#WingedWordsWindsday: 2023/02/15 -- Galileo's 459th Birthday

 WINGED WORDS WINDSDAY

Compiled & Edited by Rob Chappell (@RHCLambengolmo)

Vol. 2, No. 16: February 15, 2023

 

 

Remembering Galileo on His 459^th Birthday: February 15, 1564

 

Galileo’s head was on the block.

The crime was looking up the truth.

à The Indigo Girls: “Galileo” (1992)

 

Editor’s Note

                The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) has been a favorite hero of mine since my childhood days. Not only did he have the courage to speak truth to power in his own time, but his use and popularization of the astronomical telescope paved the way for the development of other types of telescopes, including the small monocular telescope that I wear around my neck to enhance my own vision of the everyday world around me. I look forward to the day when Galileo will be fully appreciated for his courageous efforts to build bridges of understanding between philosophy, science, and theology – a trio of disciplines that should be chanting in three-part harmony as they collectively uphold the foundations of our emerging global civilization.

                In this week’s feature, I have included an invocation to Urania, the Muse of astronomy, penned by John Milton (who met Galileo at his Italian villa while the great astronomer was under house arrest there); a brief summary of Galileo’s life and legacy; an excerpt from his most famous book, the Starry Messenger, in which he describes his telescopic observations of the Milky Way; a classic poem about the Milky Way; and a quotation from Cicero about the Milky Way. Both of these “galactic” pieces reflect the age-old belief that the Milky Way is like a “rainbow bridge” that is followed by the souls of the blessed (like Galileo!) after their earthly lives are done. We conclude this week’s reflections with two classic poems about Galileo and his legacy.

 

From Paradise Lost: Book 7, Lines 1-20

By John Milton (1608-1674)

Descend from Heaven, Urania, by that name

If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine

Following, above the Olympian hill I soar,

Above the flight of Pegasean wing!

The meaning, not the name, I call: for thou

Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top

Of old Olympus dwellest; but, heavenly-born,

Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,

Thou with eternal Wisdom didst converse,

Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play

In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased

With thy celestial song. Up led by thee

Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed,

An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air,

Thy tempering: with like safety guided down

Return me to my native element:

Lest from this flying steed unreined, (as once

Bellerophon, though from a lower clime,)

Dismounted, on the Aleian field I fall,

Erroneous there to wander, and forlorn.

 

In this classic painting, the English poet John Milton (left) visited Galileo (right) in 1638, while the latter was under house arrest at his villa at Arcetri, Italy. (Image Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

 

“The Story of Galileo”

Excerpted from an Expanded 19^th-Century Edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

                The most eminent men of science and philosophy of the day did not escape the watchful eye of this cruel despotism. Galileo, the chief astronomer and mathematician of his age, was the first who used the telescope successfully in solving the movements of the heavenly bodies. He discovered that the Sun is the center of motion around which the Earth and various planets revolve. For making this great discovery Galileo was brought before the Inquisition, and for a while was in great danger of being put to death.

                After a long and bitter review of Galileo's writings, in which many of his most important discoveries were condemned as errors, the charge of the Inquisitors went on to declare, “That you, Galileo, have upon account of those things which you have written and confessed, subjected yourself to a strong suspicion of heresy in this Holy Office, by believing, and holding to be true, a doctrine which is false, and contrary to the sacred and divine Scripture – viz., that the Sun is the center of the orb of the Earth, and does not move from the east to the west; and that the Earth moves, and is not the center of the world."

                In order to save his life. Galileo admitted that he was wrong in thinking that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and swore that – "For the future, I will never more say, or assert, either by word or writing, anything that shall give occasion for a like suspicion." But immediately after taking this forced oath he is said to have whispered to a friend standing near, "The Earth moves, for all that."

 

“This is the celebrated Galileo, who was in the Inquisition for six years, and put to the torture, for saying, that the Earth moved. The moment he was set at liberty, he looked up to the sky and down to the ground, and, stamping with his foot, in a contemplative mood, said, ‘Eppur si muove,’ that is, ‘Still it moves,’ meaning the Earth.”

à Giuseppe Baretti (1719-1789): The Italian Library (1757)

 

This portrait of Galileo (holding a telescope) was painted in 1636 by Justus Sustermans. (Image Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

 

An Excerpt from Galileo’s Starry Messenger (1610)

                The next object which I have observed is the essence or substance of the Milky Way. By the aid of a telescope anyone may behold this in a manner which so distinctly appeals to the senses that all the disputes which have tormented philosophers through so many ages are exploded at once by the irrefragable evidence of our eyes, and we are freed from wordy disputes upon this subject, for the Galaxy is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters. Upon whatever part of it you direct the telescope straightway a vast crowd of stars presents itself to view; many of them are tolerably large and extremely bright, but the number of small ones is quite beyond determination.

 

“The Milky Way” (Anonymous)

 

Evening has come; and across the skies —

Out through the darkness that, quivering, dies —

Beautiful, broad, and white,

Fashioned of many a silver ray

Stolen out of the ruins of Day,

Grows the pale bridge of the Milky Way,

Built by the architect Night.

 

Dim with shadows, and bright with stars,

Hung like gold lights on invisible bars

Stirred by the wind's spent breath,

Rising on cloud-shapen pillars of grey,

Perfect it stands, like a tangible way

Binding tomorrow with yesterday,

Reaching to Life from Death.

 

Dark show the heavens on either side;

Soft flows the blue in a waveless tide

Under the silver arch;

Never a footstep is heard below,

Echoing earthward, as measured and slow,

Over the bridge the still hours go

Bound on their trackless march.

 

Is it a pathway leading to Heaven

Over Earth's sin-clouds, rent and riven

With its supernal light,

Crossed by the souls of the loved who have flown

Stilly away from our arms, and alone

Up to the beautiful, great, white Throne

Pass in the hush of night?

 

Is it the road that our wild dreams walk,

Far beyond reach of our waking talk,

Out to the vague and grand

Far beyond Fancy's uttermost range,

Out to the Dream-world of marvel and change,

Out to the mystic, unreal and strange —

Out to the Wonderland?

 

Is it the way that the angels take

When they come down by night to wake

Over the slumbering Earth?

Is it the way the faint stars go back,

Driven by insolent Day from his track

Into the distant mysterious Black

Where their bright souls had birth?

 

What may it be? Who may certainly say?

Over the shadowy Milky Way

No human foot hath trod.

Aeons have passed; but unsullied and white,

Still it stands, fair as a rainbow of night,

Held like a promise above our dark sight,

Guiding our thoughts to God.

 

This infrared photo of the Milky Way features the galactic core at its center. It was taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope in 2006. (Photo Credit: Public Domain)

 

Chapter 8 from Scipio’s Dream

By Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE)

                 But rather, my Scipio – like your grandfather here, like me your sire – follow justice and natural affection, which though great in the case of parents and kinsfolk, is greatest of all in relation to our fatherland. Such is the life that leads to heaven and to this company of those who have now lived their lives and released from their bodies dwell in that place which you can see," — now that place was a circle conspicuous among the fires of heaven by the surpassing whiteness of its glowing light — "which place you mortals, as you have learned from the Greeks, call the Milky Way." And as I surveyed them from this point, all the other heavenly bodies appeared to be glorious and wonderful, — now the stars were such as we have never seen from this Earth; and such was the magnitude of them all as we have never dreamed; and the least of them all was that planet [the Moon], which farthest from the heavenly sphere and nearest to our Earth, was shining with borrowed light, but the spheres of the stars easily surpassed the Earth in magnitude — already the Earth itself appeared to me so small, that it grieved me to think of our empire, with which we cover but a point, as it were, of its surface.

 

“Galileo”

By George MacDonald (1824-1905)

 

“And yet it moves!” Ah, Truth, where wert thou then

When all for thee they racked each piteous limb?

Wert thou in heaven, and busy with thy hymn

When those poor hands convulsed that held thy pen?

Art thou a phantom that deceives! men

To their undoing? or dost thou watch him

Pale, cold, and silent in his dungeon dim?

And wilt thou ever speak to him again?

“It moves, it moves! Alas, my flesh was weak!

That was a hideous dream! I'll cry aloud

How the green bulk wheels sunward day by day!

Ah me! ah me! perchance my heart was proud

That I alone should know that word to speak!

And now, sweet Truth, shine upon these, I pray.”

 

“Magna veritas et praevalet!”

“Great is truth, and it prevails!”

(1 Esdras 4:41 in the Latin Vulgate)

 

“Galilei Galileo”

By Wilbur D. Nesbit (1871-1927)

 

Galilei Galileo was an early man of science;

He was happy when inventing, or discussing an appliance;

Pendulums, he found by study, were precise in every wobble —

Showing how old Father Time went in his never-ending hobble.

 

Galilei Galileo the thermometer invented

And informed the gaping public what its figures represented.

“O you foolish Galileo,” cried the public, “you shall rue it!

Why get up a thing to tell us we are hot? We always knew it.”

 

Galilei Galileo took a tube and got some lenses

And discovered things that made him rather disbelieve his senses;

He would point his telescope up to the sky and then he’d scan it,

Then go into breakfast smiling, for he’d found another planet.

 

Galilei Galileo viewed the luminary solar

(That’s the Sun) and found it spotted on the belt and regions polar;

But he didn’t figure out that when the Sun was thickly freckled

Then the world with lights and fusses was continually speckled.

 

Galilei Galileo wrote a thing and then denounced it —

But we often read his name and wonder how the man pronounced it.

Maybe when he tried to, he was all at sixes and at sevens,

Which is why he turned his studies to the dim and distant heavens.

 

Galilei Galileo! What a musical cognomen!

Possibly some bright librettist will find in this name an omen

That presages fortune for him, and the stage will pay what we owe

To that honest old stargazer, Galilei Galileo.

 

Using his telescope, Galileo discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter in January 1610. Shown in this photo montage are a portion of Jupiter (at left), along with the four Galilean moons (from top to bottom): Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. (Photo Credit: NASA – Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

 

I call on the resting soul of Galileo,

King of night vision, king of insight.

à The Indigo Girls: “Galileo” (1992)