Coming of Age in the Milky Way (5 page)

This was a stupendous result for its day—a heliocentric universe with a radius more than a hundred thousand times larger than that of the Ptolemaic model, proposed four centuries before Ptolemy was born! Although we know today that one light-year is but a quarter of the distance to the nearest star, and less than one ten-billionth of the radius of the observable universe, Aristarchus’ model nonetheless represented a tremendous increase in the scale that the human mind had yet assigned to the cosmos. Had the world listened, we today would speak of an Aristarchian rather than a Copernican revolution in science, and cosmology might have been spared a millennium of delusion. Instead, the work of Aristarchus was all but forgotten; Seleucus the Babylonian championed the Aristarchian system a century later, but appears to have been lonely in his enthusiasm for it. Then came the paper triumph of Ptolemy’s shrunken, geocentric universe, and the world stood still.

Writing “The Sand Reckoner” was one of the last acts of Archimedes’ life. He was living in his native Syracuse on the southeast coast of Sicily, a center of Greek civilization, and the city was besieged by the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus. Though his last name means “martial” and he was nicknamed the Sword of Rome, Marcellus for all his mettle was getting nowhere in Syracuse. Credit for holding his army at bay went to the frightening machines of war that Archimedes had designed. Roman ships approaching
the city walls were seized in the jaws of giant Archimedean cranes, raised high into the air while the terrified marines aboard clung to the rails, then dashed on the rocks below. Troops attacking on foot were crushed by boulders rained down on them by Archimedean catapults. As Plutarch recounts the siege, the Romans soon were so chagrined that “if they did but see a little rope or a piece of wood from the wall, instantly crying out, that there it was again, Archimedes was about to let fly some engine at them, they turned their backs and fled.”
⁴

“Who,” Marcellus asked in his frustration as the siege wore on, “is this Archimedes?”

A good question. The world remembers him as the man who ran naked through the city streets shouting “Eureka” after having realized, while lowering himself into a bath, that he could measure the specific gravity of a gold crown (a gift to King Hieron, one that he suspected of being adulterated) by submerging it and weighing the amount of water it displaced. Remembered, too, is his invention of the Archimedes’ screw, still widely used to pump water today, and his fascination with levers and pulleys. “Give me a place to stand,” he is said to have boasted to King Hieron, “and I shall move the earth.”
⁵
The king requested a demonstration on a smaller scale. Archimedes commandeered a ship loaded with freight and passengers—one that normally would have required a gang of strong men to warp from the dock—and pulled the ship unassisted, employing a multiple pulley of his own design. The king, impressed, commissioned Archimedes to build the engines of war that were to hold off the Romans.

Plutarch writes that although he was famous for his technological skills, Archimedes disdained “as sordid and ignoble the whole trade of engineering, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit,” preferring to concentrate upon pure mathematics. His passion for geometry, Plutarch adds,

Archimedes determined the value of pi to three decimal places, proved that the area of the surface of a sphere equals four times that of a circle of the same size (the rule of 4πr
²
), and discovered that if a sphere is circumscribed within a cylinder, the ratio of their volumes and surfaces is 3:2. (He was so proud of this last feat that he asked friends to have a sphere within a cylinder inscribed on his tombstone. Cicero, quaestor of Sicily in 75
B.C
., located and restored the tomb; it has since vanished.)

Marcellus’ invasion came while the Syracusans were celebrating the feast of Diana, traditionally an excuse for heavy drinking. Marcellus had ordered that no free citizens be injured, but his men had seen many of their compatriots killed by Archimedes’ war machines, and they were not in a conciliatory mood. As the story is told, Archimedes was absorbed in calculations when a Roman soldier approached and addressed him in an imperative tone. Archimedes was seventy-five years old and no fighter, but he was also one of the freest men who ever lived, and unaccustomed to taking orders. Drawing geometrical diagrams in the sand, Archimedes waved the soldier aside, or told him to go away, or otherwise dismissed him, and the angry man cut him down. Marcellus damned the soldier as a murderer, writes Plutarch, adding that “nothing afflicted Marcellus so much as the death of Archimedes.”
⁷

Greek science was mortal, too. By the time of Archimedes’ death the world center of intellectual life already had shifted from Athens to Alexandria, the city Alexander the Great had established a century earlier with the charter—inspired, I suppose, by his boyhood tutor Aristotle—that it be a capital of learning modeled on the Greek ideal. Here Ptolemy I, the Macedonian general and biographer of Alexander, established with the wealth of empire a vast library and a museum where scientists and scholars could carry on their studies, their salaries paid by the state. It was in Alexandria that Euclid composed his
Elements
of geometry, that Ptolemy constructed his eccentric universe, and that Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth and the distance of the sun to within a few percent of the correct values. Archimedes himself had studied at Alexandria, and had often ordered books from the library there to be sent to Syracuse. But the tree of science grew poorly in Alexandrian soil, and within a century or two had hardened into the dead wood of pedantry. Scholars continued to study and annotate the great books of the past, and roomfuls of copiers laboriously
duplicated them, and historians owe a great debt to the anonymous clerks of the library of Alexandria, but they were the pallbearers of science and not its torchbearers.

The Romans completed their conquest of the known world on the day in 30
B.C
. that Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemies, bared her breast to the asp. Theirs was a nonscientific culture. Rome revered authority; science heeds no authority but that of nature. Rome excelled in the practice of law; science values novelty over precedent. Rome was practical, and respected technology, but science at the cutting edge is as impractical as painting and poetry, and is exemplified more by Archimedes’ theorems than by his catapults. Roman surveyors did not need to know the size of the sun in order to tell time by consulting a sundial; nor did the pilots of Roman galleys concern themselves overmuch with the distance of the moon, so long as it lit their way across the benighted Mediterranean. Ceramic stars ornamented the ceilings of the elegant dining rooms of Rome; to ask what the real stars were made of would have been as indelicate as asking one’s host how the roast pig on the table had been slaughtered. When a student Euclid was tutoring wondered aloud what might be the use of geometry, Euclid told his slave, “Give him a coin, since he must gain from what he learns.”
⁸
This story was not popular in Rome.

Roman rule engendered among those it oppressed a growing scorn for material wealth, a heightened regard for ethical values, and a willingness to imagine that their earthly sufferings were but a preparation for a better life to come. The conflict between this essentially spiritual, otherworldly outlook and the stolid practicality of Rome crystallized in the interrogation that Pontius Pilate, a prefect known for his ruthlessness and legal acumen, conducted of the obscure Jewish prophet Jesus of Nazareth.

The world knows the story. Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?”

“My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus replied.

“Are you a king, then?”

“You say I am a king,” Jesus replied. “To this end was I born, and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone that is of the truth hears my voice.”

“What is truth?” asked Pilate.
⁹

Jesus said nothing, and was led off to execution, and his few followers dropped from sight. Yet within two centuries his eloquent
silence had swallowed up the words of the law, and Christianity had become the state religion of Rome.

Science, however, fared no better in Christian than in pagan Rome. Christianity, in its emphasis upon asceticism, spirituality, and contemplation of the afterlife, was inherently uninterested in the study of material things. What difference did it make whether the world was round or flat, if the world was corrupt and doomed? As Saint Ambrose put it in the fourth century, “To discuss the nature and position of the earth does not help us in our hope of the life to come.” Wrote Tertullian the Christian convert, “For us, curiosity is no longer necessary.”

To the Christians, the fall of Rome illustrated the futility of putting one’s trust in the here and now. “Time was when the world held us fast to it by its delight,” declaimed Pope Gregory the Great, seated on a marble chair amid the flickering candles of the chapel of the Catacomb of St. Domitilla in Rome at the close of the sixth century (by which time the city had been sacked five times). “Now ’tis full of such monstrous blows for us, that of itself it sends us home to God at last. The fall of the show points out to us that it was but a
passing
show,” he said, advising the somber celebrants to “let your heart’s affections wing their way to eternity, that so despising the attainments of this earth’s high places, you may come unto the goal of glory which ye shall hold by faith through Jesus Christ, our Lord.”
¹⁰

Christian zealots are alleged to have burned the pagan books in the library of Alexandria, and Muslims to have burned the Christian books, but the historical record of this great crime is subject to dispute on both counts; in any event, the books went up in smoke. The old institutions of learning and philosophy, most of them already in decline, collapsed under the rising winds of change. Plato’s Academy was closed by Justinian in
A.D
. 529; the Sarapeum of Alexandria, a center of learning, was razed to the ground by Christian activists in
A.D
. 391; and in 415 the geometer Hypatia, daughter of the last known associate of the museum of Alexandria, was murdered by a Christian mob. (“They stripped her stark naked,” an eyewitness reported. “They raze[d] the skin and ren[t] the flesh of her body with sharp shell, until the breath departed out of her body; they quartered] her body; they [brought] her quarters unto a place called Cinaron and burn[ed] them to ashes.”
¹¹
)

Scholars fled from Alexandria and Rome and headed for
Byzantium—followed closely by the Roman emperor himself, after whom the city was renamed Constantinople—and the pursuit of science devolved to the province of Islam. Encouraged by the Koran to practice
taffakur
, the study of nature, and
taskheer
, the mastery of nature through technology, Islamic scholars studied and elaborated upon classics of Greek science and philosophy forgotten in the West. Evidence of their astronomical research is written in the names of stars—names like Aldebaran, from
Al Dabaran
, “the follower;” Rigel, from
Rijl Jauzah al Yusra
, “the left leg of the Jauzah;” and Deneb, from
Al Dhanab al Dajajah
, “the hen’s tail.”

But the Arabs were enchanted by Ptolemy, and envisioned no grander cosmos. Aristarchus’ treatise on astronomical distances was translated in the early tenth century by a Syrian-Greek scholar named Questa ibn Luqa, and an Arabic secret society known as the Brethren of Purity published an Aristarchian table of wildly inaccurate but robustly expansive planetary distances, but otherwise little attention was paid to the concept of a vast universe. The generally accepted authority on the scale of what we today call the solar system was al-Farghani, a ninth-century astronomer who, by assuming that the Ptolemaic epicycles fit as tightly as ball bearings between the planetary spheres—“there is no void between the heavens,” he asserted—estimated that Saturn, the outermost known planet, was eighty million miles away.
¹²
Its true distance is more than ten times that.

The Islamic devotees of Ptolemy, however, inadvertently undermined the very cosmology they cherished, by transmuting Ptolemaic abstractions into real, concrete celestial spheres and epicycles. So complex and unnatural a system, palatable if regarded as purely symbolic, became hard to swallow when represented as a genuine mechanism that was actually out there moving the planets around. The thirteenth-century monarch King Alfonso (“the Learned”) of Castile is said to have remarked, upon being briefed on the Ptolemaic model, that if this was really how God had built the universe, he might have given Him some better advice.

But that was many long, dark centuries later. The last classical scholar in the West was Ancius Boethius, who enjoyed power and prestige in the court of the Gothic emperor Theodoric at Ravenna until he backed the losing side in a power struggle and was jailed. In prison he wrote
The Consolation of Philosophy
, a portrait of the life of the mind illuminated by the fading rays of a setting sun. There,
Boethius contrasts the constancy of the stars with the unpredictability of human fortune: