9. Aristotle, On the Heavens, Book II, 14, 296b 4–6 (Oxford trans.).
10. Aristotle, On the Heavens, Book II, 14, 296b 23–24 (Oxford trans.).
11. Cicero, De Re Publica, 1.xiv §21–22, in Cicero, On the Republic and On the Laws, trans. Clinton W. Keys (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1928), pp. 41, 43.
12. This work has been reconstructed by modern scholars; see Albert van Helden, Measuring the Universe—Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1983), pp. 10–13.
13. Ptolemy’s Almagest, trans. and annotated G. J. Toomer (Duckworth, London, 1984). The Ptolemy star catalog is on pages 341–99.
14. For a contrary view, see O. Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1975), pp. 288, 577.
15. Ptolemy, Almagest, Book VII, Chapter 2.
16. Cleomedes, Lectures on Astronomy, ed. and trans. A. C. Bowen and R. B. Todd (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004).
8. The Problem of the Planets
1. G. W. Burch, “The Counter-Earth,” Osiris 11, 267 (1954).
2. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I, Part 5, 986a 1 (Oxford trans.). But in Book II of On the Heavens, 293b 23–25, Aristotle says that the counter-Earth was supposed to explain why lunar eclipses are more common than solar eclipses.
3. The paragraph quoted here is as given by Pierre Duhem in To Save the Phenomena—An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo, trans. E. Dolan and C. Machler (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1969), p. 5, hereafter cited as Duhem, To Save the Phenomena. A more recent translation of this passage from Simplicius is given by I. Mueller: see Simplicius, On Aristotle’s “On the Heavens 2.10–14” (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 2005), 492.31–493.4, p. 33. We don’t know if Plato ever actually proposed this problem. Simplicius was quoting Sosigenes the Peripatetic, a philosopher of the second century AD.
4. For very clear illustrations showing the model of Eudoxus, see James Evans, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998), pp. 307–9.
5. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII, Chapter 8, 1073b 1–1074a 1.
6. For a translation by I. Mueller, see Simplicius, On Aristotle “On the Heavens 3.1–7” (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 2005), 493.1–497.8, pp. 33–36.
7. This was the work, in 1956, of the physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang.
8. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII, Section 8, 1073b 18–1074a 14 (Oxford trans.).
9. These references are given by D. R. Dicks, Early Greek Astronomy to Aristotle (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), p. 202. Dicks takes a different view of what Aristotle was trying to accomplish.
10. Mueller, Simplicius, On Aristotle’s “On the Heavens 2.10–14,” 519.9–11, p. 59.
11. Ibid., 504.19–30, p. 43.
12. See Book I of Otto Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1975).
13. G. Smith, private communication.
14. Ptolemy, Almagest, trans. G. J. Toomer (Duckworth, London, 1984), Book V, Chapter 13, pp. 247–51. Also see O. Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, Part One (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1975), pp. 100–3.
15. Barrie Fleet, trans., Simplicius on Aristotle “Physics 2” (Duckworth, London, 1997), 291.23–292.29, pp. 47–48.
16. Quoted by Duhem, To Save the Phenomena, pp. 20–21.
17. Ibid.
18. For comments on the meaning of explanation in science, and references to other articles on this subject, see S. Weinberg, “Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?” in New York Review of Books 48, 9 (May 31, 2001): 47–50. Reprints: Australian Review (2001); in Portuguese, Folha da S. Paolo (2001); in French, La Recherche (2001); The Best American Science Writing, ed. M. Ridley and A. Lightman (HarperCollins, New York, 2002); The Norton Reader (W. W. Norton, New York, December 2003); Explanations—Styles of Explanation in Science, ed. John Cornwell (Oxford University Press, London, 2004), 23–38; in Hungarian, Akadeemia 176, No. 8: 1734–49 (2005); S. Weinberg, Lake Views—This World and the Universe (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2009).
19. This is not from the Almagest but from the Greek Anthology, verses compiled in the Byzantine Empire around AD 900. This translation is from Thomas L. Heath, Greek Astronomy (Dover, Mineola, N.Y., 1991), p. lvii.
PART III: THE MIDDLE AGES
9. The Arabs
1. This letter is quoted by Eutychius, then patriarch of Alexandria. The translation here is from E. M. Forster, Pharos and Pharillon (Knopf, New York, 1962), pp. 21–22. A less pithy translation is given by Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Chapter 51.
2. P. K. Hitti, History of the Arabs (Macmillan, London, 1937), p. 315.
3. D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture—The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbāsid Society (Routledge, London, 1998), pp. 53–60.
4. Al-Biruni, Book of the Determination at Coordinates of Localities, Chapter 5, excerpted and trans. J. Lennart Berggren, in The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and Islam, ed. Victor Katz (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2007).
5. Quoted in P. Duhem, To Save the Phenomena, p. 29.
6. Quoted by R. Arnaldez and A. Z. Iskandar in The Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Scribner, New York, 1975), Volume 12, p. 3.
7. G. J. Toomer, Centaurus 14, 306 (1969).
8. Moses ben Maimon, Guide to the Perplexed, Part 2, Chapter 24, trans. M. Friedländer, 2nd ed. (Routledge, London, 1919), pp. 196, 198.
9. Ben Maimon is here quoting Psalms 115:16.
10. See E. Masood, Science and Islam (Icon, London, 2009).
11. N. M. Swerdlow, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117, 423 (1973).
12. The case that Copernicus learned of this device from Arab sources is made by F. J. Ragep, History of Science 14, 65 (2007).
13. This is documented by Toby E. Huff, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011), Chapter 5.
14. These are verses 13, 29, and 30 of the second version of Fitzgerald’s translation.
15. Quoted in Jim al-Khalili, The House of Wisdom (Penguin, New York, 2011), p. 188.
16. Al-Ghazali’s Tahafut al-Falasifah, trans. Sabih Ahmad Kamali (Pakistan Philosophical Congress, Lahore, 1958).
17. Al-Ghazali, Fatihat al-‘Ulum, trans. I. Goldheizer, in Studies on Islam, ed. Merlin L. Swartz (Oxford University Press, 1981), quotation, p. 195.
10. Medieval Europe
1. See, e. g., Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962), Chapter 2.
2. Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences—European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, 2009), p. 15.
3. The articles of the condemnation are given in a translation by Edward Grant in A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. E. Grant (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1974), pp. 48–50.
4. Ibid., p. 47.
5. Quoted in David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1992), p. 241.
6. Ibid.
7. Nicole Oresme, Le livre du ciel et du monde, in French and trans. A. D. Menut and A. J. Denomy (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1968), p. 369.
8. Quoted in “Buridan,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (Scribner, New York, 1973), Volume 2, pp. 604–5.
9. See the article by Piaget in The Voices of Time, ed. J. T. Fraser (Braziller, New York, 1966).
10. Oresme, Le livre.
11. Ibid., pp. 537–39.
12. A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science—1100–1700 (Clarendon, Oxford, 1953).
13. For instance, see T. C. R. McLeish, Nature 507, 161–63 (March 13, 2014).
> 14. Quoted in A. C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science (Doubleday Anchor, Garden City, N.Y., 1959), Volume 1, p. 53.
15. Translation by Ernest A. Moody, in A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. E. Grant, p. 239. I have taken the liberty of changing the word “latitude” in Moody’s translation to “increment of velocity,” which I think more accurately indicates Heytesbury’s meaning.
16. De Soto is quoted in an English translation by W. A. Wallace, Isis 59, 384 (1968).
17. Quoted in Duhem, To Save the Phenomena, pp. 49–50.
PART IV: THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
1. Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, rev. ed. (Free Press, New York, 1957), p. 7.
2. For collections of essays on this theme, see Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. D. C. Lindberg and R. S. Westfall (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990), and Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, ed. M. J. Osler (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000).
3. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1996), p. 1.
4. Pierre Duhem, The System of the World: A History of Cosmological Doctrines from Plato to Copernicus (Hermann, Paris, 1913).
11. The Solar System Solved
1. For an English translation, see Edward Rosen, Three Copernican Treatises (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1939), or Noel M. Swerdlow, “The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus’s Planetary Theory: A Translation of the Commentariolus with Commentary,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117, 423 (1973).
2. For a review, see N. Jardine, Journal of the History of Astronomy 13, 168 (1982).
3. O. Neugebauer, Astronomy and History—Selected Essays (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1983), essay 40.
4. The importance of this correlation for Copernicus is stressed by Bernard R. Goldstein, Journal of the History of Astronomy 33, 219 (2002).
5. For an English translation, see Nicolas Copernicus On the Revolutions, trans. Edward Rosen (Polish Scientific Publishers, Warsaw, 1978; reprint, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md., 1978); or Copernicus—On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, trans. A. M. Duncan (Barnes and Noble, New York, 1976). Quotations here are from Rosen.
6. A. D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (Appleton, New York, 1895), Volume 1, pp. 126–28. For a deflation of White, see D. C. Lindberg and R. L. Numbers, “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter Between Christianity and Science,” Church History 58, 3 (September 1986): 338.
7. This paragraph has been quoted by Lindberg and Numbers, “Beyond War and Peace,” and by T. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 191. Kuhn’s source is White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology. The German original is Sämtliche Schriften, ed. J. G. Walch (J. J. Gebauer, Halle, 1743), Volume 22, p. 2260.
8. Joshua 10:12.
9. This English translation of Osiander’s preface is taken from Rosen, trans., Nicolas Copernicus On the Revolutions.
10. Quoted in R. Christianson, Tycho’s Island (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000), p. 17.
11. On the history of the idea of hard celestial spheres, see Edward Rosen, “The Dissolution of the Solid Celestial Spheres,” Journal of the History of Ideas 46, 13 (1985). Rosen argues that Tycho exaggerated the extent to which this idea had been accepted before his time.
12. For claims to Tycho’s system and for its variations, see C. Schofield, “The Tychonic and Semi-Tychonic World Systems,” in Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics—Part A: Tycho Brahe to Newton, ed. R. Taton and C. Wilson (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989).
13. For a photograph of this statue, taken by Owen Gingerich, see the frontispiece of my essay collection Facing Up—Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
14. S. Weinberg, “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant,” Physical Review Letters 59, 2607 (1987); H. Martel, P. Shapiro, and S. Weinberg, “Likely Values of the Cosmological Constant,” Astrophysical Journal 492, 29 (1998).
15. J. R. Voelkel and O. Gingerich, “Giovanni Antonio Magini’s ‘Keplerian’ Tables of 1614 and Their Implications for the Reception of Keplerian Astronomy in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 32, 237 (2001).
16. Quoted in Robert S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science—Mechanism and Mechanics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977), p. 10.
17. This is the translation of William H. Donahue, in Johannes Kepler—New Astronomy (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992), p. 65.
18. Johannes Kepler, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Prometheus, Amherst, N.Y., 1995), p. 180.
19. Quoted by Owen Gingerich in Tribute to Galileo in Padua, International Symposium a cura dell’Universita di Padova, 2–6 dicembre 1992, Volume 4 (Edizioni LINT, Trieste, 1995).
20. Quotations from Galileo Galilei, Siderius Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger, trans. Albert van Helden (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1989).
21. Galileo Galilei, Discorse e Dimostrazione Matematiche. For a facsimile of the 1663 translation by Thomas Salusbury, see Galileo Galilei, Discourse on Bodies in Water, with introduction and notes by Stillman Drake (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1960).
22. For a modern edition of a seventeenth-century translation, see Galileo, Discourse on Bodies in Water, trans. Thomas Salusbury, intro. and notes by Stillman Drake.
23. For details of this conflict, see J. L. Heilbron, Galileo (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010).
24. This letter is widely cited. The translation quoted here is from Duhem, To Save the Phenomena, p. 107. A fuller translation is given in Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (Anchor, New York, 1957), pp. 162–64.
25. A translation of the entire letter is given in Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, pp. 175–216.
26. Quoted in Stillman Drake, Galileo (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980), p. 64.
27. The letters of Maria Celeste to her father fortunately survive. Many are quoted in Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter (Walker, New York, 1999). Alas, Galileo’s letters to his daughters are lost.
28. See Annibale Fantoli, Galileo—For Copernicanism and for the Church, 2nd ed., trans. G. V. Coyne (University of Notre Dame Press, South Bend, Ind., 1996); Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992 (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005).
29. Quoted in Drake, Galileo, p. 90.
30. Quoted by Gingerich, Tribute to Galileo, p. 343.
31. I made a statement to this effect at the same meeting in Padua where Kuhn made the remarks about Aristotle cited in Chapter 4 and where Gingerich gave the talk about Galileo from which I have quoted here. See S. Weinberg, in L’Anno Galileiano (Edizioni LINT, Trieste, 1995), p. 129.
12. Experiments Begun
1. See G. E. R. Lloyd, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, N.S. 10, 50 (1972), reprinted in Methods and Problems in Greek Science (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991).
2. Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences, trans. Stillman Drake (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1974), p. 68.
3. Stillman Drake, Galileo (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980), p. 33.
4. T. B. Settle, “An Experiment in the History of Science,” Science 133, 19 (1961).
5. This is Drake’s conclusion in the endnote to p. 259 of Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, trans. Stillman Drake (Modern Library, New York, 2001).
6. Our knowledge of this experiment is based on an unpublished document, folio 116v, in Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. See Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work—His Scientific Biography (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1978), pp. 128–32; A. J. Hahn, “The Pendulum Swings Again: A Mathematical Reassessment of G
alileo’s Experiments with Inclined Planes,” Archive for the History of the Exact Sciences 56, 339 (2002), with a reproduction of the folio on p. 344.
7. Carlo M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 1300–1700 (W. W. Norton, New York, 1978), pp. 59, 138.
8. Christiaan Huygens, The Pendulum Clock or Geometrical Demonstrations Concerning the Motion of Pendula as Applied to Clocks, trans. Richard J. Blackwell (Iowa State University Press, Ames, 1986), p. 171.
9. This measurement was described in detail by Alexandre Koyré in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 97, 222 (1953) and 45, 329 (1955). Also see Christopher M. Graney, “Anatomy of a Fall: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Story of g,” Physics Today, September 2012, pp. 36–40.
10. On the controversy over these conservation laws, see G. E. Smith, “The Vis-Viva Dispute: A Controversy at the Dawn of Mathematics,” Physics Today, October 2006, p. 31.
11. Christiaan Huygens, Treatise on Light, trans. Silvanus P. Thompson (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1945), p. vi.
12. Quoted by Steven Shapin in The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1996), p. 105.
13. Ibid., p. 185.
13. Method Reconsidered
1. See articles on Leonardo in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (Scribner, New York, 1970), Volume 8, pp. 192–245.
2. Quotations are from René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. V. R. Miller and R. P. Miller (D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1983), p. 15.
3. Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, trans. E. Dilworth (Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, Indianapolis, Ind., 1961), p. 64.
4. It is odd that many modern English language editions of Discourse on Method leave out these supplements, as if they would not be of interest to philosophers. For an edition that does include them, see René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, Ind., 1965). The Descartes quote and the numerical results below are from this edition.
5. It is argued that the tennis ball analogy fits well with Descartes’ theory of light as arising from the dynamics of the tiny corpuscles that fill space; see John A. Schuster, “Descartes Opticien—The Construction of the Law of Refraction and the Manufacture of Its Physical Rationales, 1618–29,” in Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, ed. S. Graukroger, J. Schuster, and J. Sutton (Routledge, London and New York, 2000), pp. 258–312.
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