by Jane Hawking
Although Copernicus did not live to see how his theory was developed by Galileo in the seventeenth century, he must have been well aware of its dangerously controversial nature. He might be seen as the first scientist to open the Pandora’s box of science, with its dual potential of advancing human knowledge and yet of posing uncomfortable dilemmas which would test man’s moral integrity. The theory well deserved the term by which it came to be known: the “Copernican Revolution”. Since, according to Copernicus, the earth was no longer at the centre of the universe, man was not at the centre of creation. Man, therefore, could no longer be said to have a special relationship with the Creator. This fundamental change in perspective was to liberate man from the oppressive medieval obsession with the divine image, enabling him to expand his intellectual capabilities and value his own physical attributes – and it was one of the powerful influences behind the philosophy of the European Renaissance, when architects built palaces rather than cathedrals, and artists and sculptors replaced the religious image with the human form, depicted for its own sake, for its beauty and strength. In scientific terms, the Copernican theory paved the way for the discoveries of Newton in seventeenth-century England, where a positive aftereffect of an otherwise fanatical Puritanism had been the release of rational thought from the grip of religious superstition. Within Catholicism, however, the Copernican theory was to produce an ugly, anti-scientific reaction, the repercussions of which are still felt throughout society.
Perhaps wary of its implications, Copernicus did not permit his work Concerning the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres to be published until just before he died; a copy of the printed work was reputedly brought to him on his deathbed on 24th May 1543. Nonetheless he had not sought to hide its contents, for the theory had been widely disseminated over a long period, and he himself had lectured to the Pope Clement VII on the subject in Rome in 1533. Perhaps the Pope did not fully understand the implications of the lecture because it was presented to him merely as a simplification of the cumbersome Ptolemaic mathematics, or perhaps he did not take it seriously, because it was not until some time later – in the seventeenth century – that it fell to Galileo Galilei to bear the full brunt of the Church’s ire for his support and publicizing of the new system.
A charming popular account of the spyglass ascribes its invention to children who were playing around with bits of glass and lenses in the workshop of a Flemish spectacle-maker and found that by putting two lenses together they could see distant objects plainly. The spectacle-maker saw the potential of the gadget for the toy market, but when in 1609 Galileo heard of it, he worked out the underlying theory in one night and developed his own improved version, the telescope, which he demonstrated to that city’s incredulous merchants from the Campanile in Venice. To their astonishment, they could see in detail the markings on a sailing ship on the horizon, two hours from port. Galileo then realized that his revolutionary navigational aid could be turned on the heavens. He built a telescope in Padua, discovered four new planets – in fact the satellites of Jupiter – and published his own watercolour maps of the moon. His observations, which showed that not all heavenly bodies necessarily orbited the earth, convinced him of the accuracy of the Copernican theory. In 1610 he somewhat naively publicized his proof of the theory obtained from his observations, and in the next few years found himself in conflict with the Church, for whom the earth was theologically fixed at the centre of the universe.
In 1600, Giordano Bruno had been burnt at the stake for daring to speculate about astronomical matters, yet Galileo was undeterred by Bruno’s fate. Innocently supposing that no one would want to contradict visible evidence, he went on to become the main and most successful proponent of the Copernican theory, especially because he published his findings in the vernacular language, Italian, instead of Latin. The attack this represented on the traditional Judeo-Christian view of a conveniently earth-centred universe posed an unacceptable threat from within to a church already struggling to contain the forces of Protestantism from without, and in 1616 the Church authorities issued an admonition requiring Galileo not to hold or defend the Copernican doctrine.
The election in 1623 of Maffeo Barberini to the Papacy as Urban VIII alleviated Galileo’s uncomfortable situation temporarily. Barberini was a highly cultured man and a lover of the arts, but he was also proud, extravagant and autocratic – he reputedly had all the birds in the Vatican garden killed because they disturbed him. He was however a friend of Galileo’s and helped to bring about a limited relaxation of the 1616 injunction by commissioning Galileo to write a discourse – Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e copernicano – giving the arguments for and against the two competing systems, on condition that the discourse should be completely neutral. Inevitably the book, when it appeared in 1632, was seen as a categorical statement of the force of the Copernican argument and led to Galileo’s arrest and trial by the Inquisition. He was sentenced to house arrest in his villa at Arcetri where, old, blind and captive, the king of infinite space bounded in a nutshell, he eloquently lamented the disparity between the vastness of his area of research and the limitations of his physical condition, a situation with which it was all too easy for us to sympathize: “This universe is now shrivelled up for me into such a narrow compass as is filled by my own bodily sensations.”
Despite the life sentence of house arrest, his creative powers were not dulled. A new manuscript, Concerning Two New Sciences, was smuggled out of Italy to Holland where it was published in 1638. With this manuscript, Galileo is said to have laid the foundations of modern experimental and theoretical physics, and with it the scientific tradition moved north, away from the repressions of southern Europe.
Although Galileo was a devout Catholic, it was his conflict with the Vatican, sadly mismanaged on both sides, that lay at the basis of the running battle between science and religion, a tragic and confusing schism which persists unresolved. More than ever today, religion finds its revelatory truths threatened by scientific theory, and retreats into a defensive corner, while scientists go into the attack insisting that rational argument is the only valid criterion for an understanding of the workings of the universe. Maybe both sides have misunderstood the nature of their respective roles. Scientists are equipped to answer the mechanical question of how the universe and everything in it, including life, came about. But since their modes of thought are dictated by purely rational, materialistic criteria, physicists cannot claim to answer the questions of why the universe exists, and why we human beings are here to observe it, any more than molecular biologists can satisfactorily explain why – if our actions are determined by the workings of a selfish genetic coding – we occasionally listen to the voice of conscience and behave with altruism, compassion and generosity. Even these human qualities have come under attack from evolutionary psychologists who have ascribed altruism to a crude genetic theory by which familial cooperation is said to favour the survival of the species. Likewise the spiritual sophistication of musical, artistic and poetic activity is regarded as just a highly advanced function of primitive origins.
Frequently over the decades of our marriage, stimulated by a scientific article or television programme, I found my mind exercised by questions of this nature and would try to discuss them with Stephen. In the early days our arguments on the topics rehearsed above were playful and fairly light-hearted. Increasingly in later years, they became more personal, divisive and hurtful. The damaging schism between religion and science seemed to have extended its reach into our very lives: Stephen would adamantly assert the blunt positivist stance which I found too depressing and too limiting to my view of the world, because I fervently needed to believe that there was more to life than the bald facts of the laws of physics and the day-to-day struggle for survival. Compromise was anathema to Stephen however, because it admitted an unacceptable degree of uncertainty, when he dealt only in the certainties of mathematics.
Galileo died on 8th January 1642, the y
ear in which Newton was born and three hundred years to the day before Stephen was born. It was therefore not surprising that Stephen adopted Galileo as his hero. When in 1975 he received a medal from the Pope, he took the opportunity to launch a personal campaign for Galileo’s rehabilitation. The campaign was eventually successful but was nevertheless seen as a victory for the rational advance of science over the hidebound antiquated forces of religion, a theological capitulation, rather than as a reconciliation of science with religion.
In the sixteenth century, Nicolaus Copernicus had led the life of a true Renaissance man, untroubled by the crises that Galileo was to suffer in the next century. Copernicus enjoyed all the advantages, breadth of education and experience of that period of intellectual expansion and travelled widely, as far as Bologna, Padua and Rome. He studied medicine as well as mathematics and astronomy. He made translations from Greek into Latin, fulfilled a number of diplomatic functions and presented proposals for the reform of various Polish currencies. Ironically, five hundred years later, such broad possibilities were denied to Copernicus’ modern compatriots as they celebrated his quincentenary.
From the scientific point of view, the great advantage of the Polish setting for the commemorative conference was that it provided a meeting place for all the great minds from both West and East, since Russian physicists were able to travel to Poland, if not further field, with relative freedom. For Westerners, Poland was certainly more accessible than the Soviet Union: our Polish visas came through automatically, whereas the Russians were much less welcoming. The only inconvenience of entry into Poland, as a number of male delegates found, was that the bearer of a passport was expected to resemble his photograph down to the last detail. Since the year was 1973, many of the younger delegates and students were sporting long hair and fine bushy growths of beard, bearing little resemblance to their passport photos which could have been taken nearly ten years earlier when they were but whining schoolboys with satchel and shining faces. The only means of persuading the Polish authorities that they really were who they purported to be, and not decadent hippies intent on undermining the purity of communist culture, was to shave off their beards and cut their hair at the border post. They arrived in Warsaw looking like sheep from the shearer. Stephen was probably the only one among them whose hair was actually shorter than on his photo and did not have to subject himself to an urgent trim.
The Poland we witnessed in 1973 was a sad country, ravaged by Germany and dominated by Russia. It was hardly surprising that the Poles regarded all foreigners, ourselves included, with suspicion. We were all tarred with the same brush: if we were not German, we must be Russian. Protesting our Britishness was of no avail because we and the Americans came from the envied affluent societies to which the Poles would like to belong but from which they were barred. Plate-glass shopfronts bore ample evidence of western aspirations, but inside the shops the shelves were either bare or the goods they displayed were shoddy and prohibitively expensive.
Everywhere Poland showed signs of a country ill at ease with itself, caught on the horns of a dilemma between old and new, East and West. Torn apart throughout its history by both its neighbours, Russia and Germany, it had painstakingly reconstructed much that it had lost in the Second World War – especially, in fine detail, the old town of Warsaw. In contrast, Stalin’s unwelcome post-war gift to the Polish people was a megalithic municipal building of which it was said that the best views of Warsaw could be seen from it – meaning that only by viewing Warsaw from the Stalin monument could one avoid seeing the monument itself. In that building the Copernicus conference took place. It was approached from without by means of a long flight of steps. Another long flight of steps led down inside the building from the foyer to the conference area. Each morning, Stephen’s student Bernard Carr and I would carry Stephen to the top of the steps, sit him down on a chair and then bring up the wheelchair. Inside, for want of a lift, we would then take the wheelchair down the corresponding inner flight of stairs before carrying Stephen down to it. This process was repeated in reverse sequence at the end of the day, possibly also several times during the course of the day, subject to variations in the programme and the venue. Those steps did not impress us with Stalin’s generosity to the Polish people: they impressed us only with his megalomania.
A repressive Communism, imposed by Russia, which condemned peasant farmers to appear as lean as the emaciated cows we saw them herding along the country roads or the teams of scrawny oxen they drove across the fields, had produced a defiant reaction in the people. Poland was the most devoutly Catholic country in Europe: the Polish Church had become a symbol of national independence and nobly fulfilled its role as the defender of liberty, producing martyrs from among its priesthood. Nonetheless, I was perplexed to find strong reminiscences in Polish churches of the Church in Spain, so unlike the refreshing simplicity of English Catholicism which had resulted from the reforms of John XXIII’s inspired papacy. As in Spain, churches in Poland were ornate, darkly lit, incense-filled, full of extravagant plaster saints and virgins, imbued with that distasteful air of superstition. Clusters of little old crones, draped in black, crowded round the porches and genuflected at the altars just as they did in Francoist Spain. Polish independence as manifested through the Catholic church was a very conservative force, competing against a hostile political system with its own traditional opiate, whereas in Spain the attitude of the Catholic church was equally conservative but was generally one of political compliance with the repressive regime.
Cracow, to which the conference adjourned for the second session, was more assured of its identity than Warsaw, since its monuments – Wawel Castle and the church of St Mary – had survived the war intact, but the vicinity of Cracow was tainted with the chilling notoriety of Auschwitz. There was no official excursion to Auschwitz, but some Jewish participants organized their own outing and came back communicating to the rest of us their devastation at what they had witnessed.
The only place in that unhappy country where I detected any sense of peace and integrity was at Chopin’s birthplace, a single-storeyed thatched house, set in a tangle of greenery at Żelazowa Wola in the country outside Warsaw. Although Chopin’s family moved to Warsaw when he was a baby, he spent summer holidays at Żelazowa Wola, the country seat of his mother’s aristocratic relations, the Skarbeks, and it was there that he put the finishing touches to his E-minor piano concerto. He also spent holidays with school friends in the country. On one such holiday, he and his friends went on an excursion to Torum and found the house where Copernicus was born. Shocked by the condition of the house, Chopin complained that the room where Copernicus was born was occupied by “some German who stuffs himself with potatoes and then probably passes foul winds”.
The old house at Żelazowa Wola, with its sparse furnishings, polished floors, family portraits and collection of instruments, modestly conjured up the atmosphere of life in a cultured Polish family in the early nineteenth century. It was not just the aura of unworldliness that held me enthralled, but also the evocative silence. Mazurkas and waltzes hung on the air as though the main living room were still echoing with the strains of a family party. Nocturnes wafted in on a scented breeze from the shady garden. The setting lent a visual, tangible dimension to that powerfully emotive music. Above all, the house spoke of peace, the peace of a devoted family which had nurtured that most seductive of Romantic geniuses, the genius for whom, according to his good friend Delacroix, “heaven was jealous of the earth”. Like Copernicus, Chopin lived abroad for much of his life. He left Poland in 1830 never to return to his beloved homeland. His requited love for the young Polish girl Maria Wodzi´nska, whom he met in Dresden, was thwarted by her parents, who disapproved of the match on the grounds of Chopin’s ill health. Marriage to Maria might have taken him back to Poland. Instead he settled in his father’s native country, France, where he formed a tempestuous liaison with the volatile female novelist of licentious repute, George Sand, and died of consumpt
ion in 1849 at the age of thirty-nine.
The tragic experience seemed to be the hallmark of that stay in Poland, where so many resonances seemed to touch familiar chords and reveal points of similarity with our own lives. The tragic experience pursued us to the very end, for it was in the scientific company of Claudio Teitelbaum, a young Chilean delegate to the conference, and his wife that strange fleeting poetic memories from my own past resurfaced. Although they were living in Princeton, the Teitelbaums had close connections with the government of President Allende – the newly elected socialist government of Chile – through Claudio’s father, who was one of Allende’s ambassadors. They were part of the circle of dedicated left-wing reformers which included Pablo Neruda, the inspired poet at whose feet I had worshipped as an undergraduate. In 1964 Neruda had come to read his poetry at a gathering in King’s College, London, and I still carried in my mind the sensual sonority – as rich and evocative as Chopin’s music – that he brought to his love poems, caressing and emphasizing their lush strain of natural imagery. Neruda, a communist, was so deeply involved in Chilean politics that the presidency was within his grasp, but he relinquished his ambitions in favour of his friend, Salvador Allende. It was in Cracow, in the bare lounge of the hotel on the last day of the Copernicus meeting, that news reached us of the right-wing military coup against the legitimate Chilean government, allegedly with CIA support. Allende had died in the defence of the Presidential Palace. The Teitelbaums were stunned not only at the death of their much admired President but also at the death of their dreams of reforming the impoverished lives of the oppressed peasants of Chile. They with thousands of others were destined to spend many years in exile. Their destiny was fortunate by comparison with those who did not manage to flee the vicious reprisals exacted by the right-wing Pinochet regime. Two weeks later Pablo Neruda, a Spanish-speaking poet of genius like Lorca before him, died in the aftermath of right-wing revolution.
