According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is. If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire. Paul-1Cor. 3:10-15
There was a man in my life-whether all that I say about him is real or fictional is for God to determine. I didn't like this man until he died. He was the man that married my mother and I did not like him. He was an auto mechanic; a peculiar sort of man because he worked all of the time. My mother said that he was always doing things for others and never charging for his time. I didn't like him because we were poor. He worked all day at the auto shop. On the weekends and most evenings he worked in our two-car garage in the back of the house. I didn't like him because sometimes he made me wash the greasy auto parts and hold the lamp for him so he could see the engine of the car he was working on. He told me all about combustion engines, but I didn't want to listen.
We had an old LaSalle car that he loved. I think it had twelve cylinders, I'm not sure. He could get that old car to run so smooth we couldn't hear it when we were inside it, and we couldn't even feel it move when it was running. About once a month he worked on the LaSalle. The majority of the time he made my brother and me help.
I thought him strange because before he did anything to the car he would pull his violin out from under the bed in my mother's room and make a few sounds like he was tuning it. He never played the violin, he just tuned it. For some reason though, I knew he could play it if he had to-he talked a lot about classical music. Once in a while after he would painstakingly perfect the sound of the violin, I would hear part of a melody, but not much, not for long. However, when he was finished tuning, he could make the violin sound like a bird. To this day when working on the computer I like to have a guitar handy, to tune before I start; it kinda makes things go better. Anyway, after he finished tuning the violin we would go out into the garage and tear into the big green LaSalle.
One evening after we got it running smooth, my step-father asked me to drive the car out of the garage. I couldn't figure it out. I was the only one helping, I don't know where my brother was. I had never driven before-my brother had, but I hadn't. He told me how to do it though, and I backed the car out of the garage while he watched. I did a good job. When I finished he came and sat on the passenger side, leaving me in the driver's seat, and closed the car door. I couldn't believe it-I felt aces! We listened. We couldn't hear anything and we couldn't feel the car move. He leaned against the dash and looked out the windshield straining his neck a little because the garage was close in front of us and the glass was almost straight up and down and said, "Look up, into the sky, try not to move-look hard. When the car is running and it feels as still and sounds as quiet as the universe, it's in tune, just like everything up there is. That's the way you can tell if you've done a good job." Maybe I liked him.
My stepfather had glaucoma. He developed leukemia and died when I was young. For the short time I knew him, bits and pieces of his conversation made me believe that he worked on some bomb in Arizona or Nevada or somewhere. After he died, I made up stories about him to myself until I couldn't tell what was true and what was not. I knew he was a genius though, and I guessed that because of his eyes he couldn't do the work he used to do. He knew so much stuff. He talked about the bomb and how it was made. He wished we would not have done what we did in Japan. Sometimes he got drunk when he talked about it. He wanted to be a good man, I didn't know what his problem was.
When I got older and I wanted to be alone I would go somewhere and lie on a hillside or in the middle of a meadow and look up at the night sky and think of my stepfather. He introduced me to the wonder of the universe. Because of what he told me, I devised many plans on how the night sky works. He told me that everything up there fit together, all of it was connected-and the stars related to each other like friends. He told me that God made the lot of it. He said if I wanted to, I could know everything there is to know about the heavens. I would lie there and think for quite a while. The only thing I truly knew though, concerning my stepfather, is that I didn't get to tell him I liked him before he died. He never knew it.
It is difficult for me to change my way when I don't want to, especially when I feel comfortable where I am. Before I began studying the thoughts of others, I devised many methods for the universe to work, but each one seemed to fall apart at one end or the other. I would spend months and sometimes more than a year concocting a scheme that I was sure would work; and when it wouldn't, I felt as though I lost my dog or my arm was being cut off. Imagine this: for over three centuries, hundreds, maybe thousands of people have devoted their lives developing the complexities of the Newtonian dynamic; just to have it replaced by another paradigm. Yes, they had been looking for a better way, but still, what would it do to their mind-set? With all that, I was not going to stop looking for the universal secret to life-I was afraid of death. I saw my stepfather in the hospital and I swore to myself that I would do everything I could to overcome. I was going to live forever. I decided to leave my family. I figured that if they were not important to me, I wouldn't have to watch them fail and wither away. If I didn't get close to anyone I would never have to go to another funeral.
For the years prior to my knowing God I traveled all over the country, studying in the great libraries, collecting information. Most of the time I would go to a university in a certain city, find out what was required in a particular curriculum and study the texts. Sometimes I would take classes to help myself keep on track. I worked as little as possible for a living. I kept my nose in the books. I read the classics, theory of education, philosophy, psychology, eastern thought, theatre, optics, astronomy and physics, to the limit of my understanding. I chose those fields because at the time I understood their theoretical subject matter to be what I needed to get where I wanted to go. I leaned more toward physics and astronomy; I felt these two systems of information could produce the foundation for man to gain access to forever.
Early Astronomy
While looking into the antiquities of astronomy and physics, I learned that astronomy, born out of astrology, was the first physical science-even before medicine. From the information I was able to glean, I found that the process of acquiring knowledge of the celestial spheres has directly and in a special way governed our activities and thoughts here on earth-and in particular the Western World.
From sketchy records, going back to 2000 B.C., we find concepts of the universe. Archaeological investigations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and as far east as the valleys of China and India have yielded the inhabitants' knowledge of celestial motions. The awareness of moving objects in the sky without doubt exercised an influence on these ancient people.
"The heavens reveal ideas; the holyman takes them as his model"
Book of Changes
The Chinese, often considered the oldest civilization, had a calendar that reflected their observed knowledge of celestial changes. This knowledge, to a great extent, governed their own activity. Their temples, for example, always faced the rising sun. Also, they noticed that each day the sun would shift its position according to the stars. The lowest arc of the sun's travel across the sky would mark what we now know as the winter solstice. Some assert their division of the circle into 365.25 equal parts to be proof of the accuracy of their observations. All this, coupled with irregular heavenly activities, such as the appearance of comets, brought forth some terrifying superstitions that abounded in this ancient culture. For example, because of their astrological bent, the underlying disharmony of a comet was thought to indicate failure by the governing rulers. All in all, in the Chinese culture, more than 2000 years before Christ, there was a high level of understanding of the events taking place in their celestial treasury.
Probably the best astronomers of antiquity were the Babylonians. Like the Chinese they were stargazers. They named many of the constellations, such as, Orion, the Pleiades, Aldebaran, and Sirius. It is believed that they were, for the most part, responsible for the pseudoscience of astrology. After a time, the astronomical movement of the celestial bodies became a religious dogma to the Babylonians. Unlike the Chinese, whose stars became gods, the Babylonian gods became stars. The Babylonians placed their native divinities into the heavens; and all the mythic traits of these divinities were transferred to the stars. It was the first and only time that any religion made their divine beings visible and calculable. That is, the divine worship of the Babylonians was made equivalent to astronomy. Their religious message was revealed through picture writing in the sky.
The task of Greek astronomy was to eliminate the apparent planetary irregularities perceived even by the Babylonians. One of the most striking of these irregular events was the motion of Mars. Month by month for half of the year the distance Mars would travel grew longer; thereafter, the length of the planet's journey would diminish. The Greeks thought it to be an illusion; surely the cosmos is perfect in its circular motion and its unchanging velocity.
Once the center of the orbit of Mars was no longer the center of the earth, the solution to the problem of cosmological irregularities could be explained. Apollonius of Perga, a mathematician of report, who had supplemented Euclidean geometry with the laws of curves such as the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola, constructed a geometry that would provide a mathematical rationale to satisfy the Greek appetency for harmony. Even though the planets might circle around an assumed empty point, the earth still remained the center of the universe, and the pride of the Hellenistic philosophers was justified.
This achievement lasted for one hundred years. Then, the digging around by one called Hipparchus showed that the irregularities of Mars were greater than had been assumed-he knew the ingenious construction of Apollonius had failed. Hipparchus was so shaken because he had destroyed a triumphant cosmology, he could not bring himself to solve the mysteries of the planetary orbits.
Not to worry though, an Egyptian, Claudius Ptolemaeus, came to the rescue of Grecian astronomy and restored the harmonization of the cosmos Hipparchus had so reticently and sorrowfully demolished. Ptolemy had such superior qualities as a theoretician that his "Great System" (Megale Syntaxis tes Astronomias, known from the Arabic translation as the Almagest) lived for approximately fifteen hundred years. Yes, the system was complicated, but by moving the center of Apollonius' imaginary circle twice the distance from Earth and overlaying his planetary circle upon that of Apollonius', Ptolemy was able to calculate with some accuracy the future positions of Mars. Because of capitulation, Ptolemy's "epicycles" seemed to be a barnacle on his sinking ship of astronomical thought. Nevertheless, it was the earth centered system of the universe propounded by Ptolemy that triumphed over Apollonius' theory that the planets circled around an assumed point in a void.
Algebra, and Euclid's geometry, describing space as three-dimensional, were tools that aided the Greeks in their observational capabilities, but, they did not have a scientific method of investigation. They treated experimentation with contempt and aloofness. They did recognize that things were going on in nature that they could not understand; however, any hypotheses that was philosophically pleasing and logical to them was "proven," even when contradicted by observation.
After the decline of the ancient Greek civilization, any sort of scientific investigation, for the most part, came to a halt. As the Roman empire strutted to power, a new progress of expansion, commerce, politics, and warfare was shared by those who would accept the good life that the Greeks sought to achieve. The Romans abandoned all thought of nature and the universe.
The inability of astronomers to build upon or supplant the Great System of Ptolemaeus, along with the ever increasing stronghold of astrology in the Christian community, were enormous factors in the suppression of astronomical thought between the rise of the Roman Empire and (what we know today as) the era of the classical physicists.
The notation of the activities of the heavenly spheres all but gave way to astrological writings in the sky. For a short time, the need by the Christians to place the Gospel in the stars took precedence over any sort of realistic approach to heavenly observation. There was what seemed to be a reversion to the Babylonian tradition of placing the divinities into the stars. Finally, the fathers of the Church began to fight this tendency. Tertullian, for example, sharply admonished the Church with these words: "The magical relationships in the heavens existed only up to the appearance of Christ. Through Christ man was raised from servant of the stars to master of the stars."
Was astrology a form of idolatry? The Church fathers believed it to be so. Stargazing would be permitted for noting the signs of weather and such (Augustine, for one, felt that the stars had an influence over nature), but fortune-telling astrology was not to be permitted. The Church took an official stance on this matter. Even so, astrology won a powerful place in Christianity.
As the darkness of the Middle Ages began to settle on the Western World, there was a hint of realism that kindled a new light. By this time, the Church had banned astronomy along with astrology. There was a fear in the Church that the study of the movements of the sun, moon, and planets would turn men's minds to pagan idol worship. Be that as it may, many astronomical and scientific achievements, including those of Ptolemy, were translated from the Arabic and brought to Christendom. The era that would all but end the regressive tendencies of astrology, and bring astronomy into a commonplace, was at hand.
Some call Johann Muller of Konigsberg (about 1450) the first "true" modern scientist. His role in the revival of Renaissance astronomy was important. At the University of Vienna he completed and published Georg von Peurbach's translation of the Almagest, Theoricae novae planetarum (New Theories of the Planets), and wrote his own work on trigonometry. He understood the sky to be curved, and applied Arabic trigonometry to it. He even suggested to the Pope, that out of fifty of the Church's calculated Easter dates, thirty were incorrect. Toward the latter part of the Middle Ages astronomers in the West were making sensible, impartial, and sober observations of the heavens.
Classical Astronomy
Jastrow, an "...agnostic in religious matters," in his work "God and the Astronomer," speaks about what he thinks are "...some strange developments going on in astronomy-partly because of their religious implications and partly because of the peculiar reactions of my colleagues." The Universe had, in some sense, a beginning: there was a prime mover-or a creative agent-that the scientists did not want to come to terms with. The Steady State cosmology (which had no beginning) had been superseded by the Big Bang theory.
The general scientific picture of the universe was now one that suggested an enormous explosion; and we are witnessing the aftermath. The universe is expanding before our eyes. And, if we were to look back (in our mind's eye) to the moment of this beginning we would see "The dazzling brilliance of the radiation ... ." Again, the density of the hot Universe must have had no description. "The picture suggests the explosion of a cosmic hydrogen bomb." This cosmic bomb would mark the birth of the Universe.
The Big Bang seemed to support the biblical view of the origin of the world. The theologians, in general, were delighted with the proof that the Universe had a beginning. The astronomers, though they were supposed to have an objective mind about things, had become irritated. Their reaction was much the same as the theologians displeasure with the Steady State theory. The new evidence was in conflict with the scientists' beliefs. There is a faint glow of radiation around the earth, and it is coming from every direction in the heavens. It was found by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of the Bell Laboratories, and was the almost certain evidence that made the Big Bang theory a reality. It would be impossible to paper over this one.
The measurements showed that the earth could not be the origin of this radiation-the entire universe, the moon, the sun, and any particular object in the sky seemed to be the source. Penzias and Wilson had stumbled upon one of the mysteries of the Cosmos. Some scientists, who we now know were ahead of their time, such as Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, had asserted that the Universe resembled a white-hot fireball in its very first moments. The Penzias-Wilson radiation-and this is the clincher-was from that fireball. As the Universe expanded and cooled, the fireball would have become less brilliant, but the radiation would not have disappeared. Around the earth is a diffuse glow of this ancient fireball radiation-the pattern of wavelengths expected from the light and heat of a prime explosion are the same as those found by Penzias and Wilson. As a result, the Big Bang theory has no competitors. Try as they would, the supporters of the Steady State theory were unable to find any alternative explanation.
This kind of observation found its inception in the labors of the classical physicists who were in the throes of the modern scientific endeavor-the astrologers continued in their prognostications.
Some of the more eminent astrologers, such as Nostradamus of Paris, who foresaw the demise of King Henry II in a duel, made it difficult for astronomy to come to the fore. Everyone knew that a king could or would not engage in a duel; however in a court tournament, the splinter of a lance flew at the king and the projectile struck him dead.
Although Tycho Brahe was a passionate lover of astrology, he was an astute observer of the heavens. He took pride in his "Tychonic Cosmology" thinking that he had surpassed the theoretic of Copernicus. Nevertheless, he was truly a man of astronomical distinction. He was destined to surpass the Greeks. His refraction table corrected the basic error of the Greeks that resulted from rays of light being bent as they entered the earth's atmosphere. He was possibly the first to bring the precision we need for astronomical insight. He labored diligently to restore the dignity of man that Copernicus had demolished by putting the sun in the center of the universe. He harbored a deep feeling that God made man the benefactor and central figure of the cosmos. The earth had to be the focal point of God's attention. His solution to the problem was that the sun revolved around the earth annually and the planets revolved around the sun.
Johannes Kepler, Brahe's student and assistant, may have been the last of the astrologer-astronomers. With Kepler, it seems, was a turning toward the realism of astronomy. Although Tycho Brahe was a successful astrologer who wrote horoscopes for the king's court, was made responsible for the predictions of good and bad "political weather," and had written volumes concerning the "new star" that appeared in the northern sky of 1572, Kepler decided that keeping statistics would be the best form of objectivity. He himself made a few solid predictions concerning the weather, but his almanac failed miserably. He gave up forecasting.
Brahe believed anything that appeared in the heavens after the creation must be transitory. His new star lasted eighteen months. (We would know the star today as a nova.) Brahe thought it a sign that there would be a new light in religion, in Finland, between 1593 and 1632. His prediction was thought to be fulfilled in one Gustavus Adolphus II, king of Sweden (Finland was under the political power of Sweden at that time) and who was born 1594 and died in 1632.
Kepler did have a keen regard for personal horoscopes, but he did not want to engage in the foretelling of personal fate. It is known that when a certain general wanted to know how long to trust in the good fortune the military was bringing him, the reply from Kepler was, "Whosoever would have the answers to such questions from the stars alone, without reckoning with the character and the free will of man, has not yet rightly learned to trim the lamp of reason which God has lighted in him. If you would be hoodwinked to your face, turn to the young astrologers; there are many who have the faith and the brazenness to indulge in such games. True astrology is a holy testimony to God's glorious works, and I for my part, do not wish to dishonor it."
Both Tycho Brahe, and Kepler with his waning astrological bent, believed that an understanding of the unity of the universe would give man a better ability to order his own fate. Tycho Brahe said, in a lecture at the University of Copenhagen in 1574, "To deny the forces and influence of the stars is to undervalue firstly the divine wisdom and providence and moreover to contradict evident experience. For what could be thought more unjust and foolish about God than that He should have made this large and admirable scenery of the skies and so many brilliant stars to no use or purpose-whereas no man makes even his least work without a certain aim." Tycho Brahe was unable to formulate an accurate picture of the universe, but he did something more than others of his leaning; he kept records that were true to his observations regardless of the conclusions drawn.
Johannes Kepler was given the advantage of being the successor to Tycho Brahe. His adoption of the heliocentric principle given by Copernicus and his driving curiosity made Kepler a mathematician indeed. He was enthralled with the beauteous symmetry of the universal system. He thought there must be a simplicity-a synthesis-that would describe in geometrical relationships the motions of the celestial spheres. But Mars was his greatest difficulty; the planet would not fit into the Copernican theory.
Copernicus, in a book published in 1543, "De Revolutionibus" had offered an alternative to Ptolemy's "Almagest." Copernicus analyzed a vast amount of data including that of Ptolemy. And, as he reconsidered the planetary motions, and their relationship with the sun, his assertion was that the sun should be the central point of the system rather than the earth. He removed the five planetary epicycles of Ptolemy and replaced them with a great number of small epicycles in order to make accurate planetary predictions. Although he was steeped in mediaeval tradition; such as, the uniform circular motion of the planets, and the stars being surrounded by the planets on a crystal sphere, many of his ideas were historically significant. He believed that the earth's rotation (an exemplary thought to be sure) produced the daily motion of the stars. He thought the earth was just another planet revolving around the Sun.
Kepler couldn't be satisfied with a mystical interpretation of what he observed. He instead looked for a relationship that was causal. With all the data he possessed, he set out to test the Copernician theory of the heliocentric solar system. There was always error in circles and epicycles, but Kepler found that the paths of the planets could be described by an elliptical movement. He recognized that the orbit of Mars could be represented as an ellipse with the sun at one focal point and an unoccupied point in space at the other. His first law of planetary motion was written as such: "Each planet moves around the sun in an orbit whose shape is that of an ellipse, with the sun at one focal point." His second law of planetary motion, which explained his observance of Mars speeding up when approaching the sun and slowing while moving away from the sun, was this: "A straight line joining the planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas in space in equal intervals of time." His third law: "The square of the period of any planet is proportional to the cube of its semimajor axis," is a relationship recognized by Kepler that each and every planet has in the length of time required to revolve around the sun (the period of a planet) and its average distance (the semimajor axis of its orbit) from the sun.
The Copernican revolution lasted two hundred years; his work caused a frenzy in the Church. Many men, Galileo being one of them, were threatened with death or were burned at the stake in order to keep their "heretical beliefs" silenced. It was the Galilean instrument (the telescope) that brought proof that would indicate a heliocentric solar system. The truth will out; "De Revolutionibus" planted a seed that would bring a new life into the scientific community. Moreover, Kepler played a demonstrative role in the spreading of the "new life" Copernicus had so arduously labored to give.
Exactly who it was that invented the telescope is not clear. It may have been the Dutch spectacle maker Hans Lippershey, who combined lenses to produce an enlarged image of a distant object. Credit for the "astronomical" telescope is given to Galileo Galilei. It is thought that Galileo heard about the work of Hans Lappershey. He set out to produce a telescope without knowing its ramifications.
By whatever means the telescope came into being, the results of its work became the vanguard of astronomical thought in the seventeenth century. The significance of the Galilean telescope was that it proved there to be centers of revolution other than the earth itself, and revealed stars that could not be seen with the naked eye. The discovery of the moons of Jupiter helped to strengthen the Copernican theory that the earth was not the center of the universe. Galileo was able to observe Venus through all its phases. Under the Ptolemaic system Venus couldn't move to the opposite side of the sun from the earth. The earth could never see its fully illuminated face. The truth is, the Ptolemaic system required Venus to appear in a "new" phase or as a crescent. This was absolute proof that the system of Ptolemais had met its demise and the heliocentric theory of Copernicus would live.
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
Herbert Spencer
Galileo had opened an era of experimentation and invention that would be the mainstay of the scientific endeavor. He traveled to Rome with his newfound information. The Church leadership pronounced his teachings heretical and required that no one should expound upon them as representing reality. He was forced by the Inquisition to abjure his position that the earth was not the center of the solar system. When he asked some of his contemporaries to look through his telescope at the heavens, and in particular the moons of Jupiter; tradition says their response was, "I see nothing." Admitting what they had seen would have been a refutation of their dogmatic understandings. Sir Isaac Newton must have been talking about Galileo and those of his mien when he said, "If I have been able to see farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton, himself a giant in the world of classical physicists, made lasting contributions in his work "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" ('Principia'). He invented calculus, demonstrated that white light could be separated into its various colors by refraction, and explained the astrodynamics of gravitation. In his explanation of the earth's spherical shape, Copernicus suggested there was mutual attraction of objects. The same thing was implied by Kepler (and other physicists) when mentioning the possibility of an inverse square attraction between objects. None of them, however, provided proof of this matter.
Newton consolidated the views of his time into a general theory of motion, which, when applied to the solar system, satisfied the requirements of astronomy. His law of motion can be explained in this manner: were you to place an object (such as a clothes hanger) on a string and tie the string between the legs of a stool, then move the hanger along the string, the hanger would be moving in a straight line in relation to the stool. Now, pick up the stool and move the hanger while walking with the stool; the hanger's fixed frame of reference has been changed. The hanger now has a different motion relative to its rigid reference frame-which could be the deck, the walls, or even the house-boat you are on. This reference frame is called a "base," oftentimes referred to as a "Galilean base." Ultimately this base is attached to the center of mass of the solar system. It is without rotation relative to the fixed stars. Newton referred to any movement relative to a Galilean base as "absolute motion."
Newton was sure that if there was truly an attractive force in the heavens it could be mathematically defined. The distance of the moon from the earth, he thought, was sixty times the earth's radius. It would follow then that the attractive force of the earth on the moon would be one-sixtieth its strength-given the distance. However, Kepler's third law stated that with any two planets the ratio of the cubes of their semimajor axes is equal to the ratio of the squares of their periods. Because of Kepler's third law, Newton was able to deduce that the attraction of the earth on the moon would diminish inversely as the square of the distance, which meant the attraction ratio of the earth on the moon would be as little as one-three thousand six hundredth.
The concept of mutual attraction between objects came to the fore in the mind of Newton. He must have been thinking of the apple falling to the earth and that the same force would probably be tugging at the moon. Assuming that the natural motion of an object would be a straight line, and that a circular motion would be caused by the influence of a mutual attractive force, Newton was able to generalize Galileo's thoughts on inertia. Newton's first law stated: "Every body preserves in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right (straight) line, unless it is compelled to change that state by force impressed thereon." His genius was in his ability to synthesize.
An object (such as an apple) would fall with an acceleration rate of thirty-two feet per second every second. The first second therefore, would yield a distance of sixteen feet. When Newton divided three thousand six hundred into the sixteen feet the moon would be falling in its first second, he came up with fifty-three thousandths of an inch and the classical dynamic in the guise of the law of gravitation was born.
Newton had proven that there was a mutual attraction between celestial bodies. His equation for this force would be thus: Gravitation equals the product of the masses divided by the square of the distance.
Newton's dynamic "Law of Universal Gravitation" proved its validity for all movement in the sky. It can calculate the movement of meteors, binary stars, and comets. It can explain the weight of stars, deviations in the orbits of the planets resulting from the influence of other planets and moons, and it can predict the position, mass, and orbit of unknown planets. Moreover, every tiny particle of mass has graviton (hypothetical particle-a postulated energy exchange to make gravitational interaction consistent with quantum theory) and Newton's formula is applicable to it.
Together, Galileo's "Dialogues" and Newton's "Principia" brought forth a new view of the world. This "World-Machine" displaced the spheres of Aristotle with a mathematical dynamic that would require a capitulation by the scientific and theological communities.
Aristotle would explain that objects fall because each thing seeks its own natural resting-place. Heavy objects would fall downward (the bigger the more rapidly) and light things such as fire had a tendency to find their rest in an upwardly direction. The followers of Aristotle were looking for reason-the purpose (teleology) of God. They had a deductive process of thinking. Starting from a general principle, they would reason to the particulars. These particulars were not always in accordance with observation. Galileo and Newton, on the other hand, set aside all deductive reason and engaged in the process of induction, starting from a set of particular observations to find a general dynamic.
The medieval picture of the universe, a mergence of Aristotelian cosmology and Christian theology, which was based on the laws of morality rather than the laws of mechanics, found its own Aristotelian place of rest. Ian G. Barbour says, "At times man's spiritual destiny seemed to so outweigh temporal relationships that the world was treated as a great allegory whose essential secret was its religious meaning, not its operation or its causes."
A Little Astronomy
