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

valid observations.
    Galileo also focused his telescope on Saturn, the most distant of the visible planets—and he saw the famous rings. But he could not properly visualize or interpret what he had observed, presumably because his conceptual world lacked the requisite “space” for such a peculiar object (while his telescope remained too crude to render the rings with enough clarity to force his mind, already benumbed by so many surprises, to the most peculiar and unanticipated conclusion of all).
    The stymied Galileo looked and looked, and focused and focused, night after night. He finally interpreted Saturn as a threefold body, with a central sphere flanked by two smaller spheres of equal size, each touching the main planet. Following a common custom of the day—established to preserve claims of priority while not revealing preliminary conclusions ripe for theft by others—Galileo encoded his interpretation as a Latin anagram, which he posted to his friend and leading compatriot in astronomical research, Johannes Kepler.
    Kepler may have matched Galileo in brilliance, but he never resolved the anagram correctly, and he misinterpreted the message as a statement about the planet Mars. In frustration (and a bit of pique), he begged Galileo for the answer. His colleague replied with the intended solution:
    Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi .
[I have observed that the farthest planet is threefold.]
    I regard the last word of Galileo’s anagram as especially revealing. He does not advocate his solution by stating “I conjecture,” “I hypothesize,” “I infer,” or “It seems to me that the best interpretation …” Instead, he boldly writes “ observavi ”—I have observed . No other word could capture, with such terseness and accuracy, the major change in concept and procedure (not to mention ethical valuation) that marked the transition to what we call “modern” science. An older style (as found, for example, in Gesner’s compendium on mammals, cited above) would not have dishonored a claim for direct observation, but would have evaluated such an argument as a corroborative afterthought, surely secondary in weight to such criteria as the testimony of classical authors and logical consistency with a conception of the universe “known” to be both true and just—in other words, to authority and fixed “reasonableness.”
    But the new spirit of skepticism toward past certainty, coupled with respect for “pure” and personal observation—then being stressed by Francis Bacon in England, René Descartes in France, and the Lynxes in Italy—was sweeping through the intellectual world, upsetting all standard procedures of former times and giving birth to the modern form of an institution now called “science.” Thus, Galileo supported his theory of Saturn with the strongest possible claim of the new order, the one argument that could sweep aside all opposition by claiming a direct, immediate, and unsullied message from nature. Galileo simply said: I have observed it; I have seen it with my own eyes. How could old Aristotle, or even the present pope himself, deny such evidence?
    I do not intend, in this essay, to debunk the usual view that such a transition from old authority to direct observation marks a defining (and wonderfully salutary) event in the history of scientific methodology. But I do wish to note that all great mythologies include harmful simplicities amidst their genuine reforms—and that these negative features often induce the ironic consequence of saddling an original revolutionary doctrine with its own form ofrestrictive and unquestioned authority. The idea that observation can be pure and unsullied (and therefore beyond dispute)—and that great scientists are, by implication, people who can free their minds from the constraints of surrounding culture and reach conclusions