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Galileo—speaking truth to power
Perspectives
Photo by Leon Puplett, projections by 59 Productions
Galileo Galilei was a great catch. When, in 1612, he joined the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy, it was but 9 years old. The academy had been started by four young men excited by the idea that science was the way to understand the world. Galileo founded modern science in Italy and was famous for it. He looked at the stars and made observations, he did experiments, he reasoned, he argued. And, importantly, he questioned received wisdom. He fought it, shredded it, mercilessly showed its flaws. Galileo may have been the most famous member of the fledgling academy—named Lincei because the founders wanted to see into the secrets of nature with a perception as acute as that of the lynx. But he was probably also the cause of the academy’s first demise in 1630; in the 19th century it resurfaced to stay, and is a highlight of a visit to Rome. Galileo’s science led him to embrace Copernicanism, the earth moves round the sun, over the Aristotelian view that the earth sits immobile at the centre of the Universe and the sun revolves around it. The church, speaking of heaven and earth, had the earth at the centre. The Accademia dei Lincei sided with Galileo. The clash between science and the religious establishment was
www.thelancet.com Vol 389 June 10, 2017
fatal for the academy; catastrophic but not quite fatal for Galileo. Science versus the establishment. Speaking truth to power. Galileo’s is a story for our times. And the heroic struggle of the man of science against the power of the Italian Inquisition is of tragic proportion. Galileo found his modern Shakespeare in Bertolt Brecht, whose English language version of Life of Galileo was first performed in the USA in 1947. A busy year for Brecht, he also appeared before the US House Un-American Activities Committee, and left for Europe the next day spending the remainder of his life based in Communist East Germany.
“Science versus the establishment. Speaking truth to power. Galileo’s is a story for our times.“ Life of Galileo is now being staged at London’s Young Vic in a wonderful, energetic production directed by Joe Wright. This impressive staging features planetarium, original music by Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers, puppets, and a magnetic performance by its star, Brendan Cowell as Galileo, whose Australian accent helps to portray him as the outsider. Brecht was a Marxist and it is possible
that he was using Galileo’s struggles as a metaphor for struggles of the people against an ideological state. Setting that aside, there are at least three themes that stand out as relevant to the tussle between truth and power: the nature of scientific endeavour, power, and the scientist as hero as distinct from the science itself. Galileo’s credo as scientist is articulated in the play: “What is written in the old books is no longer good enough. For where faith has been enthroned for a thousand years doubt now sits”, and “the universe has lost its centre overnight, and woken up to find it has countless centres”. In other words, not only does science question dogma but it is also essentially democratising. “The earth is rolling cheerfully around the sun, and the fishwives, merchants, princes, cardinals, and even the Pope are rolling with it.” Science is international, even in the 16th and 17th centuries. Galileo hears of a Dutch invention that magnifies, and constructs his own telescope. Aristotle may have reasoned his way to an earth-centric universe; and a literal reading of heaven and earth in the Bible may have laid it down as Christian dogma, but Galileo is going to look at the stars. What he sees, never before observed, is the four moons of Jupiter rotating around the planet. And what he understands is even more thrilling. If the moons of Jupiter move, why not the earth too, as Copernicus stated. The earth’s revolution around the sun is science’s revolution against the unscientific doctrine of religious astronomy. At the Young Vic, as Galileo looks at the stars the audience also see the stars, magnificently, on the ceiling, sparkles on blue. Then, as Galileo’s understanding expands, the ceiling explodes into a riot of colour that recalls Michelangelo’s ceiling on the Sistine Chapel. Science as glorious as religion?
Johan Persson
Theatre Galileo—speaking truth to power
Life of Galileo A play by Bertolt Brecht, translation by John Willett, directed by Joe Wright. Young Vic, London, UK, until July 1, 2017 https://www.youngvic.org/ whats-on/life-of-galileo
2277
Further reading Brecht B. Brecht collected plays: 5 Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and her children. Willett J, Manheim R, eds. Willett J, trans. London: Bloomsbury, 2015 Gopnik A. Moon man: what Galileo saw. The New Yorker, Feb 11 and Feb 18, 2013 Wootton D. Galileo watcher of the skies. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013
2278
And if the power structure wants to deny evidence? If they say: global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, what then? Show them the evidence, show them the melting of Antarctic ice, show them global temperatures. But there is a telling moment when Galileo is demonstrating to a mathematician and a philosopher at the Medici Court in Florence why the Copernican schema does a better job of explaining the movement of the planets than does accepted dogma and invites his “highness” the mathematician to look through the telescope. The mathematician responds: “If your tube shows something which cannot be there, it cannot be an entirely reliable tube…Sooner or later Mr Galilei will have to reconcile himself to the facts”. And the philosopher adds: “My distinguished colleague and I are supported by none less than the divine Aristotle himself.” Were it not for a slight problem of anachronism, the philosopher could have been invoking Chico Marx in Duck Soup: “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” The first theme, then, is Galileo’s scientific revolution in the way science is done: observation, experiment, reason, argument replacing an appeal to authority. Which brings us to the second theme: power. The question is, who controls the agenda? Life of Galileo shows science, in the person of Galileo, in a titanic struggle with the power of the church. A second great power, against which science rails, is free-market economics. John Maynard Keynes hailed The End of Laissez-Faire in a 1926 essay. He said that the evidence refuted its ideological positions. But it has had another life in the guise of neoliberalism that dominates the agenda in the UK, USA, and global financial institutions. Evidence to the contrary, even from Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, is dismissed by neoliberal ideologues. But signs of scientific evidence still break through, such as when IMF economists wrote a paper Neoliberalism: Oversold? last year.
Photo by Johan Persson
Perspectives
Brendan Cowell as Galileo (left) and Billy Howle as Andrea (right) in the Young Vic’s Life of Galileo
A third great source of power that damaged scientific enquiry was Communism. Think, for example, the pride of place Lamarck’s wrong theories had, because they fit with Stalin’s orthodoxy. The Soviet Union was not a good place to pursue science. Across the ideological divide, in Nazi Germany, theories of race prevailed, not because they were true but because they fitted with political prejudice. Free scientific enquiry was impossible, particularly if done by Jewish scientists. An issue for science, today, and for truth more generally, is that the powerful opposition is more difficult to locate. The spectacle of some of the out-and-out lies and bullshit in the recent US election is alarming. What many see as a war by Donald Trump’s administration on evidence-based thinking seems to pose an existential threat to science. But who exactly holds the power? The internet? Right-wing billionaires? Populist politicians? In Brecht’s play, Galileo is committed to the democracy of scientific knowledge. He writes in the vernacular Italian of pasta makers, not in the Latin of court scholars. He is asked: if it’s just a lot of stars, then where’s God? Galileo responds: “I believe in Humanity, which means to say I believe in human reason…No one who isn’t dead can fail to be convinced by proof.” Galileo, arguing against a “populist” who says
people can be swayed by prejudice, says: look at the evidence, people do respond to facts. The crowning point of the drama is that Galileo is hauled before the Italian Inquisition and, faced with the threat of torture, recants and says that the earth is at the centre of the Universe. His beloved former student Andrea, in a moving performance by Billy Howle, is devastated. Andrea says bitterly: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo’s response: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” In the end, his students realise two important things. First, Galileo has still been doing science. For him the recantation was to avoid torture not to change his views, and he has written another great book during his house arrest, Two New Sciences. Second, “no force will help them to make what has been seen unseen”. The truth will out. The Italian Inquisition may have been the short-term winner in forcing Galileo’s supposed recantation, but we think of them in a poor light if they needed implements of torture to win the argument. Galileo is the clear long-term winner. We remember him for what he discovered, for how he discovered it, and for speaking truth to power.
Michael Marmot [email protected] @Michael.Marmot
www.thelancet.com Vol 389 June 10, 2017
Photo by Leon Puplett, projections by 59 Productions
Galileo Galilei was a great catch. When, in 1612, he joined the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy, it was but 9 years old. The academy had been started by four young men excited by the idea that science was the way to understand the world. Galileo founded modern science in Italy and was famous for it. He looked at the stars and made observations, he did experiments, he reasoned, he argued. And, importantly, he questioned received wisdom. He fought it, shredded it, mercilessly showed its flaws. Galileo may have been the most famous member of the fledgling academy—named Lincei because the founders wanted to see into the secrets of nature with a perception as acute as that of the lynx. But he was probably also the cause of the academy’s first demise in 1630; in the 19th century it resurfaced to stay, and is a highlight of a visit to Rome. Galileo’s science led him to embrace Copernicanism, the earth moves round the sun, over the Aristotelian view that the earth sits immobile at the centre of the Universe and the sun revolves around it. The church, speaking of heaven and earth, had the earth at the centre. The Accademia dei Lincei sided with Galileo. The clash between science and the religious establishment was
www.thelancet.com Vol 389 June 10, 2017
fatal for the academy; catastrophic but not quite fatal for Galileo. Science versus the establishment. Speaking truth to power. Galileo’s is a story for our times. And the heroic struggle of the man of science against the power of the Italian Inquisition is of tragic proportion. Galileo found his modern Shakespeare in Bertolt Brecht, whose English language version of Life of Galileo was first performed in the USA in 1947. A busy year for Brecht, he also appeared before the US House Un-American Activities Committee, and left for Europe the next day spending the remainder of his life based in Communist East Germany.
“Science versus the establishment. Speaking truth to power. Galileo’s is a story for our times.“ Life of Galileo is now being staged at London’s Young Vic in a wonderful, energetic production directed by Joe Wright. This impressive staging features planetarium, original music by Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers, puppets, and a magnetic performance by its star, Brendan Cowell as Galileo, whose Australian accent helps to portray him as the outsider. Brecht was a Marxist and it is possible
that he was using Galileo’s struggles as a metaphor for struggles of the people against an ideological state. Setting that aside, there are at least three themes that stand out as relevant to the tussle between truth and power: the nature of scientific endeavour, power, and the scientist as hero as distinct from the science itself. Galileo’s credo as scientist is articulated in the play: “What is written in the old books is no longer good enough. For where faith has been enthroned for a thousand years doubt now sits”, and “the universe has lost its centre overnight, and woken up to find it has countless centres”. In other words, not only does science question dogma but it is also essentially democratising. “The earth is rolling cheerfully around the sun, and the fishwives, merchants, princes, cardinals, and even the Pope are rolling with it.” Science is international, even in the 16th and 17th centuries. Galileo hears of a Dutch invention that magnifies, and constructs his own telescope. Aristotle may have reasoned his way to an earth-centric universe; and a literal reading of heaven and earth in the Bible may have laid it down as Christian dogma, but Galileo is going to look at the stars. What he sees, never before observed, is the four moons of Jupiter rotating around the planet. And what he understands is even more thrilling. If the moons of Jupiter move, why not the earth too, as Copernicus stated. The earth’s revolution around the sun is science’s revolution against the unscientific doctrine of religious astronomy. At the Young Vic, as Galileo looks at the stars the audience also see the stars, magnificently, on the ceiling, sparkles on blue. Then, as Galileo’s understanding expands, the ceiling explodes into a riot of colour that recalls Michelangelo’s ceiling on the Sistine Chapel. Science as glorious as religion?
Johan Persson
Theatre Galileo—speaking truth to power
Life of Galileo A play by Bertolt Brecht, translation by John Willett, directed by Joe Wright. Young Vic, London, UK, until July 1, 2017 https://www.youngvic.org/ whats-on/life-of-galileo
2277
Further reading Brecht B. Brecht collected plays: 5 Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and her children. Willett J, Manheim R, eds. Willett J, trans. London: Bloomsbury, 2015 Gopnik A. Moon man: what Galileo saw. The New Yorker, Feb 11 and Feb 18, 2013 Wootton D. Galileo watcher of the skies. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013
2278
And if the power structure wants to deny evidence? If they say: global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, what then? Show them the evidence, show them the melting of Antarctic ice, show them global temperatures. But there is a telling moment when Galileo is demonstrating to a mathematician and a philosopher at the Medici Court in Florence why the Copernican schema does a better job of explaining the movement of the planets than does accepted dogma and invites his “highness” the mathematician to look through the telescope. The mathematician responds: “If your tube shows something which cannot be there, it cannot be an entirely reliable tube…Sooner or later Mr Galilei will have to reconcile himself to the facts”. And the philosopher adds: “My distinguished colleague and I are supported by none less than the divine Aristotle himself.” Were it not for a slight problem of anachronism, the philosopher could have been invoking Chico Marx in Duck Soup: “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” The first theme, then, is Galileo’s scientific revolution in the way science is done: observation, experiment, reason, argument replacing an appeal to authority. Which brings us to the second theme: power. The question is, who controls the agenda? Life of Galileo shows science, in the person of Galileo, in a titanic struggle with the power of the church. A second great power, against which science rails, is free-market economics. John Maynard Keynes hailed The End of Laissez-Faire in a 1926 essay. He said that the evidence refuted its ideological positions. But it has had another life in the guise of neoliberalism that dominates the agenda in the UK, USA, and global financial institutions. Evidence to the contrary, even from Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, is dismissed by neoliberal ideologues. But signs of scientific evidence still break through, such as when IMF economists wrote a paper Neoliberalism: Oversold? last year.
Photo by Johan Persson
Perspectives
Brendan Cowell as Galileo (left) and Billy Howle as Andrea (right) in the Young Vic’s Life of Galileo
A third great source of power that damaged scientific enquiry was Communism. Think, for example, the pride of place Lamarck’s wrong theories had, because they fit with Stalin’s orthodoxy. The Soviet Union was not a good place to pursue science. Across the ideological divide, in Nazi Germany, theories of race prevailed, not because they were true but because they fitted with political prejudice. Free scientific enquiry was impossible, particularly if done by Jewish scientists. An issue for science, today, and for truth more generally, is that the powerful opposition is more difficult to locate. The spectacle of some of the out-and-out lies and bullshit in the recent US election is alarming. What many see as a war by Donald Trump’s administration on evidence-based thinking seems to pose an existential threat to science. But who exactly holds the power? The internet? Right-wing billionaires? Populist politicians? In Brecht’s play, Galileo is committed to the democracy of scientific knowledge. He writes in the vernacular Italian of pasta makers, not in the Latin of court scholars. He is asked: if it’s just a lot of stars, then where’s God? Galileo responds: “I believe in Humanity, which means to say I believe in human reason…No one who isn’t dead can fail to be convinced by proof.” Galileo, arguing against a “populist” who says
people can be swayed by prejudice, says: look at the evidence, people do respond to facts. The crowning point of the drama is that Galileo is hauled before the Italian Inquisition and, faced with the threat of torture, recants and says that the earth is at the centre of the Universe. His beloved former student Andrea, in a moving performance by Billy Howle, is devastated. Andrea says bitterly: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo’s response: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” In the end, his students realise two important things. First, Galileo has still been doing science. For him the recantation was to avoid torture not to change his views, and he has written another great book during his house arrest, Two New Sciences. Second, “no force will help them to make what has been seen unseen”. The truth will out. The Italian Inquisition may have been the short-term winner in forcing Galileo’s supposed recantation, but we think of them in a poor light if they needed implements of torture to win the argument. Galileo is the clear long-term winner. We remember him for what he discovered, for how he discovered it, and for speaking truth to power.
Michael Marmot [email protected] @Michael.Marmot
www.thelancet.com Vol 389 June 10, 2017