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

strictly by untrammeled experiment and observation, joined with clear and universal logical reasoning—has often harmed science by turning the empiricist method into a shibboleth. The irony of this situation fills me with a mixture of pain for a derailed (if impossible) ideal and amusement for human foibles—as a method devised to undermine proof by authority becomes, in its turn, a species of dogma itself. Thus, if only to honor the truism that liberty requires eternal vigilance, we must also act as watchdogs to debunk the authoritarian form of the empiricist myth—and to reassert the quintessentially human theme that scientists can work only within their social and psychological contexts. Such an assertion does not debase the institution of science, but rather enriches our view of the greatest dialectic in human history: the transformation of society by scientific progress, which can only arise within a matrix set, constrained, and facilitated by society.
    I know no better illustration of this central principle than the tale of Galileo’s losing struggle with Saturn, for he insisted on validation by pure sight (observavi) , and he could never see his quarry correctly—presumably because his intellectual domain included no option for rings around a planet. Galileo did not just “see” Saturn; he had to interpret an object in his lens by classifying an ambiguous shape (the best that his poor optics could provide) within the structure of his mental space—and rings didn’t inhabit this interior world.
    The great Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens finally recognized the rings of Saturn in 1656, more than a decade after Galileo’s death. Galileo, who had wrestled mightily with Saturn, never moved beyond his trigeminal claim, and finally gave up and turned to other pursuits. In his 1613 book on sunspots, published by the Lynxes (with the author designated on the title page as Galileo Galilei Linceo), he continued to insist that Saturn must be threefold because he had so observed the planet: “I have resolved not to put anything around Saturn except what I have already observed and revealed—that is, two small stars which touch it, one to the east and one to the west.” Against a colleague who interpreted the planet as oblong, Galileo simply asserted his superior vision. The colleague, Galileo wrote, had viewed Saturn less often and with a much poorer telescope, “where perfection is lacking, [and] the shape and distinction of the three stars imperfectly seen. I, who have observed it a thousand times at different periods with an excellent instrument, can assure you that no change whatever is to be seen in it.”
    Yet just as Galileo prepared his book on sunspots for publication, he observed Saturn again after a hiatus of two years—and the two side planets had disappeared (a situation produced, we now know, when the planet’s changing orientation presents the rings directly on edge—that is, as an invisible line in Galileo’s poor telescope). The stunned Galileo, reduced to a most uncharacteristic modesty, had just enough time to make an addition to the last chapter of his book. He abjured nothing about his previous observations or about the righteousness of the empirical method in general. He merely confessed his puzzlement, making a lovely classical allusion to the primary myth about the planet’s eponym:
    I had discovered Saturn to be three-bodied…. When I first saw them they seemed almost to touch, and they remained so for almost two years without the least change. It was reasonable to believe them to be fixed…. Hence I stopped observing Saturn for more than two years. But in the past few days I returned to it and found it to be solitary, without its customary supporting stars, and as perfectly round and sharply bounded as Jupiter. Now what can be said of this strange metamorphosis? That the two lesser stars have been consumed? … Has