Galileo’s Dream. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ had made so far, and gave it to the Doge as a present, indicating again how useful it would be to the protection of the Republic, how grateful he was for the new contract, how much the splendiferousness of the Doge illuminated not just the Serenissima but the entire watershed of the Po, et cetera. Dona would take note of this generosity, perhaps, in the face of what could be seen as a very tepid response from his Senate, even a rebuff; and then maybe he would act to revise the raise accordingly. It was not the likeliest response, but it could happen.

      Then, on the Florentine front, always a part of his life, even in these last seventeen years in Padua working for Venice, Galileo wrote to young Grand Duke Cosimo’s secretary Belisario Vinta, telling him about the spyglass, offering to give the prince one of them and to instruct him in its use. A few of the closing phrases of this letter began the process of asking for patronage at the Medici court.

      There were some difficulties to be negotiated here. Galileo had been tutor to young Cosimo when his father Ferdinando was the Grand Duke, and that was good. But he had also been asked to work up a horoscope for Ferdinando the previous year, and had done so, and found that the stars predicted a long and healthy life for the Grand Duke, in the usual way; but then shortly thereafter Ferdinando had died. That was bad. In the tumult of the funeral and the succession no one had said anything, nor even seemed to remember the horoscope, except for a single penetrating glance from Vinta the next time they met. So perhaps in the end it had not mattered; and Galileo had taught Cosimo his mathematics, and treated him very kindly, of course, so that they had grown fond of one another. Cosimo was a bright young man, and Cosimo’s mother, the Grand Duchess Christina, was a very intelligent woman, and fond of Galileo-indeed, his true first patron at that court. And as Cosimo was so young, and new to his rule, she was a regent-like power. So the possibilities there were very real. And when all was said and done, Galileo was a Florentine, it was his home. His family was still there, which was bad, but unavoidable.

      So, still very angry at the Venetians for their ingratitude, he neglected his classes at Padua, wrote great flurries of letters to influential friends, and began to lay plans to move.

      Despite the discord and chaos of the tumble of days, he spent every cloudless night out in the garden, looking through the best glass they had on hand. One night he woke Mazzoleni and took him out to look at the moon. The old man peered up through the tube and then pulled his head back, grinning, shaking his head in amazement. ‘What does it mean?’

      ‘It’s a world, like this one.’

      ‘Are there people there?’

      ‘How should I know?’

      When the moon was up, and not too full, he looked at it. Long ago he had taken drawing lessons from his Florentine friend Ostilio Ricci, the better to be able to sketch his mechanical ideas. One of the exercises in Ricci’s treatise on perspectival drawing had been to draw spheres studded with geometrical figures, like raised pyramids or cubes, each one of which had to be drawn slightly differently to indicate where they stood on the hidden surface of the sphere underneath them. This was a meticulous and painstaking form of practice, very polito, at which Ricci had conceded Galileo eventually became the superior. Now Galileo found that it had given him the necessary skills, not just to draw the things the glass showed on the moon, but even to see them in the first place.

      It was particularly revealing to draw the moon’s terminator, where light and shadow mixed in patterns that changed from night to night. As he wrote in his workbook, With the moon in various aspects to the Sun, some peaks within the dark part of the moon appear drenched in light, although very far from the boundary line of the light and darkness. Comparing their distance from that boundary line to the entire lunar diameter, I found that this interval sometimes exceeds the twentieth part of the diameter. The moon’s diameter had been proposed since antiquity to be about two thousand miles; thus he had enough to complete a simple geometrical calculation of the height of these lunar mountains. He drew the moon as a circle, then on it drew a triangle with one side the radius at the terminator, another a radius running up to the tip of the lit mountain in the dark zone, and the third line following the beam of sunlight from the terminator to the mountain top. The two sides meeting at the terminator would be at right angles, and he had distances for both, based on the assumed diameter, and thus he could use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the length of the hypotenuse. Subtracting the moon’s radius from that hypotenuse, one was left with about four miles of difference-which was the height of the mountain above the surface.

      But on Earth, he wrote, no mountains exist that reach even to a perpendicular height of one mile. The mountains on the moon were taller than the Alps!

      He spotted a perfectly round shape right in the middle of the terminator, and very near the equator. He drew it a bit bigger than he saw it, to emphasize how prominent it was to the eye, and how clearly it stood out from its surroundings. A good astronomical drawing, he decided, had to evoke the sight that subsequent viewers would look for, rather than represent it to perfect scale, which in the diminution of the drawing simply made it too small. Paying attention was itself a kind of magnification.

      Drawing the constellations with their new host of companion stars was a different kind of problem, easier in some ways, as being mostly a schematic, but much harder too, in that there was no chance of representing what the view through the glass actually looked like. He altered sizes far beyond what he saw, to give an impression of the different brightnesses; but using black on white to represent white on black would never be satisfactory. White marks on black, as in an etching, would be better.

      He drew till his fingers got too cold. He made fair copies in the mornings, exaggerating to make the impressions bolder than ever. He made ink washes, very delicate; also bold schematics that would serve as guides to an engraver, because already he had plans for a book to accompany the spyglasses, just as an instruction manual had accompanied his military compass. Although here it really came down to seeing for oneself. The Milky Way, for instance; he could see that it was composed of a vast number of stars granulated together, a truly astonishing finding; but there was no way at all to draw that. People would have to see for themselves.

      He fell deeply into his new routine. He had always been an insomniac, and now there was a useful way to spend those sleepless hours. He simply did not go to bed, but stayed out on the terrace by the occhialino, looking through it and jotting down notes, comfortable in the solitary silence of the sleeping town. He had not known how much he enjoyed being alone. He wrote up what he had observed at dawn, and then slept through many a bright cool morning, wrapped in a blanket against a sunny wall in the corner, under the gnomon of the house’s big L.

      With the shorter days of November came winter, and clouds. On those nights he read, or caught up on his sleep, if he could; but on many a night he woke every hour or two, his brain full of stars, and went out to check the sky. If it had cleared he would stir the coals of the kitchen fire and put a pot of mulled wine on the grate, add a few sticks and go out to set up the glass, feeling that swirl of dust in the blood that he loved so much. He was on the hunt all right! And never had he had such a quarry! Nothing could keep him from looking when the night was clear. If his work in the daytime had to suffer-and it did-so be it. Those bastard pregadi didn’t deserve his work anyway.

      He had ordered one of the work tables moved onto the terrace, placed under a table umbrella, next to a couch. He had a lantern that could be shuttered, and workbooks, inkpots, quills; and three spyglasses on tripods, each with different powers and occlusions. Lastly, blankets to throw over his shoulders. Mazzoleni and the cook kept the household running in the mornings while he slept, and stocked the supplies for his nighttime needs; both were the kind of person who falls asleep at sunset, so they didn’t see him at work unless he forced them to. After a while, he never did; he liked being by himself through the frosty nights, looking at first one thing and then another.

      On the night of 7th January, 1610, he was out СКАЧАТЬ