Why Did Galileo Need a Telescope to Discover the Moons of Jupiter?
Creations of art and science are acts of generosity. They did not have to exist. Just like the Universe as a whole. Once we witness their beauty, we are filled with gratitude. They give meaning to our short life.
Indeed, the auditorium at the Harvard College Observatory was filled with gratitude when we celebrated yesterday the remarkable bronze sculpture, named “Galileo Looking at the Four Moons of Jupiter,” which was generously donated to my office by the Newington-Cropsey Foundation. The creator of this art, Greg Wyatt, and his wife, Fay, were there, along with their family members, and several dozens of my colleagues and friends. The scientist who inspired Greg’s sculpture, Galileo Galilei, has been dead for 383 years, one month and 12 days.
At the opening of the event, I wondered: “What did I do to deserve Greg’s generosity?” The next Galilean revolution echoes Frank Sinatra’s sentiments: “Fly me to the moon; Let me play among the stars; And let me see what spring is like; On a-Jupiter and Mars,” in the context of the search for life on moons or exoplanets near other stars. The search is on with the Galileo Project — not in the limited sense of microbes, but in the context of technological artifacts from intelligent life — with which we can share our gratitude to the Universe both of us share. Last time I heard Sinatra’s song was when it was sung by the choir of Gonville and Caius College at the conclusion of Stephen Hawking’s funeral in Cambridge University.
Hannah Marcus, a Professor of the History of Science and Faculty Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University, reviewed Galileo’s life and research, and made the following comments at the beginning and end of her speech:
“Galileo was born on February 15, 1564, a bit over 461 years ago. He was baptized a few days later in the baptistry in Pisa, across from the famous leaning tower. As a teenager and young adult, he began and abandoned studies in religion and medicine before moving on to a career in mathematics, which brought him eventually to essentially a junior faculty position at the University of Pisa and then at the more prestigious University of Padua.
… In May 1609, Galileo heard news via Venice of the invention of an instrument that could make distant things close, and he got to work. Within the month Galileo had made his own 3-powered telescope and by August his Venetian friends had him demonstrating the function of his 8-powered telescope to the government of the Venetian Republic. He was rewarded with a doubled salary and tenure for life at the University of Padua.
It’s at this juncture that we see Galileo’s ambition in earnest. The science of the stars wasn’t just about a paycheck (though it was also about a paycheck). Galileo’s observations through the telescope of mountains on the moon, the phases of Venus, satellites of Jupiter, a “tripartite” lumpy Saturn, a seeming infinity of stars, and, later, spots on the sun gave him evidence that supported the radical rearrangement of the cosmos. Paired with Copernicus’s hypothesis and Kepler’s calculations, Galileo had discovered the empirical evidence to support a heliocentric cosmos.
…What a career! These are the broad outlines of Galileo’s life and research, a life of science and controversy. In addition to being fascinating in its own right, Galileo’s life raises important questions for us today. How do new scientific discoveries overturn long held theories? What counts as scientific evidence? How should scientific controversies be disputed, and where? (Galileo was a deep believer in the well-placed ad hominem attack, which does not meet the standards of our university initiatives on civil discourse.) How do religious beliefs and scientific theories intersect? Can they coexist? These are open questions that are the shared work of scientists, philosophers, and historians.
To bring us to a close and to turn us to the unveiling of this afternoon, I don’t think any conversation about Galileo is complete without speaking of beauty. Galileo saw things through his telescope that no one else had seen before. He turned to art and to print to communicate these findings. He used literature to bring his experiments and his thought experiments to life — he is one of Italy’s greatest prose writers in addition to a scientific mind. I’m grateful to be part of bringing Greg Wyatt’s sculpture to Avi’s office today. It is a reminder that great science has long had the power to bring both beauty and understanding to our complicated world.”
Hannah’s brilliant presentation (available in full here) was followed by a conversation with Greg Wyatt, in which he described his creative work as a bronze sculptor and a watercolor painter. Greg generously gifted me a framed watercolor painting of Pythagoras which will decorate the wall next to his Galileo sculpture. Greg’s origins are Italian. An Italian professor in the audience highlighted the point that Galileo pioneered the use of a telescope for scientific discoveries that could not have been made with the naked eye.
In response, I explained that our eyes are sensors of sunlight, which floods the Earth during daytime. Such sensors were beneficial for survival and favored by natural selection. If we happened to live on a habitable planet near a neutron star which radiates X-rays, our bodies might have developed X-ray sensors instead. The ability to notice moons around Jupiter was of no benefit for survival on Earth and so human eyes required a telescope in order to gain the magnifying power needed to satisfy Galileo’s intellectual curiosity. Unexpected scientific discoveries are made, just like creations of art, for no practical benefit. Following Galileo, modern science is based on the use of instruments that extend our natural sensors to extreme regimes and scales, as well as — most recently — artificial intelligence that extends the capabilities of our natural intelligence to process large data sets.
The discussion was followed by a musical performance of the “Artist in Residence” and amazing composer, David Ibbett, who presented three compositions on themes in astrophysics, together with the magnificent soprano voice of Janet Stone. David’s last composition repeated the sentence: “We stand on Earth but we love the stars!”
In conclusion of the event, the audience raised a glass of champagne and collectively voiced the Latin phrase: “Ars longa, vita brevis,” translated loosely on this festive occasion as: “Art lives long, life is short.”
Salute!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
