Of changing visions and burning bushes

While recently reading Arthur Koestler’s book The Sleepwalkers (Arkana Press, 1959), which outlines a history of humankind’s changing vision of the universe, I came across a curious passage concerning Tycho Brahe’s “New Star,” the supernova of 1572. With Brahe’s impassioned determination to find a realistic model of the universe through measurements of unprecedented accuracy, and Johannes Kepler poised to place the Sun at a focus of elliptical planetary orbits, this new star was the first serious nail in the coffin for Aristotle’s cosmology.

Changes in the universe were previously believed to occur in the sublunary sphere, the sphere containing the Moon’s orbit. By Brahe’s measurements, the supernova showed no detectable parallax; thus it lay outside that sphere. Hence the “sphere of the fixed stars,” the domain of Aristotle’s god, was subject to change and thus imperfect.

For me at least, Koestler’s text struck a loud, resounding chord with some events at the beginning of the third millennium AD:

All Europe was agog, both with the cosmological and astrological significance of the event [the supernova]. The German painter George Busch, for instance, explained that it was really a comet condensed from the rising vapours of human sins, which had been set afire by the wrath of God. It created a kind of poisonous dust (rather like the fall-out from a Hydrogen bomb) which was drifting down on people’s heads and caused all sorts of evil, such as “bad weather, pestilence and Frenchmen.” (page 293)

It is often said that history repeats itself. I wonder if, this past fall, we should have turned our clocks back 1 hour and 433 years, in the hope of witnessing another era of scientific enlightenment, but this time without the birth pains of an inquisition.