Big Bang. Simon Singh

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ even to be contemplated, so much so that Copernicus’s work may have resulted in a new meaning for an old word. One etymological theory claims that the word ‘revolutionary’, referring to an idea that is completely counter to conventional wisdom, was inspired by the title of Copernicus’s book, ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’. And as well as revolutionary, the Sun-centred model of the universe also seemed completely impossible. This is why the word köpperneksch, based on the German form of Copernicus, has come to be used in northern Bavaria to describe an unbelievable or illogical proposition.

      All in all, the Sun-centred model of the universe was an idea ahead of its time, too revolutionary, too unbelievable and still too inaccurate to win any widespread support. De revolutionibus sat on a few bookshelves, in a few studies, and was read by just a few astronomers. The idea of a Sun-centred universe had first been suggested by Aristarchus in the fifth century BC, but it was ignored; now it had been reinvented by Copernicus, and it was being ignored again. The model would go into hibernation, waiting for somebody to resuscitate it, examine it, refine it and find the missing ingredient that would prove to the rest of the world that the Copernican model of the universe was the true picture of reality. Indeed, it would be left to the next generation of astronomers to find the evidence that would show that Ptolemy was wrong and that Aristarchus and Copernicus were right.

      Castle of the Heavens

      Born into the Danish nobility in 1546, Tycho Brahe would earn lasting fame among astronomers for two particular reasons. First, in 1566, Tycho became embroiled in a disagreement with his cousin Manderup Parsberg, possibly because Parsberg had insulted and mocked Tycho over a recent astrological prediction that had fallen flat. Tycho had foretold the death of Suleiman the Great, and even embedded his prophecy within a Latin poem, apparently unaware that the Ottoman leader had already been dead for six months. The dispute culminated in an infamous duel. During the sword fight, a slash from Parsberg cut Tycho’s forehead and hacked through the bridge of his nose. An inch deeper and Tycho would have died. Thereafter he glued into place a false metal nose, so cleverly composed of a gold-silver–copper alloy that it blended in with his skin tone.

      The second and more important reason for Tycho’s fame was that he took observational astronomy to an entirely new level of accuracy. He earned such a high reputation that King Frederick II of Denmark gave him the island of Hven, 10 km off the Danish coast, and paid for him to build an observatory there. Uraniborg (Castle of the Heavens) would grow over the years into a vast ornate citadel that consumed more than 5% of Denmark’s gross national product, an all-time world record for research centre funding.

      Uraniborg housed a library, a paper mill, a printing press, an alchemist’s laboratory, a furnace and a prison for unruly servants. The observation turrets contained giant instruments, such as sextants, quadrants and armillary spheres (all naked-eye instruments, as astronomers had not yet learned to exploit the potential of lenses). There were four sets of every instrument for simultaneous and independent measurements, thereby minimising errors in assessing the angular positions of stars and planets. Tycho’s observations were generally accurate to ¹/₃₀°, five times better than the best previous measurements. Perhaps Tycho’s measurements were aided by his ability to remove his nose and align his eye more perfectly.

      Figure 11 Uraniborg, on the island of Hven, the best funded and most hedonistic astronomical observatory in history.

      Tycho’s reputation was such that a stream of VIPs visited his observatory. As well as being interested in his research, these visitors were also attracted by Uraniborg’s wild parties, which were famous all over Europe. Tycho provided alcohol in excess and entertainment in the shape of mechanical statues and a story-telling dwarf called Jepp, who was said to be a gifted clairvoyant. To add to the spectacle, Tycho’s pet elk was allowed to freely wander the castle, but tragically it died after stumbling down a staircase after drinking too much alcohol. Uraniborg was more like the setting for a Peter Greenaway film than a research institute.

      While Tycho had been raised in the traditions of Ptolemaic astronomy, his painstaking observations forced him to reconsider his confidence in the ancient view of the universe. In fact, we know that he had a copy of De revolutionibus in his study and that he was sympathetic to Copernicus’s ideas, but, instead of adopting them unreservedly, he developed his own model of the universe, which was a faint-hearted halfway house between Ptolemy and Copernicus. In 1588, almost fifty years after Copernicus’s death, Tycho published De mundi ætherei recentioribus phænomenis (‘Concerning the New Phenomena in the Ethereal World’), in which he argued that all the planets orbited the Sun, but that the Sun orbited the Earth, as shown in Figure 12. His liberalism stretched as far as allowing the Sun to be the hub for the planets, but his conservatism obliged him to retain the Earth at the centre of the universe. He was reluctant to dislodge the Earth, because its supposed centrality was the only way to explain why objects fall towards the centre of the Earth.

      Figure 12 Tycho’s model makes the same error as Ptolemy’s and places the Earth at the centre of the universe, being orbited by the Moon and the Sun. His main breakthrough was to realise that the planets (and the fiery comet) orbit the Sun. This illustration is from Tycho’s De mundi ætherei.

      Before Tycho could continue to the next stage of his programme of astronomical observation and theorising, his research suffered a severe blow. His patron, King Frederick, died after a session of binge drinking in the same year that Tycho published De mundi ætherei, and the new king, Christian IV, was no longer prepared to fund Tycho’s lavish observatory or tolerate his hedonistic lifestyle. Tycho had no option but to abandon Uraniborg and leave Denmark with his family, assistants, Jepp the dwarf and cartloads of astronomical equipment. Fortunately, Tycho’s instruments had been designed to be transportable, because he had shrewdly realised: ‘An astronomer must be cosmopolitan, because ignorant statesmen cannot be expected to value their services.’

      Tycho Brahe migrated to Prague, where Emperor Rudolph II appointed him Imperial Mathematician and allowed him to establish a new observatory in Benatky Castle. The move turned out to have a silver lining, because it was in Prague that Tycho teamed up with a new assistant, Johannes Kepler, who would arrive in the city a few months later. The Lutheran Kepler had been forced to flee his previous home in Graz when the fiercely Catholic Archduke Ferdinand had threatened to execute him, in keeping with his stated declaration that he would rather ‘make a desert of the country than rule over heretics’.

      Fittingly, Kepler set out on his journey to Prague on 1 January 1600. The start of a new century would mark the start of a new collaboration that would lead to a reinvention of the universe. Together, Tycho and Kepler made the perfect double act. Scientific advance requires both observation and theory. Tycho had accumulated the best collection of observations in the history of astronomy, and Kepler would prove to be an excellent interpreter of those observations. Although Kepler suffered from myopia and multiple vision from birth, he would ultimately see farther than Tycho.

      It was a partnership that was formed in the nick of time. Within a few months of Kepler’s arrival, Tycho attended a dinner hosted by the Baron of Rosenberg and drank to his usual excess, refusing nonetheless to break etiquette by leaving the table before the Baron. Kepler recorded: ‘When he drank more, he felt the tension in his bladder increase, but he put politeness before his health. When he got home, he was scarcely able to urinate.’ That night he developed a fever, and from then on he alternated between bouts of unconsciousness and delirium. Ten days later he was dead.

      On his deathbed, Tycho repeatedly uttered the phrase: ‘May I not have lived in vain.’ There was no need to fear, because Kepler would СКАЧАТЬ