My phone versus Galileo's telescope

My Samsung Captivate Smart phone

We live in a time of remarkable technological advances.  Denise and I upgraded to smart phones last month, and I have yet to plumb the depths of all the cool things that it can do.  In addition to a telephone, it has a really good still and video camera, GPS receiver, mp3 and video player, WiFi for full access to the Internet, and Bluetooth for easy connection to other devices.  It seems to combine some of the most important inventions of the 20th Century in a gadget the size of my palm.  And yes, it works on an Android operating system developed by Google, and therefore has access to thousands of free applications easily found and downloadable.  I have spent several evenings simply exploring the potential of amazing and free 'apps'. 

But is it really that big of a technological leap?  Certainly the GPS and internet applications on my smart phone are new.  However, when I was a kid my parents had telephones, used still and movie cameras, and played music on a record player.  When it comes down to it, my smart phone is really much of the same technology only packaged in one unit and much, much smaller.  As for other differences, my parents drove around in cars, boarded planes to cover long distances, shopped for food in large grocery stores, lived in subdivisions, watched television and movies.   Our lives today are really not that much different.

Hard Times

But there are other times in western civilization when technology seemed to change much, much more the way people lived.  For example, in the 19th Century, the invention of the railroad increased peoples' transportation by an order of six times in a single day, a more modern medicine recognized germs as the causes of infection and because of it saved millions of peoples' lives, an industrialized work place required people to work in horribly dark and unhealthy sweat shops and factories, industrialized cities expanded in size by two and three times in a generation, and harboured the conditions for largely un-policed and rampant crime, lethal toxins, and all sorts of dark activities that exploited women, the poor, the weak, and the young. 

Galileo at his telescope

Perhaps Galileo's telescope changed things far more dramatically than a gadget ever could today.  He did not invent the telescope, but he was the first to point it at the stars.  His first telescope in 1609 magnified about 10 times, the same as most binoculars used today, and later on he developed a 30 times telescope.

Galileo looked up through his telescope at a time when the educated elite of the time were largely 'Scholastics': that is, they relied on and used the words and opinions of authorities often long dead to present their arguments.  "Ah yes, but St Jerome builds on St Augustine's idea in a way that St Thomas Aquinas does not."  In the realm of science, all of the various fields were explained in the works of Aristotle, who managed to draw them all together into one coherent 'world system'.  If people since Aristotle had different ideas about certain aspects of science, their ideas probably would not take hold unless they could replace Aristotle's entire system of science.  Nobody was able to do that, and so Aristotle's scientific ideas for the most part were held from the 4th C BC through to the Renaissance. 

A generation before Galileo, Copernicus had published his views on a heliocentric universe, and used theory and good common sense to back up his arguments.  Galileo, with his telescope, began to observe things that revealed one inconsistency after another in the Aristotelian universe, and at the same time underline the veracity of the Copernican system.  The moon, he observed, was not a perfect sphere, but was covered in mountains and valleys.  Venus went through 'phases' as did the moon, there were four moons orbiting Jupiter, the sun had 'spots' and orbited on an axis that was skewed like earth's, and the 'fixed stars' (beyond the planets) were very, very far away and seemed to be stationary.  All of these things refuted aspects of the Aristotelian astronomical system, and when Galileo published his findings in Italian rather than Latin, the plot thickened.  

The Scholastics were very religious.  This was at a time of the Protestant Reformation, and at first, most of the dissent for the Copernican system was coming from that quarter. These early Protestants were very fundamentalist: in fact, one of the reasons leading to the reformation was that the Church was not literally following the words of the Bible.  Contrary to a Copernican system, the Book of Joshua related how Joshua had made the sun stand still.  If the sun was not moving but the earth was, how could Joshua require the sun to stop when it was already stationary?  Also, the Bible placed the earth in the centre of the universe, with everything set up to serve mankind: the sun lit our days and allowed crops to grow, the moon gave us light at night, and the stars allowed navigation.  A Copernican system treated earth as simply another mundane planet.  Further, in a geocentric universe, hell was in the centre of an earth that was corruptible, and heaven was outside the nine perfect celestial spheres that contained the moon, sun, planets and fixed stars.  If the sun was the centre, and the earth just another planet, where were the unique places for hell and heaven? 

And then things began to go wrong for Galileo in his own Catholic Church.  His work, written in Italian, was understandable to anyone who could read and did not require Latin training. At that time, the Jesuits controlled the educational system and they closely guarded this privilege.  Galileo directly threatened this power by making learning available through channels outside Jesuit control. The enemies Galileo had made early in his career rose to positions of power in the Jesuit hierarchy, and eventually led a sustained attack against Galileo.  In the end, Galileo was made to recant his views and he spent his remaining days muzzled under house arrest.

However, even though both Catholics and Protestants tried to repress the teaching of the Copernican system, Galileo had broken the field wide open.  Within a few generations, the educated people of western civilization had embraced a heliocentric universe.  Galileo's telescope resulted in humans perceiving themselves no longer on a stationary sphere in the centre of the universe, but rather on a planet revolving daily on a skewed axis, over a year long orbit around our sun.  It is difficult to imagine a greater change in worldview.  Today we all accept that we are on a moving planet because that is how we are taught when we are young.  However, imagine having to come to grips with this reality later on in life. 

Galileo's careful observations, predictions, and testing of predictions with more observations also helped to pioneer a scientific method that was to change western civilization forever.  Scholasticism would take successive blows by figures like Galileo, Kepler and Descartes, and it would fade away during a new Age of Science. 

And so, while my smart phone is very cool, when placed against Galileo's telescope and other gadgets in history, it is but a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants.