The Lying Stones of Marrakech by Stephen Jay Gould Read Free Book Online

quadrupeds.” Plutarch had embellished the legend by speaking of “the lynx, who can penetrate through trees and rocks with its sharp sight.” And Galen, ever the comparative anatomist, had written: “We would seem absurdly weak in our powers of vision if we compared our sight to the acuity of the lynx or the eagle.” (I have translated these aphorisms directly from Conrad Gesner’s 1551 compendium on mammals, the standard source for such information in Cesi’s day.)

    The official emblem of Europe’s first scientific society, the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynxes), founded in 1603 and including Galileo as an early member .
    Still, despite Cesi’s ambitious names and aims, the academy of four young men faltered at first. Cesi’s father made a vigorous attempt to stop his son’s foolishness, and the four Lynxes all dispersed to their native cities, keeping their organization alive only by the uncertain media of post and messages. But Cesi persevered and triumphed (for a time), thanks to several skills and circumstances. He acquired more power and prestige, both by growing up and by inheriting substantial wealth. Most importantly, he became a consummate diplomat and facilitator within the maximally suspicious and labyrinthine world of civil and ecclesiastical politics in Rome during the Counter-Reformation. The Lynxes flourished largely because Cesi managed to keep the suspicions of popes and cardinals at bay, while science prepared to fracture old views of the cosmos, and to develop radically new theories about the nature of matter and causation.
    As a brilliant administrator, Cesi knew that he needed more clout among the membership of the Lynxes. He therefore recruited, as the fifth and sixth members of an organization that would eventually reach a roster of about thirty, two of the most prestigious thinkers and doers of early-seventeenth-century life. In 1610, he journeyed to Naples, where he persuaded the senior spokesman of the fading Neoplatonic school—the seventy-five-year-old GiambattistaDella Porta—to join a group of men young enough to be his grandsons. Then, in 1611, Cesi made his preeminent catch, when he recruited the hottest intellectual property in the Western world, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), to become the sixth member of the Lynxes.
    The year before, in 1610, Galileo had provided an ultimate proof for the cliché that good things come in small packages by publishing Sidereus nuncius (Starry messenger)—little more than a pamphlet really, but containing more oomph per paragraph than anything else ever achieved in the history of science or printing. Galileo shook the earth by turning his newly invented telescope upon the cosmos and seeing the moon as a planet with mountains and valleys, not as the perfect sphere required by conventional concepts of science and theology. Galileo also reported that thousands of previously invisible stars build the Milky Way, thus extending the cosmos beyond any previously conceivable limit; and that four moons orbit Jupiter, forming a miniature world analogous to the motion of planets around a central body. Moreover, Galileo pointed out, if satellites circle planets, then the crystalline spheres, supposedly marking the domain of each planet, and ordered as a set of concentric shells around the central earth, could not exist—for the revolution of moons would shatter these mystical structures of a geometrically perfect, unsullied, and unchanging cosmos, God’s empyrean realm.
    But Galileo also made some errors in his initial survey, and I have always been struck that standard books on the history of astronomy, written in the heroic or hagiographical mode, almost never mention (or relegate to an awkward footnote) the most prominent of Galileo’s mistakes—for the story strikes me as fascinating and much more informative about the nature of science, and of creativity in general, than any of his