Galileo’s Dream. Kim Stanley Robinson

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       Chapter Two I Primi Al Mondo

       Having come to this pass, I appealed out of my innocent soul to the high and omnipotent gods and my own good genius, beseeching them of their eternal goodness to take notice of my wretched state. And behold! I began to descry a faint light.

      -FRANCESCO COLONNA, Hypnerotomachia PoliphiliThe Strife of Love in a Dream of Poliphili

      The next night, back in Padua, Galileo went out into his garden and aimed his best occhialino at the moon. He left Mazzoleni sleeping by the kitchen fire, woke none of the servants; the house was asleep. This was his hour, as on so many nights when his insomnia took hold of him.

      Now his mind was filled with the stranger’s blade of a face, his intense gaze: have you looked at the moon? The moon tonight was near its first quarter, the bright part almost exactly half the whole, the dark part easily visible against the night sky. An obvious sphere. Galileo sat on a low stool, held his breath, brought his right eye to the eyepiece. The little black circle of glass was marked on its left side by a luminous white patch. He focused on it.

      At first he saw nothing but a chiaroscuro flecking of greyish black and brilliant white, the tremble of the white seeming to flow over the dark spots. Ah: hills. A landscape. A world seen from above.

      A view from world to world.

      He loosened the screw on the tripod head and tapped the tube, trying to capture in the glass the tip of the moon’s upper crescent. He tightened the screw, looked again. Brilliant white horn: a dark grey in the curve of the horn, a blackness just slightly washed with white. Again he saw an arc of hills. There, at the border of light and dark, was a flat dark patch, like a lake in shadow. The sunlight was obviously shining horizontally over the landscape, as it would be of course, as he was looking at the area experiencing dawn. He was looking at a sunrise on the moon, twenty-eight times slower than a sunrise on Earth.

      There was a little round valley; there another one. Any number of circles and arcs, in fact, as if God had been fooling around up there with a compass. But the strongest impression remained the range of hills, there on the border of black and white.

      The moon was a world, the Earth was a world. Well, of course. He had always known this.

      As for the assertions the Aristotelians made about the moon, that because it was in the heavens it was therefore a perfect sphere, made of some unearthly crystal that was of unchanging purity-well, its ordinary appearance had always rendered that a very suspicious statement. Now it was clearer than ever that Aristotle had been wrong. This was no great surprise-when indeed had he been right, in the natural sciences? He should have stuck to his strength, which was rhetoric. He had had no mathematics.

      Galileo got up and went in to the workshop to get his current folio, and a quill and inkpot. He wondered if he should wake Mazzoleni, then decided against it. There would be other nights. This one was his. He could feel his blood pounding in his head; his neck muscles were sore. It was his night. No one had ever seen these things. Well, perhaps the stranger had. But Galileo suppressed that thought in order to glory in his own moment. All the years, all the centuries and their millions come and gone, the stars rotating above them night after night, and only now had someone seen the hills of the moon.

      The moon must rotate on its axis at the same speed it circled the Earth, to keep the same side always facing it; this was odd, but no odder than many other phenomena, such as the fact that the moon and the sun were the same size in the sky. These things were either caused, or accidental; it was hard to tell. But it was a rotating sphere, that was clear. And so was the Earth also a rotating sphere? Galileo wondered if Copernicus’s advocacy of this old Pythagorean notion could be right.

      He looked through the glass again, relocated the white hills. The dark part west of them was extremely interesting. Land in shadow, obviously. Perhaps there were lakes and seas too, though he could see no sign one way or the other. But it was not as black as a cave or a dark room at night. One could make out dim large features, because the area was very slightly illuminated. That could not be direct sunlight, obviously. But just as the moonlight illuminating his garden at this moment was really sunlight bouncing off the moon to him, he was no doubt also seeing the dark part of the moon illuminated by sunlight that had bounced off the Earth and struck it-and then bounced back yet again, of course, to get to his eyes. From sun to Earth to moon and then back to him-which would explain the successive diminutions in brightness. As sunlight was to moonlight, moonlight was to the dark side of the moon.

      The next morning he said to Mazzoleni, ‘I want a stronger magnification, something like twenty or thirty times.’

      ‘So you say, maestro.’

      They manufactured a lot of spyglasses. Making the objective lenses bigger and smoother, while keeping the eyepiece lenses at their original size and grinding them both deeper and smoother, led to very satisfactory jumps in magnifying power. In a matter of weeks they had glasses that showed things twenty-twenty-five- thirty-finally thirty-two times closer than the unaided eye saw them. There they hit their limit; the lenses could not be made bigger or smoother, and the tubes were twice as long as when they had begun. Also, as magnifying power grew, what one actually saw through the glass contracted down to a very small field of view. One could move one’s eye around the eyepiece a bit to broaden the view, but not by very much. Accurate aiming was important, and Galileo got better at this by attaching an empty spotting tube to the side of the strongest glass. They also had to deal with a white glare that invaded the sides of the larger images, where the irregularities in the lenses also tended to cluster, so that the outer circumference of the image was often nearly useless. Here Galileo put to use a solution he had discovered to deal with the rainbow rings that plagued his own vision, especially of things seen at night. This unhappy phenomenon he tended to attribute to the strange incident of his near-death experience in the cellar of the Villa Costozza, which he also believed had caused his rheumatism, bad digestion, headaches, seizures, melancholia, hypochondria, and so on. Vision problems were only one more remnant of that ancient disaster, and he had long since discovered that if he looked at something through his fist, the aurora of coloured light surrounding the thing would be blocked from view. Now he tried the same remedy with the new spyglasses, fashioning with Mazzoleni’s help a cardboard sleeve that could be fitted over the objective. The most effective one left an oval opening over the lens that blocked most of the outer third of its area. Why an oval worked better than a circle he had no idea, but it did; the glare was eliminated, and the image that remained was about as large as before, and very much sharper.

      As the spyglasses got stronger, things in the sky were becoming visible that had not been visible before. One night, after a long inspection of the moon, he swung the glass across the sky toward the Pleiades, just risen above the house. He looked СКАЧАТЬ