The Enchantment of Urania

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface

We do not know precisely how, when, and where Galileo Galilei first learned of the invention of the “Dutch cylinder”. In the absence of documentary evidence, we can only piece together the clues and try to figure it out. It probably happened in Venice at the early summer of 1609, within the walls of the convent annexed to the Gothic church of Santa Fosca, in the popular and populous Cannaregio district, the northernmost of the six historic sestieri of the city of canals. The place, which was not far from the ghetto where the “Concilio dei Pregadi” had relegated Jews about a century earlier, was easy to reach by boat for those arriving at the Lagoon city from the mainland. The then forty-five-year-old professor of the Padua Studium (Latin names of universities in the Middle Ages) went there from time to time to meet his friend Paolo Sarpi, who had been severely disabled after a vicious attack. Two years earlier, the friar of the mendicant order of the Servorum Beatae Mariae Virginis (Servants of Mary) had been seriously wounded in the face by the dagger of some assassins in retaliation for his critical attitude towards the Roman Curia and for having taken the side of Venice in the dispute with Pope Paul V Borghese for civil liberties. The ambush of the peaceful man of God brought a bloody end to a hitherto bloodless tug-of-war between the Serenissima (Most Serene) Republic and the temporal power of the Church, punctuated by the sudden excommunication of Doge Leonardo Donà and the whole Senate and by an interdict beautifully ignored by Venetians…

Since the dawn of reason, the heavens have captured the imagination of mankind. This interest stemmed not only from the inimitable beauty of the firmament and the undeniable usefulness of celestial bodies for measuring time and navigating oceans and deserts. In fact, because of its apparent perfection, the sky was seen as a kind of open window to the supernatural world. Among the consequences of this attitude is the birth, for divinatory purposes, of astronomy, the most ancient philosophy of nature we have and the only science with its own muse, Urania, and lay enthusiasts, the amateur astronomers. It is astonishing to think that all this came from a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation of the phenomena! The Sun and the black vault of the night sky, dotted with stars and the planets projecting their orbits onto it, gave the terrestrial observer the impression of being at the center of a perfect mechanical system of rotating spheres. By treating this erroneous perception as true, the ancients attempted to explain it away. In doing so, they ended up elevating themselves to the rank of creatures favored by a god-architect, a demiurge: someone who had brought order out of primordial chaos and started the clock of time. It was believed that this god-architect had made the world as a cradle for his own children, for whom he had reserved, among other things, a better life after death. One might say — to paraphrase the Aristotelian Don Ferrante from Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) — that the fault of this misunderstanding lies entirely with the stars and, we must add, with the fate that has made us see them…

Whoever thinks of the revolutionary Copernicus as a daring guerrilla of knowledge — a kind of Che Guevara ante litteram (ahead of his time) ready to fight to the point of the utmost sacrifice for the noble cause of scientific truth — could not be further from reality. Nicolaus was a reserved person, attached to the relatively quiet life he had built to cultivate his talents and especially his great passion for astronomy. He was arguably the most conservative of all the innovators…

Some may wonder why the perspicillum, which is a rather simple instrument, was not invented earlier. The question is far from idle, since some 4,000 years ago the inhabitants of the Mediterranean coasts were already familiar with the optical elements that make up the telescope. This fact is evidenced by the discovery of some lenses in Crete and the Near East, although they appear too crude to be of any practical use. They were made of quartz, a natural crystal, and of glass, a material that, according to Pliny the Elder, the encyclopedic writer who perished in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., was accidentally discovered by the Phoenicians more than a thousand years before the founding of Rome. Technically, glass is an amorphous solid obtained by rapidly cooling (quenching) a liquid to stop crystallization and give the product a disordered microscopic structure. But vitrification is not a true change of state. Rather, it is the creation of a state of high viscosity in the fluid so that the material retains its shape, just as a solid would. In short, the glass from which you are sipping your favorite beverage as you read these pages is itself a liquid, even though you would have to wait an extremely long time to see it drain away…

The Dutch telescope model that Galileo had perfected and would not abandon until his last years, marked by blindness, consisted of a plano-convex objective and a plano-concave eyepiece. However, this combination of lenses is not the only one possible for a telescope. In fact, Kepler, stimulated by reading the Sidereus Nuncius, which had rekindled his old passion for optics, soon discovered another. This is the story…

Giovanni (Giovan) Domenico Cassini was born in 1625 to a wealthy bour geois family in Perinaldo, a village in the hills of the Ligurian hinterland, a fief of the Marquises Doria. His long life spanned the entire 17th century, a period of contrasts between reality and thought, nature and sentiment, ethics and customs, and a fertile ground for the seeds of a new world and the progressive disintegration of the ancien régime. As was usual in those days, his education began at home and continued in Genoa. There, within the austere walls of the College of the Societas Iesu (Society of Jesus), Giovan Domenico came into contact with the world of science that the Jesuits knew and practiced with mastery. His approach to astronomy was further encouraged by his early interest in astrology, which he later disavowed. The horo-scope that made him famous as an interpreter of heavenly wills predicted the military victory of Pope Innocent X Pamphili over Duke Ranuccio II Farnese in the conflict sparked by the murder of the Bishop of Castro, of which Ranuccio was accused of being the chief instigator…

In 1670, Isaac Newton, newly appointed professor at Trinity College, Cambridge, taught a course in optics, which he repeated the following year. It was an excellent opportunity to dust off an earlier interest in light and colors and bring ideas together, according to the rule that in order to understand something, one must first have taught it. The result was a work of synthesis that Newton, certainly not lacking in self-respect, judged to be «the oddest if not the most considerable detection w^ch hath hitherto beene made in the operations of Nature». He exaggerated, but not entirely, as we will see soon…

On the night of March 13, 1781, as was his custom when the weather permitted, Frederick William Herschel stood in the open air on the street in front of his house. Indifferent to the cold, he scanned the sky with a telescope he had built with his own hands: a magnificent Newtonian reflector with an objective made of speculum. German by birth, education, and mentality, William was 42 years old, a relatively advanced age for those times, and for the past fifteen years he had lived in Bath, a pleasant resort town in southwest England, famous for its natural thermal springs. Bath, as its name suggests, was a health resort, a meeting place for high society and the newly rich, born of the bloodthirsty post-Elizabethan commercial imperialism and a ruthless industrial revolution. A unicum in a land with-out volcanic manifestations, known and appreciated since the time of the Roman conquest of Brittany. Those who could afford it went there to heal the body and the spirit, to weave and strengthen relationships, to know and be known, to gossip while sipping Indian tea with a view lost on the soft green hills, perpetually damp, to let time pass quietly amidst parties, ablutions, walks, bon ton, loves, betrayals, readings, hypocrisies, and even good music offered as a pastime to vacationers. It is with the music that William made a living in this little paradise for a few. He performed as an organist at the Octagon Chapel, a fashionable private church, and as a conductor at the Assembly Rooms, a space devoted to listening and dancing. Over the years he had carved out a role and a reputation that could be compared, with a hint of exaggeration, to that of Herbert von Karajan in Salzburg…

We now retrace our steps a little to find the music teacher with a passion for astronomy in idyllic Bath in the late 18th century, nestled among the green hills of the Somerset countryside. The discovery of Uranus had brought him unexpected fame and immortality, but it had not quenched his thirst for the heavens. In fact, Herschel hoped to change his life by turning his hobby into a full-time occupation. But how? As we know, George III offered him the means and the opportunity. Although in a foul mood over his Red-coats’ repeated defeats in North America, the king had been persuaded to graciously confer upon his German subject the title of Court Astronomer, created for the occasion. It was a great honor, coveted by William’s friends and admirers; but it came with a meager salary, about half of what William earned as a musician. Put yourself in his shoes. It was not an easy decision to take. When he discovered Uranus in 1781, Herschel was 42. He had spent 25 years sweating for his family’s comfortable status; now, just as Urania had kissed him on the forehead, at the height of his fame, he was being asked to reduce his standard of living. In return, however, he would be able to stop giving private lessons and musical performances and concentrate solely on astronomical activities, instrument making, and observing the heavens…

The desire to fix images over time is as old as mankind: just think of the Paleolithic rock paintings. Throughout the history of the various civilizations that have flourished on Earth, artisans and artists have gradually left visual evidence of their world, both real and ideal, mediated by inspiration, technique, and materials; and in the pursuit of fidelity, they invented optical instruments capable of reproducing realistic perspectives ready to be copied on some kind of support. One such device is the camera obscura, a name given by Kepler to a closed room or, more modestly, to a box in which light enters only through an opening drilled in one of the walls. And there’s the magic! The rays that penetrate the chamber form on the wall opposite the opening an inverted image of what would be seen if the eye were placed directly on the small hole. The ancestor of the modern camera had illustrious enthusiasts: Aristotle and Euclid played with it, Chinese philosophers and Arabs, Roger Bacon, and also Leonardo da Vinci as a painter and scientist. Even in the time of Dante Alighieri, it was common to safely observe eclipses with this device…

What a great time the 19th century was! A melting pot of new ideas and contradictions, it gave rise to those scientific, technological, and social revolutions that gradually shaped, for better or worse, a new world. A century of conservatives and rebels, bigots, ruthless businessmen, and libertarians; brilliant to the point of demolishing the most sacred paradigms, such as that of eternity, replaced by the much more secular concept of evolution. A century of machines, trades, inventions, and monumental works, of ideologists and iconoclasts, of lonely men deluded by reason, tormented by ideals, forced to confront with themselves and their passions, and committed to exploring the psyche and its mists; of artists engaged by technological innovations, in search of new languages; of masses of desperate people at work in anthills, fighting for crumbs of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, always promised and never given. A century in which the idea that the Earth is not a privileged place with different rules from the rest of the universe was definitively affirmed: a very bitter morsel to take for the irreducible defenders of the primacy of man over nature, but also an indispensable step towards the fruitful fusion of physics with astronomy, heralding marvelous discoveries in the two apparently antithetical worlds of the infinitely large and the infinitely small…

On the evening of August 20, 1885, the thirty-four-year-old Ernst Hartwig was on duty at the achromatic 9 inch refractor of the Imperial University Observatory in Dorpat, Estonia. Everything in the Baltic city was German: the name itself of Germanic origin, the customs, traditions, and even the language used at the university, despite the long domination of first the Swedish kings and then the tsars. Even the Observatory, founded in 1802 by the will of Alexander I Romanov, the tsar defeated by Napoleon at Austerlitz and then victorious in the French Emperor’s ill-considered Russian campaign, had a distinct Germanic character. Germans were the first director, the famous Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, and the first prestigious instrument, purchased in 1824 from the Bavarian firm of Joseph Fraunhofer, then the largest telescope in the world; and German was Hartwig himself…

After the resounding successes of Bessel and Huggins, and the technological prowess of William Herschel and Lord Rosse, European astronomy was catching its breath in terms of large instruments for observing the heavens. Fueled by coal and steel, the Industrial Revolution had decisively shifted interests and investments toward the sciences applied to peace and war; two sides of the same coin. Profit, together with power, was the key word of a productive bourgeoisie that was not willing to go along with the pure drive of Odysseus. Paradoxically, it was this same bourgeoisie, perhaps even more crude and cruel, that instead made the fortune of science and higher education on the North American continent. Here, as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, some “new men”, who quickly became immensely wealthy, decided to redeem their humble beginnings, or to wash away the blood they had shed for their rise, or simply to secure immortality, by offering scientists opportunities unimaginable in the Old World. Almost every-where, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, from the industrial North to the plantations of the slave-owning South, projects for large observatories equipped with ever more powerful telescopes proliferated, as did new universities. And while in Europe astrophysics and cosmology favored the interpretation and mathematical formalization of phenomena, in the New World, pragmatic, daring, and still imbued with the spirit of the frontier, the “great book of nature” was scrutinized in search of facts, often without the guidance of a priori ideas. Among the pioneers of this new epic of celestial observation was the legendary figure of George Ellery Hale, a scientist whose story is intertwined with that of great American capitalism, ruthless and visionary, deregulated and philanthropist…

The dawn of the 20th century was accompanied by great expectations for the future. How many good wishes in New Year’s toasts, and how much awe at the wonders of technology, the child of the new science, the hope for a renewed social order, and the worry about a rapidly expanding market, increasingly omnivorous, ruthless and global, seemingly unbreakable. For thirty years, the guns had been silent in Europe after the Prussian army’s dazzling victories over its Austro-Hungarian brethren and then over its lifelong enemies, the French. Dress rehearsals for the maelstrom of fire and death into which the delirium of a Germany über alles (above all) would drag the world twice in the first half of the new century, and about which the nations of the Entente cordiale, indolently and vainly entrenched in anachronistic fences, were not paying due attention. In this atmosphere of unreal peace, the guns were already thundering on the borders of the Old Continent, crumbling the foundations of ancient empires with “feet of clay”. In the Belle Époque, the strongest tensions were rooted in the accentuated imbalances in the social structure of the great nations. The complex transformation brought about by capitalism, with famine and hunger, degradation, but also a growing awareness of human and civil rights, conspired to awaken the masses, urbanized by the Industrial Revolution, and summarily made less rough. A demand for redemption that the epigones of the Congress of Vienna and the new rich vainly believed they could control and, if necessary, extinguish in blood. In North America, after the attempted secession of the Southern states by the Confederates, only the rifles of the cavalry crackled to rid the land and its natural resources of the inconvenient presence of the natives. A genocide like so many others in Australia, Africa and Asia, told like an epic novel and opposed by few…

With his record-breaking telescopes and the astronomers he selected and cultivated, Hale had turned the exploration of the heavens into a major field of scientific research. In the process, he created the conditions that would settle once and for all the question of the nature of nebulae and usher in a new era of our knowledge of the cosmos. By the 1920s, curiosity had pushed the horizon of knowledge far beyond the boundaries of the Milky Way, the classic Hercules columns of 19th-century astronomers. But even the big calibers mounted on the mountains of California were no longer adequate to sail the endless ocean of galaxies. Hale was well aware of this. So while Europe was distracted licking its wounds from a cruel war and nurturing the subtle and poisonous germs of nationalism, in America of the Great Illusion the irrepressible George was already weaving the plot to provide his champions with an even more powerful weapon than the already formidable Hooker telescope. In 1923, the worsening of his illness forced him to relinquish the management of Mount Wilson to Walter Adams, solar astronomer and granite manager. This resignation, however, did not in the least affect his extraordinary faculty for thinking big. In between bouts of mental illness, he had begun to fantasize about an instrument with an aperture of 200, if not 300 inch, and to explore its physical feasibility with the technical assistance of Francis Pease, astronomer and engineer, Ritchey’s former assistant at Yerkes…

Let us retrace our steps once more. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the offensive launched by a handful of daring astronomers led by Hale, armed with the powerful West Coast telescopes and supported financially by a patronage unparalleled since the Renaissance, had opened to human curiosity the vast and unexplored prairies of the realm of galaxies. «No one knew [what galaxies were] before 1900. In 1920, very few people knew. All astronomers knew after 1924», Allan Sandage would later write, proudly and perhaps a little prematurely, in praise of his master Hubble. The lessons imparted to the world by these pioneers of the heavens touched every aspect of the scientist’s profession. Forged in personality and social sensibility by the experience and myth of the frontier, American astronomers were not impressed by the logistics bordering on adventure, nor by the physical exertions, dangers, and loneliness of mountaintop outposts. They had chosen the sites with the best skies for their observing stations, not the most convenient, or the cheapest, or the closest to the centers of power, both political and academic, as was the custom in Europe. On the old and quarrelsome continent where it was born, astrophysics struggled to keep up with the “Yanks” in the field of observations, held back in its impulses by the conservatism of some glorious personalities of science and culture and by the scabs of history, penalized by the lack of competitive instruments and wealthy private protectors, and crushed by the spectacular successes of experimental and theoretical physics, which the powerful considered more important than the exploration of the heavens because of their repercussions on the works of peace and war. The Europeans, however, still held the scepter of research into the structure and evolution of the stars. But the actors in these brilliant investigations were mostly philosophers, physicists, engineers, or even mere amateurs, and only rarely professional astronomers. So we return to the Old World and go back far enough in time to find the first tentative answers to the question: what are “the Sun and the other stars” made of, and how do they work?…

On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht (defence force), supported by the Luftwaffe, which played the artillery role with its Ju-87 dive bombers, the Sturzkampfflugzeug, broke through the Polish border with a lightning pincer attack (Blitzkreig) that would bring German tanks to the outskirts of Warsaw in a single week. Suddenly awakened from their slumber, France and England rushed to declare war on Germany. Thus began the largest and bloodiest conflict in the history of the planet, heralded by the annexation (Anschluss) to the Third Reich of Austria and the German-speaking region of Bohemia and Moravia, the Sudetenland. Few were spared the heavy toll in lives, infrastructure, and conscience. Although genetically reluctant to get involved in the intricacies of Europe, the United States was drawn into the conflict by the treacherous attack on its naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. By launching Zero torpedo bombers at American battleships in an unsuccessful attempt to maim the enemy before it realized what was at stake, the strategists of the Rising Sun, the third partner in the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, had risked shaking the lethargy of the overseas giant. The Soviets had already been in the field for six months, invested by Hitler’s army, which seemed to know no obstacles and did not fear the deadly “General Frost”…

It all began in 1873 with the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, a masterpiece of mathematical synthesis that unified two seemingly unrelated physical phenomena. «The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade», Richard Feynman later commented. In this context, the author, James Clerk Maxwell, suggested that light was the sensitive fraction of the energy spectrum provided by his theory. The conjecture was motivated by the analogy between the characteristics of the two phenomena and by the concordance between the speed measured for light and that calculated by the Scottish scientist for the propagation of his electromagnetic waves. The price of Maxwell’s synthesis was the introduction of a luminiferous (light-bearing) ether which pro tempore (for the time being) rescued the failure of the Galilean principle of equivalence among all observers in relative linear and uniform motion. Falsified by Michelson and Morley experiment, at the end of the 19th century, the ether disintegrated and classical electromagnetism was reconstructed as a field theory. It left open a problem that, after the partial attempts of the Frenchman Henri Poincaré and the Dutchman Hendrik Antoon Lorenz, would have been definitively solved by Einstein’s new treatment of space-time…

The 1960s opened with the astonishing success of the Soviets in the race to conquer space: the pioneering flight of Yuri Gagarin in April 1961, the “equal opportunity” mission of Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, and the extravehicular walk of Aleksey Leonov in 1965, which followed the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the non-return flight of the dog Laika, the first living creature to orbit the Earth. It took little more than a decade for the greatest of human adventures to be accomplished with a change of baton. The arrival of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission on the Moon, the landing of its lunar module, and the first «small step» of Neil Armstrong on the ground of our lunar satellite, on July 20, 1969, marked the victory of the United States in the last round of this epic match…

The following sections are included:

• Acknowledgments
• Index