This installment of the continuing thread on the history of dots questions the sublime machinery of the primum mobile in the work of Galileo, particularly in his The Siderreal Messenger (Sidereus nuncius) of 1610. The reception of this extraordinary work was deep and profound, and the images of the “dots” were of extraordinary importance.
of the Creator’s plan was being shown to be not-so-perfect in the late Renaissance, a major chink
showing up in the work of the dead Copernicus in 1543, which showed that the
Earth was not the center of the great cosmological eye. In the same year the body was also shown to
be not so much built in god’s image with its bitter working revealed in one of
the greatest anatomy books ever written, Vesalius’ revolutionary De Humani Corporis Fabrica .
started showing up regularly wrapped in scientific proof: the existence of a vacuum, thought to be
impossible given the perfection of creation, was shown to exist in Otto von Guericke's Experiemnta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de
vacuo spatio (
stupendous idea of additions to the night sky, which had been thought to be
immutable and unchanging, came into being with Tycho Brahe’s 1572 discovery of
a new star (Nova) in Cassiopeia and added to in 1602 by Kepler’s announcement
of another new star—both events showing that the night sky was not complete and
that it was actually changing.
When you consider Galileo and his use of the newly-invented telescope it is usually a little far down on the list of accomplishments that his explosion of the night sky is considered. In addition to everything he did (applying mathematics to the study of physics, understanding the physics of motion, developing the telescope and the microscope and other precision physical instruments and so on) Galileo pointed the not-yet-astronomically-used telescope to the sky and expanded the size of the universe by a factor of ten. It was so utterly astonishing an idea I can hardly think how the not-prepared mind of 1610 would’ve reacted to the idea. Certainly it was not a happy acknowledgment coming from the Holy Father, though a simple defense could’ve been that this miracle was divinely revealed ,and that it was there all of the time but just unknown to humans, and so not threatening the orthodoxy of Christian belief. But that wasn’t the case, and Galileo would soon enough be in trouble with the church and its inquisition in short order.
The dots in this image are the dots of never-before-seen stars, part of an unobserved sky that was revealed only under magnification. The size and scope of the new bigness of the universe was staggering, and of course opened the question immediately to the possibilities of yet a larger universe revealed under yet more magnification. I don’t know the answer to this, and I wonder where Galileo might have publicly mused about how big the universe might actually be, and if he ever dreamed about the possibilities of telescopes that were 15 feet across rather than just two inches, and what those beasts might reveal.