red hair and brazen nose sometimes flashing with wit and knowledge Sometimes making the whole company, princes and servants alike hold their peace and listen humbly to the ravings of a poor imbecile To the people he despised he did not show his serious instruments He had other attractions in the shape of a lot of toy machinery little windmills and queer doors and golden globes and all manner of ingenious tricks and automata many of which he had made himself and these he used to show them instead and no doubt they were well enough pleased with them Those of the visitors however who really cared to see and understand his instruments went away enchanted with his genius and hospitality I may perhaps be producing an unfair impression of imperiousness and insolence Tycho was fiery no doubt but I think we should wrong him if we considered him insolent Most of the nobles of his day were haughty persons accustomed to deal with serfs and very likely to sneer at and trample on any meek man of science whom they could easily despise So Tycho was not meek he stood up for the honor of his science and paid them back in their own coin with perhaps a little interest That this behavior was not worldly wise is true enough but I know of no commandment and joining us to be worldly wise If we knew more about a so-called imbecile protégé we should probably find some reason for the interest which Tycho took in him Whether he was what is now called a clairvoyant or not Tycho evidently regarded his utterances as irracular And of course when one is receiving what may be a revelation from heaven it is natural to suppress ordinary conversation Among the noble visitors whom he received and entertained it is interesting to notice James I of England who spent eight days at Uraniburg on the occasion of his marriage with Anne of Denmark in 1590 and seems to have been deeply impressed by his visit Among other gifts James presented Tycho with a dog and the same animal was subsequently the cause of trouble For it seems that one day the Chancellor of Denmark, Walshendorf brutally kicked the poor beast and Tycho who was very fond of animals gave him a piece of his mind in no measured language Walshendorf went home determined to ruin him King Frederick however remained his true friend, doubtless partially influenced there too by his queen Sophia, an enlightened woman who paid many visits to Uraniburg and knew Tycho well But unfortunately Frederick died and his son Amir Boy came to the throne Now was the time for the people whom Tycho had offended for those who were jealous of his great fame and importance as well as for those who cast longing eyes on his estate and endowments The boy king too unfortunately paid a visit to Tycho and venturing upon a decided opinion on some recondite subject received a quiet setting down which he ill relished Letters written by Tycho about this time are full of foreboding He greatly dreads having to leave Uraniburg with which his whole life has for twenty years been bound up He tries to comfort himself with a thought that wherever he is sent he will have the same heavens and the same stars over his head Gradually his Norwegian estate and his pensions were taken away and in five years poverty compelled him to abandon his magnificent temple and to take a small house in Copenhagen Not content with this Walshendorf got a royal commission appointed to inquire into the value of his astronomical labors This sapient body reported that his work was not only useless but noxious and soon after he was attacked by the populace in the public street Nothing was left for him now but to leave the country and he went into Germany leaving his wife and instruments to follow him whenever he could find a home for them His wanderings in this dark time some two years are not quite clear but at last the enlightened ember of Bohemia Rudolph II invited him to settle in Prague Thither he repaired a castle was given him as an observatory a house in the city and three thousand crowns a year for life So his instruments were set up once more students flocked to hear him and to receive work at his hands Among them a poor youth John Kepler to whom he was very kind and who became as you know a still greater man than his master But the spirit of Tycho was broken and though some good work was done at Prague more observations made and the redolphine tables begun yet the hand of death was upon him A painful disease seized him attended with sleeplessness and temporary delirium during the paroxysms of which he frequently exclaimed Oh that it may not appear that I have lived in vain Quietly however at last and surrounded by his friends and relatives this fierce passionate soul passed away on the 24th of October 1601 His beloved instruments which were almost a part of himself were stored by Rudolph in a museum with scrupulous care until the taking of Prague by the Elector Palatine's troops In this disturbed time they got smashed dispersed and converted to other purposes One thing only was saved the Great Brass Globe which some 30 years after was recognized by a later king of Denmark as having belonged to Tycho and deposited in the library of the Academy of Sciences at Copenhagen where I believe it is to this day The island of Heuen was overrun by the Danish nobility and nothing now remains of Uraniburg but a mound of earth and two pits As to the real work of Tycho that has become immortal enough chiefly through the labors of his friend and scholar whose life we shall consider in the next lecture End of lecture 2 recording by James Christopher Jx Christopher at yahoo.com