Galileo's Instruments of Credit

Telescopes, Images, Secrecy

Mario Biagioli

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780226045634
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Science générale

In six short years, Galileo Galilei went from being a somewhat obscure mathematics professor running a student boarding house in Padua to a star in the court of Florence to the recipient of dangerous attention from the Inquisition for his support of Copernicanism. In that brief period, Galileo made a series of astronomical discoveries that reshaped the debate over the physical nature of the heavens: he deeply modified the practices and status of astronomy with the introduction of the telescope and pictorial evidence, proposed a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between theology and astronomy, and transformed himself from university mathematician into court philosopher. Galileo's Instruments of Credit proposes radical new interpretations of several key episodes of Galileo's career, including his early telescopic discoveries of 1610, the dispute over sunspots, and the conflict with the Holy Office over the relationship between Copernicanism and Scripture. Galileo's tactics during this time shifted as rapidly as his circumstances, argues Mario Biagioli, and the pace of these changes forced him to respond swiftly to the opportunities and risks posed by unforeseen inventions, further discoveries, and the interventions of his opponents.Focusing on the aspects of Galileo's scientific life that extend beyond the framework of court culture and patronage, Biagioli offers a revisionist account of the different systems of exchanges, communication, and credibility at work in various phases of Galileo's career. Galileo's Instruments of Credit will find grateful readers among scholars of science studies, historical epistemology, visual studies, Galilean science, and late Renaissance astronomy.

CHAPTER ONE

Financing the Aura

Distance and the Construction of Scientific Authority

A FEW scientists have been enshrouded by an aura of greatness, genius, and perhaps even sacredness.¹ The substantial dismemberment of Galileo’s body carried out almost a century after his death by fans eager to have some relic of the Florentine martyr of science is an example of such cultic, auratic perception of scientists.² The fascination with Einstein’s brain may be another.³

This chapter takes the effects of the aura very seriously but looks at its genealogy from a distinctly mundane point of view. I do not connect the aura to a mythical evocation of the wholeness of a long-gone era (as Walter Benjamin does) but treat it as the mappable effect of negotiations carried out over distance and the delays produced by such a distance—negotiations in which each party has partial (and partially updated) information about the other’s position, claims, resources, and authority. I treat the construction of the aura of scientific authority as the result of an investment process—the lending of one’s credit to a practitioner as a result both of the things one might know and of those one might not know about that person or his/her claims. The aura, therefore, is not just a result (the a posteriori recognition of one’s work), but a resource for producing that work in the first place, as well as for securing its acceptance from patrons and fellow-practitioners (the way the financial backing of a project is a necessary step toward its possible, but by no means necessary, success).

The aura I am talking about is based on information that is necessarily partial due to the distance between those who are working at producing knowledge claims and those who may or may not decide to take the risk of investing in such claims—accepting the dedication of a discovery that could turn out to be an artifact, lending one’s name to a claim by endorsing it, or spending time and money trying to replicate it, etc. At times I draw an analogy between the construction of scientific authority and investment decisions where the effects of distance are chronic and unavoidable. The scenarios I encounter along the way, however, are not the “perfect markets” idealized by neoclassical economics, but only specific actual markets in which information is inevitably limited and unevenly distributed rather than ubiquitous, free, and complete.⁴

Together with the relationship between distance and the production of value, I am equally interested in the capacity of distance to make possible the deferral of that very value. The effects of distance are ultimately temporal, not only in the banal sense that it took a certain number of days for the mail to go from Venice to Florence in 1610, but in the more interesting sense that distance and the time lag resulting from it made possible the delaying of the delivery of the knowledge one had invested in. Perhaps one could say that distance makes authoritative knowledge possible by enabling its deferral, making it appear acceptable that “the check is (always) in the mail,” that is, that knowledge cannot be delivered fully stabilized here and now.⁵

Distance occupies a central but negative role in recent interpretive models in science studies and the history of science.⁶ Since the demise of beliefs in the potential universality of science and in the transferability of its methods across geographical and cultural boundaries, science studies— especially the literature informed by the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK)—has been looking at the less grand and more laborious processes through which local knowledge is rendered public by making it travel outwards from its site of production. With a parallel shift of focus from mental processes to bodily practices-in-space, the constitution of scientific knowledge has often been equated to the geographical diffusion and acceptance of those claims.⁷

It seems that the traditional philosophical distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification has been now recast as a sociological distinction between local and nonlocal knowledge.⁸ While the spatial turn in science studies and history of science has demonstrated its remarkable heuristic value, I believe we can revise that approach by considering distance neither as a problem nor as a resource, but rather as part of the conditions of possibility of knowledge. This is not a completely new proposal. Fleck, Collins, and MacKenzie have already pointed to different aspects of the relationship between authority and distance in techno-science.⁹ With the exception of Fleck, however, discussions of the importance of distance have been typically limited to how nonspecialists come to attribute high certainty to scientific knowledge.¹⁰ As Collins put it, “Distance lends enchantment: the more distant in social space or time is the locus of creation of knowledge the more certain it is.” ¹¹ Distance, therefore, is said to cast its spell on the consumers of knowledge, not on the producers.¹² And it does so only after knowledge has been produced at a specific point in time and at a “locus of creation.”¹³

Network models give distance a slightly greater role in the production of knowledge. According to Latour and Callon, knowledge is not completely made in one place but is drawn together or calculated in key nodes of the network from inscriptions received from elsewhere.¹⁴ While such a model hinges on the production of inscriptions at geographically dispersed sites, it treats distance simply as that which has to be crossed for inscriptions to reach centers of calculation. The inscriptions and resources that move across distance should not be affected by such a travel: Latour’s “mobiles” are supposed to remain “immutable.”¹⁵

Rather than thinking of knowledge as something that either conquers distance or that is constituted by having inscriptions travel unchanged through space from the periphery to centers of calculation and out again as publications, I propose to view knowledge as constituted through a range of distance-based partial perceptions. I do not look at how a knowledge claim travels from A to B, but at how the transactions made possible by the fact that A and B are distant from each other allow for the production of such a knowledge claim.

I illustrate these processes through two historical examples representative of two different configurations of the social infrastructure of early modern natural philosophy. The first example looks at the construction of Galileo’s authority around the time of his telescopic discoveries of 1609-10. Here I analyze the specific steps by which a practitioner may be credited with an authority s/he does not yet have, and how geographical distance contributes to the authoritative aura of a scientist by producing perceptions of his/her reputation and status that are necessarily out of synch with the practitioner’s predicament in the place where s/he operates. The second example focuses on the Royal Society of London right after its establishment to show that distance continued to frame key aspects of the more corporate world of scientific academies—a world that bears some family resemblance to that of today’s science.

DISTANT STARS, DISTANT CITIES

On January 30, 1610, a few months after developing his telescope, Galileo wrote the Medici secretary, Belisario Vinta, that he had made a number of important astronomical discoveries (which included four new planets) and that he was in the process of publishing a short report about these findings.¹⁶ The secretary promptly responded that the grand duke had expressed an “extraordinary desire to see those observations as soon as possible.”¹⁷ Seizing on the Medici’s enthusiastic response, Galileo replied immediately to the secretary that he wished to dedicate his discoveries to the Medici (something he had not mentioned in the previous letter) and that he was holding up the publication of the Sidereus nuncius waiting to hear from them about the specific name he should attach to the discoveries.¹⁸

Galileo was in Padua, the grand duke in Florence—a few days (and a few state boundaries) away from each other. But although Galileo was a professor at the University of Padua, his wit and mathematical skills were known in Florence. Over the years, he had built a good reputation by teaching mathematics publicly at the University of Pisa and privately to young prince Cosimo, by dedicating to him the Operations of the Geometrical and Military Compass, and by entertaining the Florentine nobility and literati with his disquisitions about the geometry of Dante’s Inferno.¹⁹ Then, in the fall of 1609, he might have traveled to Florence to show the grand duke some of the telescopes he was developing.²⁰ Based on this preexisting credibility and on the potential benefit the Medici saw in having their name associated with such exceptional findings, Cosimo II went along and, without being able to verify Galileo’s claims, allowed Galileo to attach his family name to the discoveries.

There were a number of other things the Medici did not know and, being in Florence, could not know. First, although Galileo had told them on January 30 that “I am now in Venice to have certain observations printed,” the observations pertaining to the satellites of Jupiter (soon to become the Medicean Stars) were not even half completed. (The observations included in the Sidereus nuncius run from January 7 to March 2). If Galileo thought he needed an observational log of that length to convince his readers of the existence of the satellites of Jupiter, then the Medici accepted the dedication of a product that was still being completed.²¹ And the Medici did not even exactly know what that product was. Fearing both competition from other astronomers and the likely failure that would have followed the grand duke’s attempt at observing the Stars by himself, the only information Galileo shared with his patrons was that the Medicean Stars were four new planets that orbited a large star.²² That Jupiter was such a star was mentioned only later, in a letter he sent Vinta after the Sidereus nuncius came off the press.²³

Since the very beginning of the negotiations, the Medici had expressed an “extraordinary desire” to witness the discoveries and continued to press Galileo for a demonstration.²⁴ Galileo reassured them that they would be able to see their Stars within a “short time,” but warned them about how difficult these observations could be, and that they might have to wait for Galileo’s return to Florence.²⁵ Although he promised to send them a telescope, there is no evidence that any instrument (had Galileo actually sent it) ever reached the grand duke.²⁶ All the Medici received were Galileo’s offers to visit the court to show the duke the satellites—a visit that, due to his teaching duties in Padua, would have to wait until the summer or, at the earliest, the Easter recess.²⁷

Galileo did not apologize for asking so much while providing so little in return, but instead proceeded to ask the grand duke to help him advertise the Stars he had not yet seen. On March 19, as he was sending a copy of the Sidereus nuncius to Cosimo II, he wrote to his secretary that

it would be necessary to send to many princes, not only the book, but also the instrument, so that they will be able to verify the truth. And, regarding this, I still have ten spyglasses that alone among one hundred and more that I have built with great toil and expense are good enough to detect the new planets and the new fixed stars. I thought to send these to relatives and friends of the Most Serene grand duke, and I have already received requests from the Most Serene Duke of Bavaria, the Most Serene Elector of Cologne, and the Illustrious Cardinal del Monte.... I would like to send the other five to Spain, France, Poland, Austria, and Urbino, when, with the permission of the grand duke, I would receive some introduction to these princes so that I could hope that my devotion would be appreciated and well received.²⁸

The secretary agreed. He replied: “Our Most Serene Lord agrees that the news [of the discovery] should spread and that telescopes should be sent to princes. He will make sure that they will be delivered and received with the appropriate dignity and magnificence.”²⁹ Only a week later were the grand duke and his family shown their Stars.

Why did the Medici extend so much credit to Galileo? Why did they allow him to attach their name to his discoveries without being able to check them, or without even being told what these discoveries were about? And why did they agree to help publicize a discovery they had not seen? The answer, I believe, lies in the incremental character of Galileo’s requests. Between his first mention of the discoveries on January 30, the Medici acceptance of the dedication in February, the publication of the Nuncius on March 12, and his request for help with the distribution of telescopes on March 19, the Medici name had become increasingly entwined with Galileo’s. By March 19,...