Every year, as October approaches, I anticipate the arrival of Columbus Day. And, I’m always
reminded of an old Peanuts cartoon. Charlie Brown is watching his little sister do her report on
Columbus Day. Her idea was that the Queen said she would give Mr. Day three ships because
he was a very brave man. “Good luck,” says Charlie as he walks away.
Columbus Day is a holiday that atheists should observe. 530 years ago on October 12, 1492,
three ships landed on an Island in the Caribbean ocean. In early 1493, Columbus returned to
Spain to report to Isabella and Ferdinand that his prediction was correct — by sailing west, he
had reached the coast of India (Columbus went to his grave think that). Word of the voyage
spread quickly around Europe. Among those who heard the news was a young Polish student
(Nicholas Copernicus) who was attending University in Bologna. Already, while still a student,
Copernicus, along with some others including some of his professors, was questioning the
widely accepted Ptolemaic earth centered model of the universe. Copernicus spent the rest of
his life, using simple instruments that he made himself, developing his heliocentric (sun
centered) model. Literally, he spent the rest of his life on this problem. He died on May 24,
1543, the very day that his magnum opus De Revolutionibus orbium celestial was rolling off the
newly invented movable type press. See, Copernicus’ Secret, How the Scientific Revolution
Began, by Jack Repcheck.
That was was only the beginning of the story, however. Not everyone was convinced that
Copernicus got it right. One reason for that doubt was that no one could figure out why the
planets appeared to stop in their orbits and reverse course. It was one of those mysteries that
just baffled people. About a hundred years later a Danish nobleman by the name of Tycho
Brahe built an elaborate observatory on an Island off the coast of Denmark. He made
meticulous observations of the positions of the planets, particularly the planet Mars. Like any
good scientist, Brahe made detailed notes about his observations. In the end, Brahe came up
with a hypothesis in which the earth remained the center of the solar system. Everything else
revolved around the sun, and that system revolved around the earth.
The king of Denmark died and, to make a long story short, Brahe got cross ways with the new
king and had to flee for his life. He sought refuge in the city of Prague. The emperor, Rudolph,
if I remember correctly, received Brahe and gave him a palace known as Belvedere. There was
only one hitch, he had to share it with the court mathematician, Johanas Kepler. Shortly after
Brahe died (that’s another story in itself), Kepler managed to have a good look at Brahe’s
observations, and saw a pattern — the planets only appeared to stop and reverse course if you
assumed they traveled in a perfect circle. When Kepler adjusted the equations such that the
planets traveled in an elliptical rather than a circular orbit, suddenly everything fell into place
and the mystery was solved. Copernicus was was correct after all. It was also during the life
time of Johanas Kepler that Galileo was peering through a home made telescope and having
the first look at the moons of Jupiter. Kepler and Galileo never met face to face, but they did
correspond. See, Tycho and Kepler, the Unlikely Partnership that Forever Changed our
Understanding of the Heavens, by Kitty Ferguson.
About a hundred years later, Sir Isaac Newton developed calculus and the laws of motion that
are still valid today. In 1859, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, independently,
formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection. James Clerk Maxwell and Michael
Faraday learned how electromagnetism worked. And in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
it was discovered that our planet is part of a solar system on the edge of a galaxy which
contains billions of such systems (although it is only in the last few weeks that other planets
have actually been seen). Edwin Hubble discovered that the Milky Way is only one of billions of
other galaxies all speeding away from each other.
Using the equations of Einstein and other physicists, Georges Lemaître, S.J. discovered that
the galaxies are speeding away from each other because the fabric of spacetime is expanding
at faster and faster speeds. December 25, 2021, the James Webb Space telescope was
launched providing us with a view of the heavens that Columbus Day, Nicholas Copernicus,
Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Sir Issac, Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaître, etc etc could
only dream about if they had any idea at all that such a thing might be possible.
And it all started in the 15th century when it occurred to Columbus that if the earth is round —
which no one doubted — then it was not necessary sail east to reach India. The fact that there
are two previously unknown continents in the way was completely unknown to the Europeans
of that time.
I don’t know that anyone has proposed a date on which the scientific revolution began, but in
my opinion October 12, 1492 is as good a date as any. Can you imagine what will be common
knowledge 530 years from now? In a few months Lawrence Krauss will publish a book which
discusses problems scientists are attempting to solve — those are questions to which we don’t
know the answers. I predict that the answers to those problems will lead to new questions. In
the meantime it is up to us to solve the problems of global warming and nuclear destruction —
two problems that, if they are not solved, will doom life on the planet earth unsustainable.
Columbus Day pushed open the doors of science, let’s resolve that they don’t slam shut.
Good luck, indeed.
Michael Messina, Education Chair