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Speaker 1: Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,

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Speaker 1: welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Land, and I'm

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Speaker 1: Joe McCormick, and I thought we should start today with

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Speaker 1: a question about science, one that is maybe more vexing

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Speaker 1: the more you think about it. So an often unexamined

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Speaker 1: assumption that undergird's scientific investigation all of science is this

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Speaker 1: idea that there are laws of nature, right, and that

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Speaker 1: those laws are are physically fundamental, and they apply everywhere

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Speaker 1: and they are never violated. Right. Yeah, it would be um,

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Speaker 1: it would be catastrophic if science changed from say country

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Speaker 1: to country or county to county. Right, you go across

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Speaker 1: the state line and you fall upright. Yeah. So water

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Speaker 1: boils at a hundred degrees celsius or two twelve fahrenheit

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Speaker 1: in my kitchen, it should also boil at the same

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Speaker 1: temperature in my bedroom, or in the kitchen of the

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Speaker 1: white castle down the street, or a hundred miles away

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Speaker 1: in a different town. Right now. You might interrupt there

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Speaker 1: and say, oh, but actually water sometimes does boil at

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Speaker 1: a different temperature, right, Like at high elevations, uh, where

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Speaker 1: atmospheric pressure is lower, it's easier for water to boil

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Speaker 1: because there's less pressure pressing down on the water, so

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Speaker 1: it actually does boil at a lower temperature, like at

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Speaker 1: three thousand meters, water boils at more like nine d

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Speaker 1: degrees celsius. And in fact, Robert, I don't know if

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Speaker 1: you've ever read these, there are great stories that take

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Speaker 1: this to the extreme. Did you know about the unbearable

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Speaker 1: sadness of boiling potatoes on Mount Everest? So there are

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Speaker 1: these stories about mountaineers trying to cook on Mount Everest

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Speaker 1: and they would boil potatoes in a pot of water

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Speaker 1: to eat them, but they boil them and they boil

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Speaker 1: them and boil them for hours and hours, and after

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Speaker 1: hours of cooking, the potatoes were still basically raw. And

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Speaker 1: the problem is on Mount Everest that you're up so

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Speaker 1: high that the boiling point is so low. The boiling

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Speaker 1: water in the pot is not hot enough to cook potatoes.

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Speaker 1: It's like sort of like trying to cook them in

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Speaker 1: hot tap water even though it's boiling. It's a In fact,

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Speaker 1: I would say it's actually like an inverse pressure cooker, right,

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Speaker 1: you know, pressure cooker allows your food to get hotter

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Speaker 1: because of the increased pressure going up on Mount Everest.

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Speaker 1: And trying to cook something is like doing the opposite.

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Speaker 1: But actually, you know, there, we've not discovered an absence

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Speaker 1: of an underlying law just because water boils at a

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Speaker 1: different temperature at different elevations. What we've actually discovered is

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Speaker 1: a deeper underlying law that the boiling point of a

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Speaker 1: liquid varies along with pressure, and that that relationship is

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Speaker 1: mathematically deterministic. And I would say this is the assumption

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Speaker 1: that pretty much guides almost all of applied science in

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Speaker 1: the world today. It's the idea that the laws of

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Speaker 1: physics are out there and they don't change or very

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Speaker 1: depending on special cases or where you are. But how

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Speaker 1: do we know that conditions on the Earth and the

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Speaker 1: Moon might be different, but that the underlying physical laws

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Speaker 1: that give rise to those conditions are exactly the same.

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Speaker 1: And maybe one thing that's important to point out in

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Speaker 1: understanding this is that people haven't always thought this way.

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Speaker 1: There is a powerful tradition, going back into the ancient world,

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Speaker 1: sort of viewing the behaviors of things in reality as

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Speaker 1: a large collection of special cases, governed by their own

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Speaker 1: special essences and and by by special circumstances, maybe like

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Speaker 1: divine intervention, maybe like some types of magic, maybe just

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Speaker 1: by you know, the essence of the way a person

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Speaker 1: falls is different than the way a planet falls, because

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Speaker 1: a planet is a different thing than a person, And

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Speaker 1: so you you'd end up with the idea that the

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Speaker 1: heavens are not subject to the same physical forces as

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Speaker 1: the Earth. And we see this all throughout ancient cosmology,

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Speaker 1: just thinking that there are different different laws applying to

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Speaker 1: different places and circumstances in the universe. Now, on one hand,

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Speaker 1: you could argue that, well, we don't really know that

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Speaker 1: physical laws are the same everywhere, right, and and that's

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Speaker 1: kind of true, like at the very edges of our understanding.

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Speaker 1: There could be ways of arguing that physical laws aren't

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Speaker 1: really laws, you know, maybe they're just generalizations we make

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Speaker 1: based on observation, or maybe there could be cosmological scenarios

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Speaker 1: when they're different. You know, maybe in the beginning of

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Speaker 1: the universe the laws were different or could have been different.

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Speaker 1: But for the most purposes in the present, that assumption

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Speaker 1: that the physical laws are the same everywhere has proven

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Speaker 1: extremely useful and generating accurate scientific theories that make correct

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Speaker 1: predictions and create powerful technology. So I wanted to think

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Speaker 1: about at the beginning of today. Where did this assumption

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Speaker 1: of the uniformity of physical laws come from? How did

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Speaker 1: we end up thinking this way about the world, that

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Speaker 1: there's just sort of like a set of underlying ways

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Speaker 1: that things work and that that governs everything. Well, as

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Speaker 1: the title of the show indicates, we're going to tie

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Speaker 1: it to an invention, you're exactly right now, we don't

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Speaker 1: want to tie it entirely to this invention, because there

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Speaker 1: are a bunch of different strains of thinking throughout history

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Speaker 1: that I think have contributed to this way of seeing

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Speaker 1: the world that we generally share now. But I believe

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Speaker 1: one really powerful moment of transition here was centered around

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Speaker 1: a particular piece of technology, and that technology is the

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Speaker 1: subject of today's episode, which is the telescope. Yes, more

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Speaker 1: specifically the optical telescope. Right now, we're just doing one

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Speaker 1: episode today here, so we're not going to be able

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Speaker 1: to focus on all the different kinds of telescopes. We

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Speaker 1: may come back to them in the future, but we're

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Speaker 1: gonna be focusing on specifically the earliest optical refracting telescopes,

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Speaker 1: right and uh, and yeah, it's really it really is

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Speaker 1: kind of hard to to overstate the importance of the

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Speaker 1: telescope in the history of science and in the history

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Speaker 1: of our understanding of the cosmos. Yeah, there's a great

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Speaker 1: quote about the invention from the Invention of the Telescope

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Speaker 1: by Albert van Helden. From van Helden writes, quote, among

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Speaker 1: the scientific instruments which have played an important role in

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Speaker 1: the growth of man's knowledge of the world around him,

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Speaker 1: the telescope occupies a position of historic pre eminence, rivaled

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Speaker 1: only by the microscope, which was a natural outgrowth of

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Speaker 1: the telescope. In a real sense, the telescope can be

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Speaker 1: considered the prototype of modern scientific instruments, and learned men

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Speaker 1: in the seventeenth century, the first century of its existence,

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Speaker 1: were acutely aware of its important role in the formation

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Speaker 1: of a new astronomy. Yeah, and some of the earliest

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Speaker 1: accounts of what was viewed through the very first telescopes.

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Speaker 1: You can you can kind of feel the electricity coming

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Speaker 1: off of the writing, right, like, like the excitement with

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Speaker 1: seeing stuff that not just seeing new things. I mean

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Speaker 1: we still see new things in the heavens that people

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Speaker 1: have never seen before. Just this year there was the

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Speaker 1: very first direct imaging of a black hole, not using

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Speaker 1: an optical telescope, but but using you know, a form

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Speaker 1: of magnifying the heavens. And that was astonishing because we

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Speaker 1: were looking at something we've never seen before. But as

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Speaker 1: amazing as that was, what if instead of just seeing

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Speaker 1: a new thing, you were able to see the universe

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Speaker 1: in a completely different way that now, for the first time,

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Speaker 1: you can look at really anything beyond the moon as

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Speaker 1: more than a point of light. Yeah, it's really I

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Speaker 1: mean it's really hard to avoid optical metaphors for this

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Speaker 1: optical technology. Like I want to think, it's like it's

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Speaker 1: like being able having poor eyesight your entire life and

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Speaker 1: then finally putting on a pair of glasses and seeing

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Speaker 1: things come into sharper detail, you know, solidifying things that

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Speaker 1: you suspected already, but also bringing you know, fine print

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Speaker 1: into view that was invisible to you previously. That sort

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Speaker 1: of thing. Yeah, And I think that's another reason why

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Speaker 1: the telescope is such. Um, you know, a major invention

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Speaker 1: is that we are predominantly, you know, optical beings. We

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Speaker 1: depend so much on our sense of sight, and this

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Speaker 1: so greatly improved our ability to do optically see things. Well. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean, one thing that's worth thinking about is the

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Speaker 1: very idea that that we could even view the heavens

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Speaker 1: with a with a viewing instrument, you know, with a

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Speaker 1: magnification device that's entirely contingent on the details of life

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Speaker 1: on planet Earth. If you go to another planet where

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Speaker 1: maybe life forms evolved at the bottom of an ocean

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Speaker 1: around geothermal vents or growing off of some kind of

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Speaker 1: like you know, chemosynthesis process in a clouded, hazy atmosphere

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Speaker 1: like that of Venus or that of Titan, where you

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Speaker 1: just can't you can't see the guy. I mean, there's

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Speaker 1: no reason we had to evolve on a planet where

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Speaker 1: you could look at the stars every night, but somehow

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Speaker 1: we did. And of course those stars have always intrigued us.

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Speaker 1: I mean, human history is a story of of people's

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Speaker 1: looking to the heavens and trying to figure out what

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Speaker 1: is going on up there. Yeah, and that's a great

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Speaker 1: point we should start with, which is that astronomy did

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Speaker 1: not begin with the telescope. Astronomy long predates the telescope.

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Speaker 1: There is a vast tradition of naked eye astronomy going

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Speaker 1: back in ancient history, and sometimes it's astonishing what ancient

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Speaker 1: and medieval astronomers could figure out. It could discuss ever

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Speaker 1: without optical telescopes, just using the naked eye, sometimes maybe

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Speaker 1: in conjunction with other primitive tools like measuring instruments or something.

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Speaker 1: I mean, for starters, like other planets were known before

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Speaker 1: before the telescope. Right, Oh yeah, a Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter,

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Speaker 1: and Saturn are all observable with the naked eye. Uh,

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Speaker 1: Uranus and Neptune are generally considered to be only visible

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Speaker 1: via the telescope with with an asterix there. Yeah, Uranus

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Speaker 1: is uranus. We always fight about how to pronounce this Urinus.

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Speaker 1: Let's say, Uranus is technically I think visible with the

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Speaker 1: naked eye under extremely favorable conditions, but it's very, very faint.

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Speaker 1: It was officially usually recognized as being discovered by William

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Speaker 1: Herschel in Sight one with the telescope. Of course, telescopes

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Speaker 1: had been around for a good long while in Sight one,

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Speaker 1: but it had probably been observed by others in centuries

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Speaker 1: past who thought it was some kind of faint star,

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Speaker 1: just barely visible. Herschel actually initially thought Uranus was a comet.

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Speaker 1: On our other podcast, Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we

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Speaker 1: we've been kind of considering the different planets and there

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Speaker 1: in their their their moons. From time to time, we

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Speaker 1: really we really need to go to look at the

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Speaker 1: outer planets a little more. Oh yeah, I wonder if

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Speaker 1: there's there's much to say there. I feel like the

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Speaker 1: really sexy moons show up around Saturn and Jupiter. Like

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Speaker 1: on Jupiter you've got Europa, which is everybody's favorite to

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Speaker 1: find some potential life at because they think their oceans

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Speaker 1: underneath the icy crust. And then you've got Io, which

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Speaker 1: is just a wonderful yellow hell of volcanoes and sulfur

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Speaker 1: and all that great stuff. And then around Saturn, of

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Speaker 1: course you've got Titan, which is an intriguing mystery. I'm

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Speaker 1: not aware of anything like that going on with Neptune

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Speaker 1: or Uranus, but maybe I haven't given them a fair ship.

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Speaker 1: I mean, the planets themselves, I think would be would

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Speaker 1: be good topics, you know, uh, just so we can

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Speaker 1: say that we have covered all of them, uh you know,

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Speaker 1: just in time to have to like update with new

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Speaker 1: information for all of Oh yeah, well I can't. We'll

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Speaker 1: do We'll do an episode on Uranus just so we

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Speaker 1: can pronounce its seventeen different Yeah. I believe a listener

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Speaker 1: provided a different pronunciation recently, didn't they we heard I

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Speaker 1: think we've heard uranus. Of course, we've heard uranus. We've

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Speaker 1: heard uraas uh. I think that's it for now. Well,

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Speaker 1: we gotta bring you back to the telescope. Okay, So

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Speaker 1: here here's a question. I wonder about how many stars

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Speaker 1: can you actually see without a telescope. I know there's

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Speaker 1: got to be some general cut off point that most

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Speaker 1: people aren't going to be able to see stars below

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Speaker 1: a certain brightness. Yes, yeah, there's there's a there's a

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Speaker 1: there's a system here for determining how visible various objects are,

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Speaker 1: and there is a ballpark number. According to astronomer dorit

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Speaker 1: Hof Late of Yale University, the total number of stars

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Speaker 1: in the sky that can currently be seen from both

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Speaker 1: hemispheres and given optimal conditions, is nine thousand and ninety

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Speaker 1: six or four thousand, five forty eight stars per hemisphere,

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Speaker 1: give or take, depending on the position in the season.

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Speaker 1: It's monomers use the magnitude scale to measure star and

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Speaker 1: planet brightness, so the higher the number, the fainter the

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Speaker 1: object is in the sky. So the naked eye limit

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Speaker 1: for most humans is six point five. Now, really bright

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Speaker 1: objects actually have a negative rating on this scale. So

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Speaker 1: a full moon is a negative twelve point seven highly visible,

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Speaker 1: and the sun, yeah, everybody's seen this, uh, is a

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Speaker 1: negative twenty six point seven. Now, I was looking at

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Speaker 1: an article on this from Sky and Telescope, which is

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Speaker 1: a wonderful website for anyone that's interested in astronomy, and

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Speaker 1: Bob King has an article from titled nine thousand and

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Speaker 1: ninety six stars in the sky? Is that all? And

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Speaker 1: and he shares the following that was just a nice

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Speaker 1: quote about the visibility that this. You know, this brings

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Speaker 1: up quote. While the total number of naked eye stars

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Speaker 1: may seem unimpressive, consider what happens in the sky in

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Speaker 1: and around cities where most of us live. From the suburbs,

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Speaker 1: the magnitude limit is around plus four for a worldwide

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Speaker 1: total of about nine hundred stars, or half that for

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Speaker 1: your location. If we set the city limit at magnitude

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Speaker 1: plus two stars similar to the Big Dipper in brightness,

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Speaker 1: we're left with just seventies stars worldwide, or thirty five

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Speaker 1: stars visible from say downtown Chicago or Boston, right, because

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Speaker 1: you're only ever seeing half. Yeah, that's that's a paltry

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Speaker 1: number of stars. That kind of makes me hate our cities. Well, yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean, light pollution is a real detriment to uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, in any kind of you know, amateur or

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Speaker 1: certainly professional astronomy. I think I've mentioned this on one

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Speaker 1: of our podcasts before, and at the risk of getting sappy,

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Speaker 1: I one time went to a rural area in Oregon,

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Speaker 1: you know, not near any big cities, and I guess

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Speaker 1: it must have been very clear and dry in the night,

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Speaker 1: and and I went outside, and I remember I saw

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Speaker 1: so many stars. I I felt like I was going

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Speaker 1: to fall over. And it was overwhelming. How different the

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Speaker 1: sky is in a really dark sky area. Oh yeah.

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Speaker 1: I had a similar experience in Georgia's own okay, Finoki Swamp,

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Speaker 1: which is an area where is it's just there's no

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Speaker 1: light pollution. You get out in just the midst of

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Speaker 1: this enormous swamp land, and the stars are just overwhelming.

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Speaker 1: Like it's no wonder that people sometimes and let's say

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Speaker 1: that they've encountered a you know, they've seen a UFO

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Speaker 1: in the sky. Um, because in a way it's like

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Speaker 1: like seeing the cosmos like that, um, you know, unfiltered

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Speaker 1: by light pollution. It it you know, it's It's almost

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Speaker 1: like seeing some sort of alien spaceship. You know, you're

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Speaker 1: you're confronted with the enormity of the cosmos. It was

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Speaker 1: a borderline religious experience for me. I mean it felt

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Speaker 1: like it felt like a revelation. I've gone my whole

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Speaker 1: life on Earth looking up at the sky at night

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Speaker 1: and never seen anything like this. Now that being said,

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Speaker 1: an informed look at the skies, even from a city

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Speaker 1: such as Atlanta, you can you can still have some

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Speaker 1: you know, some interesting, you know, astronomical observations like it's

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Speaker 1: it's it's wonderful video to be able to say, pinpoint

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Speaker 1: Mars in the sky and pointed out to somebody and

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Speaker 1: think about the fact that that is it. This is

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Speaker 1: the planet that we've you know that do you hear

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Speaker 1: about on the news that you see these this footage job.

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Speaker 1: There's so many questions have been asked about there it

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Speaker 1: is in the sky, I am observing it. Oh yeah,

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Speaker 1: I've I've tried to cultivate that skill before, being able

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Speaker 1: to just point things out in the sky, and I've

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Speaker 1: never gotten good at it. Well, the apps really help

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Speaker 1: these days. There's so many great um Star and Planet

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Speaker 1: i D apps you can sort of cheat off of

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Speaker 1: those and then have the experience you know, Yeah, I

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Speaker 1: do like trying to find the direction of the center

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Speaker 1: of the galaxy at any given time and point in

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Speaker 1: the direction of Sagittary as a star, the supermassive black hole,

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Speaker 1: which I know our descendants must be destined to someday

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Speaker 1: just drive straight into. Now. Of course, all the stuff

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Speaker 1: we were just talking about is looking up with the

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Speaker 1: naked eye with a tell us gope. Things are very different,

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Speaker 1: right because they magnify light so uh so with just

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Speaker 1: the original refracting optical telescope, which was just a convex

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Speaker 1: lens that gathered light from a wider field, and then

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Speaker 1: it was paired at a certain distance with a concave eyepiece. Uh. Galileo,

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Speaker 1: when he was looking into the sky was astonished by

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Speaker 1: what he saw. He wrote, I have seen stars in

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Speaker 1: myriads which have never been seen before, and which surpassed

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Speaker 1: the old previously known stars in number more than ten times. Right.

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Speaker 1: I mean we have to think back to that magnitude scale,

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Speaker 1: you know, and the idea that suddenly, uh, cosmic bodies

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Speaker 1: of a magnitude or more beyond previous human observation are

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Speaker 1: now visible. Yeah, like it's it's you know, it's really

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Speaker 1: crazy to imagine that. You really have to underline that statement. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and this would have been at the beginning of the

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Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds. He's using the most primitive telescopes. Now, of

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Speaker 1: course we see it's funny we can look can do

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Speaker 1: like a little tiny patch of the sky where before

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Speaker 1: there would have been nothing, and with the powerful telescopes

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Speaker 1: of today, we zoom in and see almost like ah,

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Speaker 1: it's like when you you know, zoom in on water

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Speaker 1: with a microscope and you see all the little bacteria

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Speaker 1: living in it, except now we see galaxies full of

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Speaker 1: stars where previously we thought there was nothing. Alright, Well,

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Speaker 1: on that note, we're going to take a quick break,

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Speaker 1: but when we come back, we're going to get to

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Speaker 1: the question who invented the telescope? Where did it come from?

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Speaker 1: And and more importantly, like what does it say about

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Speaker 1: the time the timing of this invention? Alright, we're back.

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Speaker 1: So now we're talking about the invention of the original

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Speaker 1: optical telescope, and we should start off saying at the

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Speaker 1: very top that credit for the invention of the telescope

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Speaker 1: is highly disputed. What counts you know, do just like

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Speaker 1: descriptions written in a book count if we don't have

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Speaker 1: evidence that it was actually made, what were people actually

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Speaker 1: talking about when they wrote about various kinds of magnification. Historically,

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Speaker 1: credit for the invention of the telescope is most often

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Speaker 1: given to a figure we're going to mention in just

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Speaker 1: a minute, a Dutch spectacle maker named Hans Lipper shy

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Speaker 1: or Hans lippersh lippers hay is how I've seen multiple

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Speaker 1: different pronunciations. Uh so, yeah, so lippers hey, Lipper she

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Speaker 1: lippers high. We'll we'll say them all, but there are

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Speaker 1: a lot of different contenders that that have competed in

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Speaker 1: the minds of historians, and we won't have time to

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Speaker 1: mention them all. We will highlight a few, right, yeah,

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Speaker 1: and uh yeah, it's we we really have to stress

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Speaker 1: that not only it's not just one of these things

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Speaker 1: where it was disputed later, where like historians are saying, actually,

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Speaker 1: this person working in this other land had you know,

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Speaker 1: some other ideas or seemed to have a product type

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Speaker 1: and no, I mean it was disputed at the time

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Speaker 1: in Lipper's own country. Yeah, and we'll touch on the

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Speaker 1: details of that. Well. I think one of the reasons

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Speaker 1: that it's so disputed is that the essential technolo ology

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Speaker 1: for creating the telescope had existed for a long time

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Speaker 1: before anybody ever made a telescope exactly. So Leprosy lived

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Speaker 1: fifteen seventy through sixteen nineteen, and it's worth noting that

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Speaker 1: that here at this point in in his life, he was,

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Speaker 1: of course a spectacle maker, and spectacles had been around

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Speaker 1: in Europe for at least three centuries. Uh. And I'd

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Speaker 1: actually love to come back to a future episode of

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Speaker 1: Invention where we'll talk about those three centuries, talk about uh, glasses,

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Speaker 1: spectacles where they came from. But basically the idea is,

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Speaker 1: as Europe emerged from the Dark Ages and its economy

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Speaker 1: rebounded from the invasions of the Dark Ages, it became

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Speaker 1: increasingly beneficial to ensure that functional eyesight was maintained in

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Speaker 1: their aging scholars and scribes. So that that's why eyeglasses

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Speaker 1: west by spectacles emerged really in Europe, well right, I mean,

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Speaker 1: eyeglasses would be a technology that extended the working life

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Speaker 1: of people who copied documents for living and because they

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Speaker 1: didn't have a printing press yet in some of that time,

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Speaker 1: hand copying of documents was incredibly important for preserving knowledge

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Speaker 1: and spreading it. Yeah, this is the necessity in the

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Speaker 1: invention scenario here. Um. You know, eyeglasses are largely attributed

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Speaker 1: to a Venetian invention, sometimes around thirteen hundred and for

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Speaker 1: our fellow name of the rose Fans out there, the

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Speaker 1: story of murders in a medieval abbey that they take

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Speaker 1: place in thirteen seven, and their their use is certainly

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Speaker 1: factors into a burn of Echo's plot. The use of spectacles. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: the main detective in the story, William of Baskerville. He

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Speaker 1: has a pair of spectacles, but they're not like normal, right,

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Speaker 1: It's not like, oh, you can just go get new

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Speaker 1: spectacles somewhere, Like if he loses them, that's a problem. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: for sure. But yeah, some three hundred years separate the

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Speaker 1: birth of spectacles and ultimately the birth of the spectacle

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Speaker 1: making trade. Uh from this event right where a spectacle

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Speaker 1: maker takes the technology and creates tell us gop out

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Speaker 1: of it. And then the reason for creating this telescope

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Speaker 1: is it turns out it's not to gaze at the heavens,

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Speaker 1: but to better kill people on the battlefield. I see.

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Speaker 1: So basically and this is this is the story as

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Speaker 1: it specifically concerns Lippers. During the early sixteen hundreds, Dutch

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Speaker 1: military reformer Prince Maurice of Nassau offered monetary rewards for

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Speaker 1: any inventions that could help modernize the Dutch fighting force.

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Speaker 1: Lippers took his knowledge of spectacles and applied them to

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Speaker 1: the problem, developing what he called the Looker, which he

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Speaker 1: filed a patent for in six eight and their varying

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Speaker 1: versions of Lippers's eureka moment ranging from him observing children

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Speaker 1: playing with lenses in his shop and watching them, you know,

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Speaker 1: hold one lens up and then hold the other lens

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Speaker 1: up and make objects at a distance appear closer. And

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Speaker 1: then there are also just accusations that he he flat

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Speaker 1: out stole the idea from someone else, and we'll get

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Speaker 1: to that as well. But the question that emerges from

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Speaker 1: all this is wouldn't this invention have been obvious to

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Speaker 1: anyone familiar with the three hundred year old technology of spectacles. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: so you've spectacles work on the principle of magnification through

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Speaker 1: refraction through glass. So you've got glass as a transparent medium.

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Speaker 1: You can make a rounded edge on the outside of

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Speaker 1: one of these discs of glass right like and basically

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Speaker 1: it's it's all detailed in this uh, this this story

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Speaker 1: of children playing with with with lenses like someone would

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Speaker 1: have surely seen that before. And you know, this is

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Speaker 1: ultimately exactly why the States General of the Netherlands denied

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Speaker 1: his patent application, as well as the application of two

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Speaker 1: other individuals, Jacob Midius, a lens maker from a family

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Speaker 1: of glass workers, and Zacharias Johnson, a spectacle maker. And

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Speaker 1: they've both been proposed as the alternate inventor of the telescope,

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Speaker 1: right and in other names and plots are thrown into

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Speaker 1: the mix as well, and and sometimes the microscope is

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Speaker 1: likewise brought up because the microscope has we already mentioned

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Speaker 1: or brought up in that quote we were at it's

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Speaker 1: kind of an extension of the same technology. But when

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Speaker 1: when Lippers, say, sought a thirty year patent or he

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Speaker 1: also was going to settle for a yearly pension to

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Speaker 1: prevent the lookers sale to rival kingdoms, the States General

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Speaker 1: declared that the invention was already too widely known and

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Speaker 1: too easy to copy. Still, the Prince awarded Lippers a

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Speaker 1: nine florins and asked him to make the looker binocular

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Speaker 1: okay for two eyes. So just not very impressed about

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Speaker 1: the telescope. Well impressed enough to pay him nine hundred florins,

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Speaker 1: you know, and to and to use it. But you know,

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Speaker 1: I guess you can well imagine the situation where the

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Speaker 1: military uh individuals are saying, yes, this sounds great, We're

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Speaker 1: gonna revolutionize everything, and then the patent office is like, okay, fine,

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Speaker 1: but let's not get carried away. Let's not get this

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Speaker 1: guy a patent because the the im for the knowledge

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00:23:58,200 --> 00:24:01,040
Speaker 1: of this technology is already out there. Yeah. Now, one

429
00:24:01,080 --> 00:24:03,119
Speaker 1: of the sources we were both looking at about this

430
00:24:03,200 --> 00:24:05,879
Speaker 1: story of the invention of the telescope is the great

431
00:24:06,040 --> 00:24:10,040
Speaker 1: uh James Burke's discussion and connections. And one of the

432
00:24:10,080 --> 00:24:13,040
Speaker 1: things he does that's interesting is he connects the story

433
00:24:13,080 --> 00:24:14,919
Speaker 1: of the invention of the telescope. I guess he's all

434
00:24:14,920 --> 00:24:18,680
Speaker 1: about creating connections. Uh. He connects it to the invention

435
00:24:18,720 --> 00:24:21,560
Speaker 1: of the time piece, which I guess is something else

436
00:24:21,600 --> 00:24:23,560
Speaker 1: going on in the Dutch economy at the time, the

437
00:24:23,720 --> 00:24:26,879
Speaker 1: desire to make more accurate time pieces, because, like he

438
00:24:26,920 --> 00:24:30,399
Speaker 1: writes about how the springs of low quality and the

439
00:24:30,440 --> 00:24:32,960
Speaker 1: watches of the time would mean that some watches might

440
00:24:33,000 --> 00:24:36,359
Speaker 1: lose four minutes a day. Yeah, and the telescope is

441
00:24:36,400 --> 00:24:38,560
Speaker 1: will probably continue to touch on here and it has

442
00:24:38,600 --> 00:24:42,840
Speaker 1: this this definite relationship with precision and precision instruments of

443
00:24:42,880 --> 00:24:46,119
Speaker 1: the time and those that would come afterwards. Um. But

444
00:24:46,480 --> 00:24:48,959
Speaker 1: Burke also, you can, you know, makes the point here

445
00:24:49,000 --> 00:24:52,240
Speaker 1: about the connection between invention and social need. While there

446
00:24:52,320 --> 00:24:54,919
Speaker 1: was a social need for spectacles, which we we've already mentioned,

447
00:24:55,119 --> 00:24:57,879
Speaker 1: there was not one for the telescope. And I just

448
00:24:57,880 --> 00:25:00,320
Speaker 1: want to read a quote from Connections again. Connection was

449
00:25:00,359 --> 00:25:02,760
Speaker 1: both a television series but also is a is a

450
00:25:02,800 --> 00:25:06,879
Speaker 1: wonderful book. Both are widely available out there. If you

451
00:25:06,880 --> 00:25:08,480
Speaker 1: want to pick it out, pick it up. And if

452
00:25:08,480 --> 00:25:10,679
Speaker 1: you're a fan of of this podcast and just the

453
00:25:10,720 --> 00:25:13,040
Speaker 1: history of technology and inventions, you really can't go wrong

454
00:25:13,080 --> 00:25:17,280
Speaker 1: with Connections. So Burke rights quote. But there was no

455
00:25:17,400 --> 00:25:20,359
Speaker 1: demand for the telescope during this period, which was prior

456
00:25:20,400 --> 00:25:22,879
Speaker 1: to the invention of gunpowder and the use of the

457
00:25:22,920 --> 00:25:26,000
Speaker 1: cannon on the battlefield, when the view of the universe

458
00:25:26,080 --> 00:25:30,879
Speaker 1: precluded the existence of planetary bodies as three dimensional observable phenomena.

459
00:25:31,119 --> 00:25:33,680
Speaker 1: This is why the moment of invention is so often

460
00:25:33,680 --> 00:25:37,280
Speaker 1: identified with the moment in which the artifact comes into use.

461
00:25:37,760 --> 00:25:40,560
Speaker 1: In many cases, there are times when an invention is

462
00:25:40,600 --> 00:25:45,000
Speaker 1: technologically possible and in which indeed it may appear necessary,

463
00:25:45,080 --> 00:25:48,639
Speaker 1: as the telescope may have, but without a market, the

464
00:25:48,720 --> 00:25:51,439
Speaker 1: idea will not sell, and in the absence of the

465
00:25:51,480 --> 00:25:55,400
Speaker 1: technical and social infrastructure to support it, the invention will

466
00:25:55,440 --> 00:25:59,119
Speaker 1: not survive. This reminds me of the episode or episode

467
00:25:59,119 --> 00:26:01,840
Speaker 1: I think we did a couple on the wheel, a

468
00:26:01,920 --> 00:26:05,440
Speaker 1: technology that it appears within many cultures around the world

469
00:26:05,520 --> 00:26:09,280
Speaker 1: for a long time, there was the perfect capability to

470
00:26:09,480 --> 00:26:13,679
Speaker 1: make it and familiarity with the concept. So it's like

471
00:26:13,720 --> 00:26:17,000
Speaker 1: they understood what a wheel was, and they had everything

472
00:26:17,040 --> 00:26:21,240
Speaker 1: they needed to make wheels. They just didn't make wheeled vehicles. Uh.

473
00:26:21,280 --> 00:26:24,280
Speaker 1: And so the question is like, why why would you

474
00:26:24,400 --> 00:26:26,240
Speaker 1: Why would you know how to do it and have

475
00:26:26,320 --> 00:26:28,760
Speaker 1: everything you need to do it, but not yet do it.

476
00:26:29,119 --> 00:26:31,840
Speaker 1: And Burke is pointing out that sometimes it just it does.

477
00:26:32,000 --> 00:26:35,080
Speaker 1: It doesn't occur to people that there's a particular use

478
00:26:35,240 --> 00:26:37,439
Speaker 1: for a thing. By the way, Burke is referring to

479
00:26:37,440 --> 00:26:40,080
Speaker 1: the Western invention and use of gunpowder here, which which

480
00:26:40,119 --> 00:26:42,879
Speaker 1: has a history very worthy of its own invention episode

481
00:26:42,880 --> 00:26:45,359
Speaker 1: in the future. But the short version is that the

482
00:26:45,440 --> 00:26:49,040
Speaker 1: Chinese were aware of gunpowder as early as the ninth century,

483
00:26:49,160 --> 00:26:51,560
Speaker 1: and there are various accounts of gunpowder in Europe going

484
00:26:51,560 --> 00:26:54,800
Speaker 1: back to the hundreds. But guns would not become a

485
00:26:54,840 --> 00:26:58,880
Speaker 1: military technology worthy of telescopic sites for some time basically

486
00:26:58,920 --> 00:27:02,359
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy six, as I believe, and warfare itself hadn't

487
00:27:02,600 --> 00:27:05,200
Speaker 1: evolved to depend on it yet. So Burke's argument is

488
00:27:05,280 --> 00:27:08,800
Speaker 1: that the technological advancements of warfare didn't reach the point

489
00:27:09,200 --> 00:27:11,080
Speaker 1: uh and you know, at which this sort of lens

490
00:27:11,160 --> 00:27:16,600
Speaker 1: technology promised or even uh you know, suggested a real payoff,

491
00:27:16,760 --> 00:27:19,239
Speaker 1: not until the dawn of the sixteen hundreds, and so

492
00:27:19,320 --> 00:27:22,359
Speaker 1: the telescope was finally borne into an age increasingly in

493
00:27:22,440 --> 00:27:25,879
Speaker 1: need of long distance vision for military purposes and a

494
00:27:25,960 --> 00:27:29,320
Speaker 1: tool to star gaze beyond the limits of the human eye. Again,

495
00:27:29,359 --> 00:27:31,080
Speaker 1: to Brooke's point, we can sit around all day and

496
00:27:31,119 --> 00:27:33,359
Speaker 1: think of all about all the places and times it

497
00:27:33,480 --> 00:27:37,040
Speaker 1: would have been useful before the seventeenth century and could

498
00:27:37,040 --> 00:27:40,359
Speaker 1: have been applied. I mean, navigation seems that you know,

499
00:27:40,480 --> 00:27:44,000
Speaker 1: one of the key possibilities to me, But ultimately that's

500
00:27:44,080 --> 00:27:46,560
Speaker 1: just not how it came together, but camp but it

501
00:27:46,680 --> 00:27:49,600
Speaker 1: certainly did come together. And in fact, less than two

502
00:27:49,720 --> 00:27:52,920
Speaker 1: years after Lip says patent Uh, an individual by the

503
00:27:53,000 --> 00:27:57,239
Speaker 1: name of Galileo published a ground pay breaking treaties And

504
00:27:57,280 --> 00:28:00,440
Speaker 1: will come back to Galileo in just a little bit. Yeah.

505
00:28:00,440 --> 00:28:02,520
Speaker 1: Before we get to Galileo, though, we should talk about

506
00:28:02,960 --> 00:28:05,760
Speaker 1: a few of the other names that have been suggested

507
00:28:05,800 --> 00:28:08,879
Speaker 1: as alternate inventors of the telescope, because, as we said,

508
00:28:09,520 --> 00:28:11,439
Speaker 1: there there were a bunch of people who could have

509
00:28:11,600 --> 00:28:15,359
Speaker 1: been maybe given credit depending on what counts, what kind

510
00:28:15,400 --> 00:28:18,280
Speaker 1: of evidence you allow. One alternative that might not be

511
00:28:18,320 --> 00:28:22,000
Speaker 1: surprising given given a lot of the optical advances that

512
00:28:22,000 --> 00:28:24,919
Speaker 1: that existed in the in the Muslim world, especially in

513
00:28:24,920 --> 00:28:27,960
Speaker 1: the medieval period, is that several names from the air

514
00:28:28,040 --> 00:28:31,119
Speaker 1: world showed up on this list. Yeah. Yeah, for starters,

515
00:28:31,440 --> 00:28:35,000
Speaker 1: Like a key individual is al Hazen, which is the

516
00:28:35,240 --> 00:28:40,400
Speaker 1: Latin name for for the mathematician and astronomer Uh. Even

517
00:28:40,440 --> 00:28:45,440
Speaker 1: al hatham who lived at through Tin forty h ce

518
00:28:45,760 --> 00:28:50,600
Speaker 1: Um a k a Abu Ali al hatham Um is

519
00:28:50,640 --> 00:28:53,040
Speaker 1: a major figure. Particularly we have to consider his book

520
00:28:53,040 --> 00:28:56,840
Speaker 1: of Optics, which dealt with magnification and refraction, and which

521
00:28:57,000 --> 00:29:00,040
Speaker 1: ultimately influenced the technological traditions that would lead to the

522
00:29:00,080 --> 00:29:05,480
Speaker 1: invention of the telescope. At least he wrote commentaries on Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy,

523
00:29:05,560 --> 00:29:08,880
Speaker 1: and Galen. His writings were pretty influential in the in

524
00:29:08,920 --> 00:29:11,400
Speaker 1: the West at the you know, particularly among the likes

525
00:29:11,400 --> 00:29:15,760
Speaker 1: of Bacon and Kepler. Uh. Quote this is from os Marshall.

526
00:29:16,000 --> 00:29:19,400
Speaker 1: Um al Hazen and the telescope. He observed the magnifying

527
00:29:19,480 --> 00:29:23,760
Speaker 1: power of spheres and lenses and experimented with cylindrical, concave

528
00:29:23,880 --> 00:29:27,600
Speaker 1: and parabolic metal mirrors. So basically he's a figure that

529
00:29:27,760 --> 00:29:31,480
Speaker 1: some consider capable of inventing the telescope. Like if you're

530
00:29:31,520 --> 00:29:34,719
Speaker 1: looking in history for you know, to pinpoint and individual

531
00:29:35,080 --> 00:29:38,800
Speaker 1: who who could have very well created a telescope, Um

532
00:29:38,840 --> 00:29:42,000
Speaker 1: al Hazen is your guy. Uh. Though there is it

533
00:29:42,040 --> 00:29:44,360
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be any clear evidence that he did,

534
00:29:44,600 --> 00:29:47,239
Speaker 1: but certainly all the skills were on the table some

535
00:29:47,400 --> 00:29:52,080
Speaker 1: six hundred years before Galileo. Another individual in the air

536
00:29:52,080 --> 00:29:55,440
Speaker 1: of world that pops up is um Taki al Din

537
00:29:56,080 --> 00:30:01,000
Speaker 1: or uh Taki od Den. Muhammad had been Maroof. He

538
00:30:01,080 --> 00:30:04,320
Speaker 1: was an Automan astronomer of note he lived fifty six

539
00:30:04,440 --> 00:30:07,000
Speaker 1: or fifteen eighty five, so much closer to the time

540
00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:10,760
Speaker 1: period we're discussing, um, you know, in in European traditions

541
00:30:10,800 --> 00:30:13,400
Speaker 1: here for the invention of the telescope. And uh, he

542
00:30:13,640 --> 00:30:17,000
Speaker 1: invented a number of pumps and clocks, uh, including an

543
00:30:17,040 --> 00:30:19,680
Speaker 1: astronomical clock. So again we're getting down to the technology

544
00:30:19,680 --> 00:30:23,760
Speaker 1: of precision again. And he apparently described an invention that

545
00:30:23,880 --> 00:30:28,120
Speaker 1: made far away objects appear closer. So it's possible that

546
00:30:28,160 --> 00:30:30,560
Speaker 1: he's talking about a telescope there. It's possible that he

547
00:30:30,600 --> 00:30:34,400
Speaker 1: invented a telescope in roughly fifteen seventy four, but there's

548
00:30:34,480 --> 00:30:38,160
Speaker 1: there's no clear consensus on this. But again an individual

549
00:30:38,600 --> 00:30:40,720
Speaker 1: where we we can look to and say this, it's

550
00:30:40,920 --> 00:30:44,720
Speaker 1: possible this individual created a telescope. And if they didn't,

551
00:30:45,240 --> 00:30:47,720
Speaker 1: there's no reason why they couldn't have. You know, they

552
00:30:47,720 --> 00:30:50,080
Speaker 1: had again all the tools were on the table. Uh.

553
00:30:50,120 --> 00:30:53,840
Speaker 1: There There have been other suggestions of some previous figures

554
00:30:53,840 --> 00:30:56,600
Speaker 1: from England, like Roger Bacon or like this guy named

555
00:30:56,680 --> 00:31:01,440
Speaker 1: Leonard Diggis who was apparently, uh, he was into surveying. Yeah,

556
00:31:01,480 --> 00:31:03,880
Speaker 1: and this is to show you, just like the how

557
00:31:04,320 --> 00:31:08,160
Speaker 1: how removed some of the descriptions are this was basically

558
00:31:08,200 --> 00:31:11,400
Speaker 1: his son. Leonard Diggin's son wrote that he you that

559
00:31:11,480 --> 00:31:15,400
Speaker 1: his father had used a proportional glass to view distant objects,

560
00:31:15,840 --> 00:31:18,000
Speaker 1: and this would have been the mid fifteen hundreds, and

561
00:31:18,040 --> 00:31:20,760
Speaker 1: so some historians have made a case for this, saying

562
00:31:21,080 --> 00:31:24,040
Speaker 1: like this, they're talking about a telescope. This guy invented

563
00:31:24,040 --> 00:31:26,320
Speaker 1: a telescope. But we just don't have much to go

564
00:31:26,400 --> 00:31:28,760
Speaker 1: on beyond that. All Right, This next guy I want

565
00:31:28,800 --> 00:31:33,040
Speaker 1: to talk about is not an especially strong contender, at

566
00:31:33,120 --> 00:31:36,680
Speaker 1: least I don't think so for actually having invented a telescope.

567
00:31:37,160 --> 00:31:40,360
Speaker 1: I would say that the credit that is possibly given

568
00:31:40,400 --> 00:31:43,320
Speaker 1: to him or was claimed by him for having invented

569
00:31:43,320 --> 00:31:46,560
Speaker 1: a telescope seems to be based on some vaguely written

570
00:31:46,600 --> 00:31:49,640
Speaker 1: passages about being able to see things at a distance

571
00:31:49,760 --> 00:31:53,520
Speaker 1: through through refractive lenses. But but I just wanted to

572
00:31:53,560 --> 00:31:56,600
Speaker 1: talk about him because he is very weird and a

573
00:31:56,680 --> 00:31:59,120
Speaker 1: fascinating figure, and the more I found out about him,

574
00:31:59,120 --> 00:32:01,440
Speaker 1: the more I wanted to to go deep. His name

575
00:32:01,760 --> 00:32:06,040
Speaker 1: is Giovanni Batista de la Porto or Giambatista de la Porta,

576
00:32:06,120 --> 00:32:10,440
Speaker 1: an Italian natural philosopher. A minor Neapolitan noble born around

577
00:32:10,440 --> 00:32:15,400
Speaker 1: fifteen thirty five died in sixteen fifteen. Sometimes depicted as

578
00:32:15,480 --> 00:32:20,000
Speaker 1: something of a sorcerer, sometimes as an enthusiast of the sciences,

579
00:32:20,040 --> 00:32:24,560
Speaker 1: sometimes as a quote professor of secrets. He was most notably,

580
00:32:24,600 --> 00:32:27,720
Speaker 1: I think, the author of a popular book called Magia

581
00:32:27,840 --> 00:32:32,360
Speaker 1: Naturalists meaning Natural Magic, which was a sort of encyclopedia

582
00:32:32,440 --> 00:32:36,400
Speaker 1: of marvels and curiosities about the world. And this book

583
00:32:36,440 --> 00:32:40,640
Speaker 1: has got everything it's it encompasses everything from facts about

584
00:32:40,680 --> 00:32:44,800
Speaker 1: geology and chemistry to cosmetic beauty tips. I think it's

585
00:32:44,840 --> 00:32:48,040
Speaker 1: got cooking tips in it. It's got demonology and his

586
00:32:48,200 --> 00:32:51,560
Speaker 1: opinions on it, like like a cult philosophy. And then

587
00:32:51,680 --> 00:32:55,240
Speaker 1: it's got this huge section on cryptography, including a whole

588
00:32:55,320 --> 00:32:59,880
Speaker 1: chapter about how to send secret messages inside eggs. Well,

589
00:33:00,280 --> 00:33:01,680
Speaker 1: I want to hear about these eggs. But but I

590
00:33:01,720 --> 00:33:03,160
Speaker 1: do want to point out that he would have been

591
00:33:03,160 --> 00:33:08,920
Speaker 1: a contemporary of John d uh the English um scientist,

592
00:33:09,480 --> 00:33:14,320
Speaker 1: spy occultist who is also interested in cryptography. So uh,

593
00:33:15,040 --> 00:33:17,080
Speaker 1: this was definitely a time to be into all of

594
00:33:17,120 --> 00:33:19,720
Speaker 1: these things. But now, do tell me about these eggs.

595
00:33:19,760 --> 00:33:23,640
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it sounds like a type. Yes. Sixteenth century

596
00:33:24,080 --> 00:33:28,600
Speaker 1: seventeenth century type of dude who's into demonology and refraction

597
00:33:28,800 --> 00:33:33,840
Speaker 1: lenses and all that. Yeah, so sending secret messages inside eggs, eggs,

598
00:33:34,240 --> 00:33:39,320
Speaker 1: egg based cryptography, why eggs? Well? In Magia Naturalis, Delaporta

599
00:33:39,400 --> 00:33:43,680
Speaker 1: writes that quote, because when prisons are shut, eggs are

600
00:33:43,720 --> 00:33:47,320
Speaker 1: not stopped by the papal inquisition, and no fraud is

601
00:33:47,360 --> 00:33:50,760
Speaker 1: suspected to be in them. Well, not until you wrote

602
00:33:50,760 --> 00:33:54,840
Speaker 1: about it in your book, so he writes about this.

603
00:33:54,880 --> 00:33:57,680
Speaker 1: But yeah, the idea is that Delaporta and Medieva his friends,

604
00:33:58,040 --> 00:34:00,560
Speaker 1: were targets of the Italian Inquisition, and of course the

605
00:34:00,600 --> 00:34:03,720
Speaker 1: inquisitions going on at the time. Uh. And apparently while

606
00:34:03,800 --> 00:34:07,520
Speaker 1: you could not pass letters to friends imprisoned by the inquisitors,

607
00:34:07,520 --> 00:34:10,080
Speaker 1: at least not without those letters being read or sensored

608
00:34:10,200 --> 00:34:12,880
Speaker 1: or something, you could send your friends eggs, you know,

609
00:34:13,040 --> 00:34:15,480
Speaker 1: you just bring them eggs in prison. So he explains

610
00:34:15,520 --> 00:34:20,239
Speaker 1: many different methods for smuggling secret messages inside eggs, including

611
00:34:20,239 --> 00:34:23,840
Speaker 1: by chemically treating the eggs. One method involves writing the

612
00:34:23,880 --> 00:34:26,360
Speaker 1: message on paper. So you write out a letter and

613
00:34:26,360 --> 00:34:28,960
Speaker 1: then you soften the egg shell with vinegar and you

614
00:34:29,000 --> 00:34:31,680
Speaker 1: cut a tiny hole in the shell. With a knife

615
00:34:31,960 --> 00:34:35,040
Speaker 1: and insert the letter written on paper into the egg,

616
00:34:35,320 --> 00:34:37,160
Speaker 1: and then you put the egg in cold water to

617
00:34:37,280 --> 00:34:40,400
Speaker 1: firm up the egg again and disguise the cut. Another

618
00:34:40,440 --> 00:34:43,440
Speaker 1: method involves writing the message on the shell of the

619
00:34:43,480 --> 00:34:46,600
Speaker 1: egg with an ink that's like especially prepared ink made

620
00:34:46,600 --> 00:34:50,399
Speaker 1: out of galls alum and pickle and whatever that means.

621
00:34:50,480 --> 00:34:54,040
Speaker 1: He says, pickle and then um, and then boiling the egg.

622
00:34:54,239 --> 00:34:57,200
Speaker 1: And supposedly the message will wash off of the outer

623
00:34:57,280 --> 00:35:00,000
Speaker 1: shell when the egg boils, But then when the egg

624
00:35:00,120 --> 00:35:03,160
Speaker 1: is peeled, the message will appear written on the egg

625
00:35:03,200 --> 00:35:07,839
Speaker 1: white inside because this stuff leeches through the shell. This

626
00:35:07,880 --> 00:35:11,520
Speaker 1: is incredible. Why is this not our our easter? A

627
00:35:11,600 --> 00:35:15,680
Speaker 1: messaging tradition? Yeah, that's right. The kids they go out

628
00:35:15,719 --> 00:35:17,719
Speaker 1: hunting for eggs in the grass and then they pick

629
00:35:17,800 --> 00:35:20,560
Speaker 1: one up that says, do not submit to the inquisitors,

630
00:35:20,560 --> 00:35:23,680
Speaker 1: do not confess. Do not confess that we summoned the

631
00:35:23,680 --> 00:35:27,640
Speaker 1: power of payment. But anyway, Also in Maggia Naturalis, there's

632
00:35:27,640 --> 00:35:31,240
Speaker 1: a whole volume on lenses and refraction containing these vaguely

633
00:35:31,239 --> 00:35:34,920
Speaker 1: written passages that mentioned, uh, you know, combining lenses and

634
00:35:34,960 --> 00:35:38,319
Speaker 1: the ability to see things across distance. This apparently led

635
00:35:38,400 --> 00:35:41,239
Speaker 1: to the later misunderstanding that he may have prefigured the

636
00:35:41,280 --> 00:35:45,520
Speaker 1: invention of the telescope by uh liberty or lippershy or

637
00:35:45,760 --> 00:35:48,040
Speaker 1: lippers hey or however you say it, uh and the

638
00:35:48,080 --> 00:35:50,719
Speaker 1: other contemporaries. But modern scholars I think, seemed to be

639
00:35:50,760 --> 00:35:54,840
Speaker 1: doubtful that Delaporta was actually describing a telescope in his writings,

640
00:35:54,880 --> 00:35:57,560
Speaker 1: and there's certainly no record of him making or using one,

641
00:35:57,600 --> 00:35:59,439
Speaker 1: though it appears he did work with some other types

642
00:35:59,480 --> 00:36:01,759
Speaker 1: of lenses. Is more in the realm of spectacles or

643
00:36:01,880 --> 00:36:05,760
Speaker 1: magnifying glass. Of course, John D is notable for having

644
00:36:05,800 --> 00:36:09,000
Speaker 1: at least one lens of note that being more of

645
00:36:09,000 --> 00:36:12,520
Speaker 1: a like a magical black mirror, which is which is

646
00:36:12,520 --> 00:36:14,960
Speaker 1: currently I believe on display in the British Museum. Oh,

647
00:36:15,000 --> 00:36:17,080
Speaker 1: I'd like to see that. Yeah, look into it if

648
00:36:17,080 --> 00:36:19,719
Speaker 1: you get a chance. It's probably a mirror of some

649
00:36:19,800 --> 00:36:25,320
Speaker 1: historical mischief. Yeah, with Mesoamerican origins. I believe Christian and

650
00:36:25,360 --> 00:36:27,120
Speaker 1: I did a two parter on stuff to Blow your

651
00:36:27,160 --> 00:36:31,759
Speaker 1: mind about John D where we discussed the details of it. Well,

652
00:36:31,760 --> 00:36:33,160
Speaker 1: I think maybe we should take a break and then

653
00:36:33,239 --> 00:36:36,239
Speaker 1: we come back. We can discuss the earliest uses of

654
00:36:36,280 --> 00:36:46,600
Speaker 1: the telescope. And its impact on world history. Alright, we're back. So,

655
00:36:46,640 --> 00:36:50,919
Speaker 1: as we've discussed, the world was finally ready for the telescope.

656
00:36:51,239 --> 00:36:54,840
Speaker 1: The technology was there, the understanding of optics, the ability

657
00:36:54,880 --> 00:36:57,600
Speaker 1: to craft of the lenses, and and now you also

658
00:36:57,640 --> 00:37:00,680
Speaker 1: had the necessity the market for it. People were clamoring

659
00:37:00,680 --> 00:37:04,279
Speaker 1: for it, and we had the both the military, uh,

660
00:37:04,520 --> 00:37:08,120
Speaker 1: interested in the creation of telescopes. But then you had

661
00:37:08,719 --> 00:37:11,480
Speaker 1: plenty of star gates. There's plenty of the astronomers who

662
00:37:11,520 --> 00:37:14,319
Speaker 1: were were hungry for such a device. Yeah, I'd say

663
00:37:14,360 --> 00:37:16,839
Speaker 1: that even though it was commissioned as a weapon of war,

664
00:37:17,000 --> 00:37:19,759
Speaker 1: like the real bomb that it set off, was this

665
00:37:19,880 --> 00:37:24,239
Speaker 1: more theological, philosophical, scientific one. And so of course we

666
00:37:24,320 --> 00:37:28,480
Speaker 1: have to talk about Galileo. Now, Galileo Galilei was a

667
00:37:28,600 --> 00:37:32,399
Speaker 1: natural philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. He was the son

668
00:37:32,440 --> 00:37:35,279
Speaker 1: of a cloth merchant from the city of Pisa. He

669
00:37:35,360 --> 00:37:39,080
Speaker 1: lived fifteen sixty four to sixteen forty two, and he

670
00:37:39,280 --> 00:37:43,960
Speaker 1: was in many ways, uh, sort of an ideal heretic, right, Like,

671
00:37:44,040 --> 00:37:47,239
Speaker 1: we don't like to overplay the mythology of genius and

672
00:37:47,280 --> 00:37:50,359
Speaker 1: historical inventors, but I think with Galileo, this is one

673
00:37:50,400 --> 00:37:52,480
Speaker 1: case at least in my mind, where you can you

674
00:37:52,480 --> 00:37:55,080
Speaker 1: can really make the case for a person who truly

675
00:37:55,120 --> 00:37:58,120
Speaker 1: deserves to be thought of as a revolutionary genius who

676
00:37:58,239 --> 00:38:03,560
Speaker 1: systematically challenged scientific and philosophical misconceptions of his day with

677
00:38:03,640 --> 00:38:08,280
Speaker 1: kind of mercilessly careful thought and observation, and a champion

678
00:38:08,320 --> 00:38:12,480
Speaker 1: of empirical method. You know, the mindset that says, okay,

679
00:38:12,480 --> 00:38:14,560
Speaker 1: if you've got an idea about how the world is

680
00:38:14,640 --> 00:38:16,439
Speaker 1: in a way of looking at the world to check

681
00:38:16,480 --> 00:38:18,399
Speaker 1: and see if the idea is right, you should look

682
00:38:18,400 --> 00:38:22,600
Speaker 1: and check. So. Galileo is best known today for landing

683
00:38:22,640 --> 00:38:27,720
Speaker 1: a fatal blow against the theory of geocentrism. Under classic

684
00:38:27,760 --> 00:38:31,800
Speaker 1: geocentric cosmology, the Earth was the center of the universe,

685
00:38:32,040 --> 00:38:34,920
Speaker 1: and the Moon and the Sun and all the planets

686
00:38:35,000 --> 00:38:38,080
Speaker 1: orbited around the Earth. Now again, today, we know that

687
00:38:38,120 --> 00:38:41,319
Speaker 1: the Earth rotates, which is why the sky seems to

688
00:38:41,360 --> 00:38:44,480
Speaker 1: spin around the Earth. But the Earth feels pretty solid,

689
00:38:44,560 --> 00:38:47,640
Speaker 1: doesn't it, right, It doesn't feel like it's moving, and

690
00:38:47,680 --> 00:38:50,400
Speaker 1: we can watch the sky moving all around us. So

691
00:38:50,520 --> 00:38:53,120
Speaker 1: if you had to, how would you actually prove that

692
00:38:53,239 --> 00:38:56,719
Speaker 1: objects in the sky didn't orbit the Earth. Well, part

693
00:38:56,719 --> 00:38:58,279
Speaker 1: of it is, of course, observe if you get to

694
00:38:58,280 --> 00:39:00,799
Speaker 1: the point where you're tracking these objects that are presumably

695
00:39:01,160 --> 00:39:04,240
Speaker 1: moving around the Earth, and then you begin to notice

696
00:39:04,239 --> 00:39:06,640
Speaker 1: that they don't really behave like objects that are that

697
00:39:06,680 --> 00:39:09,239
Speaker 1: are orbiting around something you know well, right, and that

698
00:39:09,320 --> 00:39:11,200
Speaker 1: had been known for a long time, right, you know,

699
00:39:11,239 --> 00:39:13,640
Speaker 1: you'd see that the planets, don't they the planets don't

700
00:39:13,640 --> 00:39:16,320
Speaker 1: seem to perfectly go around the Earth in a in

701
00:39:16,360 --> 00:39:19,000
Speaker 1: a steady pattern. It's kind of odd, isn't it. Yeah, So,

702
00:39:19,160 --> 00:39:23,880
Speaker 1: like closer inspection of this model of the cosmos ultimately

703
00:39:24,000 --> 00:39:26,360
Speaker 1: ended up showing all these problems and the you know,

704
00:39:26,400 --> 00:39:29,640
Speaker 1: the clearly showed that that our understanding was not perfect.

705
00:39:29,680 --> 00:39:32,399
Speaker 1: Something was wrong with this model, right. So Galileo did

706
00:39:32,440 --> 00:39:35,840
Speaker 1: not invent the theory of helio centrism, which is the

707
00:39:35,880 --> 00:39:38,719
Speaker 1: idea that the Sun is the gravitational center of the

708
00:39:38,719 --> 00:39:41,239
Speaker 1: Solar system. He did not come up with that. Other

709
00:39:41,280 --> 00:39:44,960
Speaker 1: thinkers had already proposed this idea for various reasons, notably

710
00:39:45,000 --> 00:39:48,640
Speaker 1: the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus in uh in I believe

711
00:39:48,800 --> 00:39:51,279
Speaker 1: fifteen forty three or in the fifteen forties. He lived

712
00:39:51,560 --> 00:39:56,760
Speaker 1: fourteen seventy three to fifteen forty three. But Copernican heliocentrism,

713
00:39:56,840 --> 00:39:59,640
Speaker 1: while it had its defenders, had not been accepted by

714
00:39:59,640 --> 00:40:01,840
Speaker 1: the cat like Church, had not been accepted by the

715
00:40:02,239 --> 00:40:04,880
Speaker 1: all the academic authorities of the day. I think the

716
00:40:05,040 --> 00:40:08,600
Speaker 1: reigning expert opinion still viewed the universe much the way

717
00:40:08,680 --> 00:40:12,960
Speaker 1: Aristotle did, with an earth centered solar system, with special

718
00:40:13,200 --> 00:40:16,480
Speaker 1: types of motion for the objects in the heavens, with

719
00:40:16,640 --> 00:40:20,680
Speaker 1: celestial spheres that held up the planets as they orbited

720
00:40:20,719 --> 00:40:23,040
Speaker 1: the Earth out in space. So at the age of

721
00:40:23,120 --> 00:40:26,880
Speaker 1: twenty seven, Galileo was appointed a professor of mathematics at

722
00:40:26,920 --> 00:40:30,360
Speaker 1: the University of Padua, and he would go on to

723
00:40:30,480 --> 00:40:32,960
Speaker 1: challenge many of the strains of thinking about physics and

724
00:40:33,000 --> 00:40:36,239
Speaker 1: astronomy that have been dominant in European history. Often these

725
00:40:36,280 --> 00:40:39,800
Speaker 1: beliefs passed on by Aristotle. So one example of the

726
00:40:39,840 --> 00:40:43,160
Speaker 1: way he challenged these things was his important discoveries in

727
00:40:43,200 --> 00:40:46,120
Speaker 1: the physics of motion and inertia. I think just in

728
00:40:46,200 --> 00:40:48,160
Speaker 1: the past year, Robert we did an episode of Stuff

729
00:40:48,160 --> 00:40:51,040
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind where we talked about Galileo's thought

730
00:40:51,120 --> 00:40:54,080
Speaker 1: experiment about the falling bodies, you know, where he was

731
00:40:54,200 --> 00:40:57,840
Speaker 1: identifying the idea that the rate of acceleration for falling

732
00:40:57,920 --> 00:41:02,000
Speaker 1: objects is actually the same between lighter objects and heavier objects,

733
00:41:02,080 --> 00:41:05,800
Speaker 1: except for the influence of air resistance. But another question

734
00:41:05,880 --> 00:41:09,320
Speaker 1: that's interesting about inertia that was addressed by Galileo is

735
00:41:09,400 --> 00:41:12,799
Speaker 1: the idea of um, how do you tell how would

736
00:41:12,800 --> 00:41:15,600
Speaker 1: you tell if the Earth was rotating? If you're on

737
00:41:15,640 --> 00:41:17,520
Speaker 1: the surface of the Earth and it's spinning. Let's say

738
00:41:17,560 --> 00:41:20,920
Speaker 1: you're sort of a shoot from the hip seventeenth century

739
00:41:20,960 --> 00:41:24,799
Speaker 1: conventional physicist. You want to argue it's obvious the Earth

740
00:41:24,840 --> 00:41:28,239
Speaker 1: doesn't rotate because if you throw a ball straight up

741
00:41:28,239 --> 00:41:31,160
Speaker 1: in the air and the Earth were rotating, the ball

742
00:41:31,239 --> 00:41:34,359
Speaker 1: should land west of where you tossed it from right,

743
00:41:34,640 --> 00:41:37,839
Speaker 1: because the Earth should continue to rotate under it while

744
00:41:37,880 --> 00:41:40,239
Speaker 1: the ball is up at the air right and it's

745
00:41:40,320 --> 00:41:43,359
Speaker 1: kind of like a like a carnival ride. Um understanding

746
00:41:43,480 --> 00:41:47,400
Speaker 1: of how the earth rotation would work. But Galileo has

747
00:41:47,440 --> 00:41:50,880
Speaker 1: got a good answer for this. It doesn't fall away

748
00:41:50,960 --> 00:41:52,840
Speaker 1: from you if the ball and the Earth and the

749
00:41:53,000 --> 00:41:57,400
Speaker 1: atmosphere are all moving together at the same rate in

750
00:41:57,480 --> 00:42:00,160
Speaker 1: the same direction. This is a crucial bit of reasoning

751
00:42:00,200 --> 00:42:04,640
Speaker 1: about inertial reference frames. In the world of motion. Difference

752
00:42:04,840 --> 00:42:08,440
Speaker 1: means acceleration. If there are a group of objects all

753
00:42:08,520 --> 00:42:11,480
Speaker 1: moving in the same direction at the same speed, they

754
00:42:11,600 --> 00:42:15,040
Speaker 1: might as well be standing still with reference to each other.

755
00:42:15,520 --> 00:42:18,719
Speaker 1: It's only when the speed or the direction changes in

756
00:42:18,800 --> 00:42:21,440
Speaker 1: the motion that we notice the difference. So you throw

757
00:42:21,480 --> 00:42:24,319
Speaker 1: a ball straight up in the air on a rotating earth,

758
00:42:24,480 --> 00:42:26,680
Speaker 1: it's actually like throwing a ball straight up in the

759
00:42:26,800 --> 00:42:29,920
Speaker 1: air inside an airplane. Right. If you were able to

760
00:42:30,000 --> 00:42:32,640
Speaker 1: like take a cross section of the airplane and look

761
00:42:32,719 --> 00:42:35,040
Speaker 1: at the path of the ball, and you were standing

762
00:42:35,120 --> 00:42:37,600
Speaker 1: still just looking at it passed by, the ball would

763
00:42:37,600 --> 00:42:39,920
Speaker 1: go in an arc right, because it would go up

764
00:42:40,040 --> 00:42:43,080
Speaker 1: from the person's hand. But also everything in the plane,

765
00:42:43,120 --> 00:42:46,680
Speaker 1: including the ball, is going horizontally. You don't throw the

766
00:42:46,719 --> 00:42:48,560
Speaker 1: ball up in the airplane, first of all, don't throw

767
00:42:48,600 --> 00:42:50,600
Speaker 1: balls in the airplane. But if you throw a ball

768
00:42:50,680 --> 00:42:53,200
Speaker 1: up in the airplane, it's not going to just go flying, uh,

769
00:42:53,360 --> 00:42:56,680
Speaker 1: you know, straight back through the through the plane and

770
00:42:56,719 --> 00:42:59,760
Speaker 1: then smack into the door of the toilet exactly because

771
00:42:59,880 --> 00:43:02,960
Speaker 1: the airplane, the air inside the airplane, and the ball

772
00:43:03,160 --> 00:43:05,480
Speaker 1: and the person throwing it are all within the same

773
00:43:05,640 --> 00:43:08,800
Speaker 1: reference frame of horizontal motion. They're all traveling at the

774
00:43:08,840 --> 00:43:11,719
Speaker 1: same speed in the same direction. So relative to the

775
00:43:11,800 --> 00:43:13,759
Speaker 1: person in the plane, the ball just goes up and down.

776
00:43:14,200 --> 00:43:16,719
Speaker 1: And the same thing happens on Earth's surface. I mean,

777
00:43:16,800 --> 00:43:19,760
Speaker 1: if you were looking out from space, a ball thrown

778
00:43:20,000 --> 00:43:22,320
Speaker 1: straight up from the Earth's surface actually does go in

779
00:43:22,400 --> 00:43:25,520
Speaker 1: an arc, but relative to the person standing there who

780
00:43:25,560 --> 00:43:27,920
Speaker 1: threw it up, who's moving at the same speed, and

781
00:43:28,040 --> 00:43:30,719
Speaker 1: the around the around the center of rotation of the Earth,

782
00:43:31,000 --> 00:43:33,239
Speaker 1: it just goes straight up and down. So so, and

783
00:43:33,320 --> 00:43:35,680
Speaker 1: that's the realm of like physics and inertia, in which

784
00:43:35,719 --> 00:43:39,359
Speaker 1: Galileo was very influential and very important. But Galileo also

785
00:43:39,480 --> 00:43:42,759
Speaker 1: found out about the invention of the telescope in the Netherlands,

786
00:43:42,840 --> 00:43:45,920
Speaker 1: and he almost immediately had the insight to turn the

787
00:43:46,000 --> 00:43:49,880
Speaker 1: magnification power of the telescope to the night sky. And

788
00:43:49,960 --> 00:43:53,120
Speaker 1: he also, using his engineering skills, he made improvements to

789
00:43:53,200 --> 00:43:56,879
Speaker 1: the design of the primordial telescope to increase its power.

790
00:43:57,000 --> 00:43:59,960
Speaker 1: He eventually, I think it within just a couple of month,

791
00:44:00,120 --> 00:44:03,759
Speaker 1: he had scaled it up to twenty times magnification. Uh So,

792
00:44:03,880 --> 00:44:06,279
Speaker 1: I guess we should discuss a couple of the examples

793
00:44:06,400 --> 00:44:09,880
Speaker 1: of what Galileo saw when he looks through the telescope

794
00:44:10,200 --> 00:44:13,360
Speaker 1: and how it provided evidence that changed the dominant strains

795
00:44:13,400 --> 00:44:16,799
Speaker 1: of thinking about the universe. Now. One of his first

796
00:44:16,880 --> 00:44:19,640
Speaker 1: observations was the moon. Yeah, I mean, what that's that's

797
00:44:19,680 --> 00:44:21,600
Speaker 1: gonna be the first thing you're gonna look at. No

798
00:44:21,719 --> 00:44:24,040
Speaker 1: better than to look at the sun. But there's the moon.

799
00:44:24,200 --> 00:44:26,120
Speaker 1: Let's take a closer look. I mean, what's there to

800
00:44:26,239 --> 00:44:28,399
Speaker 1: learn about the moon? We can all see the moon

801
00:44:28,560 --> 00:44:30,880
Speaker 1: right like, the moon's right there. It just seems like,

802
00:44:31,000 --> 00:44:33,200
Speaker 1: what what should you be able to learn about the moon?

803
00:44:33,719 --> 00:44:36,080
Speaker 1: That would be revolutionary by looking at it in a

804
00:44:36,160 --> 00:44:39,480
Speaker 1: magnified way. But I thought this was really interesting. So

805
00:44:39,560 --> 00:44:43,040
Speaker 1: in December of sixteen o nine he observed the moon

806
00:44:43,160 --> 00:44:45,560
Speaker 1: through the telescope. And of course humans have been gazing

807
00:44:45,600 --> 00:44:47,960
Speaker 1: at the Moon at night for a long time, but

808
00:44:48,200 --> 00:44:52,160
Speaker 1: a common belief in the geocentric cosmology of the time

809
00:44:52,880 --> 00:44:56,760
Speaker 1: was that the moon and other objects above the lunar sphere.

810
00:44:56,960 --> 00:44:59,480
Speaker 1: This was a you know, a designation of a certain

811
00:44:59,560 --> 00:45:02,760
Speaker 1: area around the Earth in the heavens, that the stuff

812
00:45:02,800 --> 00:45:05,839
Speaker 1: in the lunar sphere and above it was perfect, which

813
00:45:05,840 --> 00:45:12,560
Speaker 1: would mean perfectly smooth, sort of featureless heavenly spheres. So well,

814
00:45:12,640 --> 00:45:15,680
Speaker 1: we could see patterns of changes in the coloration of

815
00:45:15,800 --> 00:45:18,399
Speaker 1: the Moon from the Earth. With the naked eye, many

816
00:45:18,480 --> 00:45:21,000
Speaker 1: imagine the Moon to be sort of like a heavenly

817
00:45:21,160 --> 00:45:25,359
Speaker 1: ball bearing. But what did Galileo see when he looked

818
00:45:25,400 --> 00:45:28,400
Speaker 1: at the moon? Well, specifically, he made observations of the

819
00:45:28,719 --> 00:45:33,120
Speaker 1: terminator line. This is the division between day and night

820
00:45:33,320 --> 00:45:36,440
Speaker 1: on a partially illuminated moon. So you're seeing, you know,

821
00:45:36,520 --> 00:45:38,120
Speaker 1: part of the moon is lit up by the sun

822
00:45:38,239 --> 00:45:40,080
Speaker 1: and part of it as the nighttime part of the moon,

823
00:45:40,280 --> 00:45:43,839
Speaker 1: and we're seeing that horizon of sunrise or sunset from

824
00:45:43,840 --> 00:45:46,920
Speaker 1: the Earth. If you've ever looked at this, what is

825
00:45:47,000 --> 00:45:52,439
Speaker 1: the line like, Well, of course it's jagged, and that's

826
00:45:52,680 --> 00:45:55,880
Speaker 1: it's jagged because the surface of the Moon is textured

827
00:45:56,120 --> 00:46:00,239
Speaker 1: with mountains and valleys and craters of different elevations which

828
00:46:00,360 --> 00:46:03,200
Speaker 1: catch the light of the sunrise or the sunset differently

829
00:46:03,560 --> 00:46:07,120
Speaker 1: and cast longer or shorter shadows. The surface of the

830
00:46:07,200 --> 00:46:10,120
Speaker 1: Moon was a terrain like the surface of the Earth,

831
00:46:10,600 --> 00:46:12,600
Speaker 1: making it seem like maybe the Moon and the Earth

832
00:46:12,719 --> 00:46:17,840
Speaker 1: are not actually special examples of fundamentally different universal essences

833
00:46:18,000 --> 00:46:22,279
Speaker 1: or spheres of being, but instead are similar chunks of

834
00:46:22,400 --> 00:46:25,680
Speaker 1: matter obeying the same physical laws. So in other words,

835
00:46:25,719 --> 00:46:29,200
Speaker 1: it was almost almost like we've discussed on at least

836
00:46:29,200 --> 00:46:31,480
Speaker 1: on stuff to blow your mind, like you know, older

837
00:46:31,560 --> 00:46:33,719
Speaker 1: models of the Moon as being like some sort of

838
00:46:33,880 --> 00:46:36,440
Speaker 1: a mirror like object or certainly here like a holy

839
00:46:36,520 --> 00:46:39,120
Speaker 1: ball bearing. And basically he's looking at the Moon and

840
00:46:39,200 --> 00:46:43,400
Speaker 1: seeing that the Moon is at least earth like on

841
00:46:43,520 --> 00:46:46,960
Speaker 1: the surface. Like it is. It is earthlike in a

842
00:46:48,200 --> 00:46:50,600
Speaker 1: not in the sense that it has trees or lie

843
00:46:50,800 --> 00:46:54,000
Speaker 1: or canals or anything, but is it the very least

844
00:46:54,200 --> 00:46:55,799
Speaker 1: like it's it seems to be made of a sort

845
00:46:55,840 --> 00:46:58,800
Speaker 1: of dirt or rock. It is land. Yeah, it has terrain,

846
00:46:58,920 --> 00:47:02,080
Speaker 1: it has mountains, it as craters, there's stuff going on there.

847
00:47:02,680 --> 00:47:05,800
Speaker 1: Uh So that meant, yeah, that's an interesting point of analogy.

848
00:47:06,360 --> 00:47:10,040
Speaker 1: Then I think the really big observation came with Jupiter.

849
00:47:10,280 --> 00:47:12,320
Speaker 1: So this would have been I guess just like a

850
00:47:12,400 --> 00:47:15,919
Speaker 1: month later in January of six ten, Galileo was making

851
00:47:16,000 --> 00:47:20,200
Speaker 1: observations of Jupiter. And to be perfectly clear, Galileo did

852
00:47:20,280 --> 00:47:23,480
Speaker 1: not discover Jupiter. We mentioned earlier that you know, the

853
00:47:23,560 --> 00:47:26,719
Speaker 1: planets up to Uranus had been known about for a

854
00:47:26,840 --> 00:47:28,799
Speaker 1: long time. They could be seen with the naked eye.

855
00:47:29,080 --> 00:47:31,279
Speaker 1: Jupiter's bright enough to see with the naked eye under

856
00:47:31,280 --> 00:47:34,120
Speaker 1: the right conditions as a point of light. So people

857
00:47:34,160 --> 00:47:37,520
Speaker 1: would have known about Jupiter since ancient times. What made

858
00:47:37,600 --> 00:47:41,799
Speaker 1: Galileo's observations of Jupiter special was that when viewed through

859
00:47:41,840 --> 00:47:45,520
Speaker 1: his upgraded telescope, Jupiter's sort of single point of light

860
00:47:46,120 --> 00:47:52,480
Speaker 1: became four points of light, bringing us back to the moons. Yeah, exactly,

861
00:47:52,600 --> 00:47:56,440
Speaker 1: so he saw he saw these points of light in

862
00:47:56,520 --> 00:48:00,320
Speaker 1: a straight line alongside Jupiter, like as if mounted on

863
00:48:00,400 --> 00:48:03,480
Speaker 1: a rod going through the equator of the greater planet.

864
00:48:03,880 --> 00:48:06,000
Speaker 1: So first he made a note and decided, Okay, I

865
00:48:06,040 --> 00:48:08,680
Speaker 1: guess maybe these are stars, but I'll come back and

866
00:48:08,840 --> 00:48:12,320
Speaker 1: check later. And if they were background stars, by the

867
00:48:12,400 --> 00:48:14,520
Speaker 1: time he came back to check again later, they should

868
00:48:14,560 --> 00:48:17,239
Speaker 1: have moved along with the rest of the background starfield,

869
00:48:17,320 --> 00:48:20,480
Speaker 1: you know, because Jupiter would be closer and it's moving along, uh,

870
00:48:20,880 --> 00:48:24,080
Speaker 1: you know, independent of the stars. But instead he found

871
00:48:24,239 --> 00:48:27,719
Speaker 1: that these other stars stuck to Jupiter like glue, and

872
00:48:27,840 --> 00:48:31,719
Speaker 1: that also they moved, They moved back and forth as

873
00:48:31,760 --> 00:48:35,320
Speaker 1: if along this rod, stringing them to the planet. And

874
00:48:35,560 --> 00:48:37,960
Speaker 1: later he discovered that there was a fourth star in

875
00:48:38,239 --> 00:48:40,719
Speaker 1: in this line along with Jupiter, in addition to the

876
00:48:40,840 --> 00:48:45,960
Speaker 1: three had already seen this naturally suggested a radical conclusion,

877
00:48:46,280 --> 00:48:51,040
Speaker 1: which is that Jupiter has satellites, and we now know these, Yes,

878
00:48:51,120 --> 00:48:53,480
Speaker 1: the Galilean moons of Jupiter. We did a whole episode

879
00:48:53,480 --> 00:48:56,480
Speaker 1: of stuff to blow your mind about them. It's io Ganymede,

880
00:48:56,520 --> 00:49:00,480
Speaker 1: Europa and Callisto, and these are moons. But what was

881
00:49:00,560 --> 00:49:03,600
Speaker 1: undeniable at the time was that this other planet had

882
00:49:03,719 --> 00:49:06,960
Speaker 1: satellites orbiting it the same way that Earth did, the

883
00:49:07,040 --> 00:49:09,960
Speaker 1: same way the Earth has a moon, Jupiter has moons.

884
00:49:10,560 --> 00:49:14,080
Speaker 1: So if there were moons orbiting Jupiter, then it's really

885
00:49:14,239 --> 00:49:18,280
Speaker 1: hard to keep swinging your sword for the cosmological uniqueness

886
00:49:18,440 --> 00:49:22,920
Speaker 1: of Earth in the geocentric model. Like, it's clear evidence

887
00:49:23,000 --> 00:49:25,560
Speaker 1: that there is at least one other center of motion

888
00:49:25,640 --> 00:49:28,600
Speaker 1: in the universe, and it's Jupiter. And if Jupiter can

889
00:49:28,640 --> 00:49:30,640
Speaker 1: be a center of motion, why can't the Sun be

890
00:49:30,760 --> 00:49:34,319
Speaker 1: a center of motion? Right? It ultimately ends up simplifying

891
00:49:34,840 --> 00:49:38,239
Speaker 1: your attempts to get a grasp on, you know, the

892
00:49:38,280 --> 00:49:41,680
Speaker 1: celestial mechanics of your immediate neighborhood. Yeah. Now, like with

893
00:49:41,800 --> 00:49:44,560
Speaker 1: the invention of the telescope, the credit for the discovery

894
00:49:44,600 --> 00:49:46,760
Speaker 1: of the moons of Jupiter, I think is also somewhat

895
00:49:46,840 --> 00:49:50,960
Speaker 1: historically disputed. I've read there's there's some attempts to credit

896
00:49:51,040 --> 00:49:53,840
Speaker 1: the German astronomer Simon Marius, who I think has also

897
00:49:54,040 --> 00:49:58,520
Speaker 1: been credited as maybe a sort of inventor of the telescope. Um.

898
00:49:58,840 --> 00:50:02,239
Speaker 1: It's it's also and suggested that the ancient Chinese astronomer

899
00:50:02,320 --> 00:50:05,760
Speaker 1: Gone Day might have seen one of the moons of Jupiter,

900
00:50:05,960 --> 00:50:08,239
Speaker 1: or seeing the moons of Jupiter when he described in

901
00:50:08,320 --> 00:50:11,280
Speaker 1: the fourth century b c. E. Having seen a small

902
00:50:11,480 --> 00:50:15,000
Speaker 1: object next to Jupiter. Uh. And and technically, I think

903
00:50:15,120 --> 00:50:18,279
Speaker 1: if the conditions are just right, it's kind of like

904
00:50:18,400 --> 00:50:22,040
Speaker 1: with seeing Uranus. Right, like, if it's just right, you

905
00:50:22,239 --> 00:50:24,360
Speaker 1: might be able to make out the moons of Jupiter

906
00:50:24,480 --> 00:50:27,480
Speaker 1: with the naked eye. But it's it's tough, it's it's

907
00:50:27,520 --> 00:50:30,680
Speaker 1: hard to do. But with the telescope it becomes predictable.

908
00:50:31,200 --> 00:50:33,920
Speaker 1: You know that you can point the telescope at Jupiter

909
00:50:34,120 --> 00:50:36,520
Speaker 1: and see these bodies. It's not like, you know, it's

910
00:50:36,840 --> 00:50:39,800
Speaker 1: glimpsing something that may or may not be there. Of

911
00:50:39,880 --> 00:50:42,040
Speaker 1: course that you know, that's still that becomes an issue

912
00:50:42,440 --> 00:50:45,000
Speaker 1: with the telescope and astronomy in general. Uh. You know,

913
00:50:45,120 --> 00:50:48,359
Speaker 1: in the period to follow we've discussed that on our

914
00:50:48,400 --> 00:50:51,920
Speaker 1: shows before as well. Yeah, yeah, and so Galileo's progress

915
00:50:51,960 --> 00:50:54,920
Speaker 1: in astronomy and physics, I think it helped pave the

916
00:50:54,960 --> 00:50:58,360
Speaker 1: way for the revolutionary work of other scientists like Isaac Newton,

917
00:50:58,480 --> 00:51:00,360
Speaker 1: you know, who picked up the tour which of this

918
00:51:00,480 --> 00:51:04,600
Speaker 1: idea of the uniformity of physical laws, showing that one

919
00:51:04,640 --> 00:51:07,360
Speaker 1: thing Newton showed was the same physical laws that governed

920
00:51:07,400 --> 00:51:10,800
Speaker 1: the path of a cannonball on Earth also governed the

921
00:51:10,880 --> 00:51:14,279
Speaker 1: motions of the planets and the comets, right universal gravitation.

922
00:51:14,680 --> 00:51:18,160
Speaker 1: That that's the big Newtonian breakthrough. There's no special physics

923
00:51:18,320 --> 00:51:21,520
Speaker 1: or special essences for the heavens. It's just matter and

924
00:51:21,640 --> 00:51:24,759
Speaker 1: energy obeying the same underlying laws of physics. And I

925
00:51:24,840 --> 00:51:28,480
Speaker 1: think the telescope was what allowed the empirical observations that

926
00:51:28,680 --> 00:51:31,480
Speaker 1: gave way to that way of seeing the world. It

927
00:51:31,600 --> 00:51:34,879
Speaker 1: made it possible. The telescope showed us that up there

928
00:51:35,120 --> 00:51:38,279
Speaker 1: was like down here, and it could be understood now.

929
00:51:38,360 --> 00:51:40,719
Speaker 1: The telescope in the microscope are are like we said,

930
00:51:40,719 --> 00:51:42,960
Speaker 1: are their twin technologies in many ways, and they have

931
00:51:43,360 --> 00:51:46,720
Speaker 1: I think together lead to changes that have drastically changed

932
00:51:46,760 --> 00:51:50,120
Speaker 1: our understanding of our place in the cosmos. Um I

933
00:51:50,200 --> 00:51:54,000
Speaker 1: always come back to the wonderful documentary short The Powers

934
00:51:54,040 --> 00:51:58,839
Speaker 1: of Ten by Charles and ray Eames from seven. It's great, Yeah,

935
00:51:58,920 --> 00:52:00,840
Speaker 1: it's it's readily available on YouTube. So if you have

936
00:52:00,960 --> 00:52:04,160
Speaker 1: not seen it, go watch it now. Uh, and you know,

937
00:52:04,200 --> 00:52:06,359
Speaker 1: stop listening to this podcast, go watch Powers of Ten

938
00:52:06,440 --> 00:52:09,440
Speaker 1: and come back, because says even today, you know, it

939
00:52:09,560 --> 00:52:13,720
Speaker 1: effectively conveys the scale of the physical universe via orders

940
00:52:13,760 --> 00:52:17,840
Speaker 1: of magnitude. And these technologies, the telescope and the microscope,

941
00:52:18,000 --> 00:52:21,000
Speaker 1: they've enabled us to begin a journey both inward and outward.

942
00:52:21,360 --> 00:52:23,600
Speaker 1: And while you know, we might have thought, you know,

943
00:52:23,680 --> 00:52:26,719
Speaker 1: previously you could essentially like hold up at a telescope

944
00:52:26,760 --> 00:52:29,040
Speaker 1: and you'd be able to, you know, glimpse the barricades

945
00:52:29,080 --> 00:52:32,359
Speaker 1: of heaven, the limits of of the universe. But it's

946
00:52:33,080 --> 00:52:36,200
Speaker 1: but what's been more amazing is that we've either the

947
00:52:36,440 --> 00:52:39,440
Speaker 1: absence of those barriers are our inability to glimpse such

948
00:52:39,640 --> 00:52:42,840
Speaker 1: limits on a cosmos that's utterly on a scale beyond

949
00:52:42,920 --> 00:52:47,920
Speaker 1: anything we've evolved to comprehend. Modern astronomy is is entirely

950
00:52:48,080 --> 00:52:52,400
Speaker 1: dependent though upon this technological logical step, the invention of

951
00:52:52,520 --> 00:52:55,040
Speaker 1: the telescope. Now we've gone a long way, since the

952
00:52:55,280 --> 00:52:59,080
Speaker 1: simple glass refraction telescope, which you know, bent light through

953
00:52:59,080 --> 00:53:02,560
Speaker 1: a transparent medium. Even optical telescopes now that are just

954
00:53:02,719 --> 00:53:04,960
Speaker 1: using visible light tend to be more on the basis

955
00:53:05,000 --> 00:53:08,120
Speaker 1: of mirrors because it's easier to magnify more that way.

956
00:53:08,200 --> 00:53:11,319
Speaker 1: It's a reflection instead of refraction. But there are also

957
00:53:11,400 --> 00:53:13,960
Speaker 1: tons of other types of telescopes that aren't even looking

958
00:53:13,960 --> 00:53:17,320
Speaker 1: at visible light anymore, right, I mean, you've got radio telescopes,

959
00:53:17,480 --> 00:53:21,840
Speaker 1: X ray telescopes, gamma ray telescopes, cosmic ray telescopes. You know,

960
00:53:21,880 --> 00:53:25,320
Speaker 1: there's a tremendous amount of human achievement in space exploration

961
00:53:25,400 --> 00:53:30,160
Speaker 1: that you can lump under the legacy column for the telescope. Again,

962
00:53:30,239 --> 00:53:33,400
Speaker 1: it's just really hard to overstate the importance of this invention.

963
00:53:34,120 --> 00:53:36,560
Speaker 1: But then there are also a number of telescope based

964
00:53:36,600 --> 00:53:39,160
Speaker 1: technologies and gadgets to consider that there may be a

965
00:53:39,200 --> 00:53:46,840
Speaker 1: little more, you know, rooted in terrestrial existence. Considered the sextant,

966
00:53:46,880 --> 00:53:51,120
Speaker 1: for example, which depends on a telescope and enabled navigators

967
00:53:51,160 --> 00:53:54,960
Speaker 1: to measure the angle between an astronomical object and the horizon,

968
00:53:55,320 --> 00:54:00,279
Speaker 1: a key for celestial navigation and see. Another is the theodolite. Uh,

969
00:54:00,360 --> 00:54:03,600
Speaker 1: this is an optical instrument that is used to measure

970
00:54:03,680 --> 00:54:07,560
Speaker 1: angles between points. And you've all seen this before, uh

971
00:54:08,000 --> 00:54:11,760
Speaker 1: probably driving around watching surveyors at work. Is used in surveying,

972
00:54:11,920 --> 00:54:15,240
Speaker 1: is used in construction, also used in meteorology and rocketry.

973
00:54:15,440 --> 00:54:19,040
Speaker 1: But it would not be possible without basic telescope technology

974
00:54:19,840 --> 00:54:22,560
Speaker 1: and uh on. On a much lesser note, or maybe

975
00:54:22,640 --> 00:54:25,799
Speaker 1: not a lesser note, the telescope is also a predecessor

976
00:54:25,880 --> 00:54:29,279
Speaker 1: to the kaleidoscope, which you know, it's a fun get

977
00:54:29,480 --> 00:54:32,080
Speaker 1: that I actually would wouldn't mind doing a whole episode on.

978
00:54:32,280 --> 00:54:34,920
Speaker 1: But it was invented in the early nineteenth century by

979
00:54:34,960 --> 00:54:39,040
Speaker 1: the Scottish scientist David Brewster, a noted optics expert himself,

980
00:54:39,280 --> 00:54:43,760
Speaker 1: who also invented and improved uh stereoscope, you know, stereo

981
00:54:43,840 --> 00:54:47,640
Speaker 1: viewers and uh and also a binocular camera and other

982
00:54:47,760 --> 00:54:52,160
Speaker 1: optical inventions. Uh yeah. Once you start going down the

983
00:54:52,239 --> 00:54:55,240
Speaker 1: rabbit hole of looking at like improvements and an optical

984
00:54:55,320 --> 00:55:00,279
Speaker 1: technology and new optical technology innovations and inventions, uh, you know,

985
00:55:00,360 --> 00:55:06,000
Speaker 1: it really gets gets fascinated. Yeah yeah, and it's I mean,

986
00:55:06,040 --> 00:55:09,200
Speaker 1: the telescope. I think it would not be wrong to

987
00:55:09,280 --> 00:55:12,080
Speaker 1: say that it changed the world. I don't want to

988
00:55:12,360 --> 00:55:14,960
Speaker 1: put everything on the telescope and not say and say

989
00:55:15,000 --> 00:55:17,360
Speaker 1: that there were not other influences. But I think the

990
00:55:17,440 --> 00:55:21,399
Speaker 1: telescope was one of the most important things that led

991
00:55:21,480 --> 00:55:24,400
Speaker 1: to this change in our way of thinking about the universe,

992
00:55:24,560 --> 00:55:28,319
Speaker 1: that said, uh, you know that that phenomena everywhere can

993
00:55:28,360 --> 00:55:32,640
Speaker 1: be understood by appealing to universal laws and not necessarily

994
00:55:32,800 --> 00:55:37,000
Speaker 1: like special circumstances that that can't be understood from our

995
00:55:37,040 --> 00:55:39,880
Speaker 1: point of view. Right, Yeah, And and again it's it's

996
00:55:39,920 --> 00:55:43,320
Speaker 1: such a fascinating one too, because it's it's it's a

997
00:55:43,400 --> 00:55:46,359
Speaker 1: situation where like, you know, all the elements were there

998
00:55:46,560 --> 00:55:49,719
Speaker 1: all you know, the technology was available, and then it's

999
00:55:50,040 --> 00:55:52,840
Speaker 1: you know, looking back in retrospect, you know, we we

1000
00:55:52,920 --> 00:55:55,239
Speaker 1: can we can look at the timeline and say, like,

1001
00:55:55,360 --> 00:55:57,040
Speaker 1: you know, who's gonna do it? Why? Why have they

1002
00:55:57,120 --> 00:55:59,880
Speaker 1: not invented it yet? Why is the telescope not changing

1003
00:56:00,000 --> 00:56:02,960
Speaker 1: the world yet? And then the moment occurs, and uh,

1004
00:56:03,360 --> 00:56:06,080
Speaker 1: and the world changes. We already mentioned this, but I

1005
00:56:06,160 --> 00:56:09,440
Speaker 1: am very interested in in actually going backward in this

1006
00:56:09,640 --> 00:56:12,320
Speaker 1: story to some time in the future, come back to

1007
00:56:12,480 --> 00:56:18,000
Speaker 1: earlier moments of breakthroughs in optics and refraction lenses, the

1008
00:56:18,120 --> 00:56:21,080
Speaker 1: creation of spectacles, for example, spectacles is a key one.

1009
00:56:21,360 --> 00:56:24,800
Speaker 1: Now we have done a previous episode on sunglasses. Yeah, so,

1010
00:56:25,400 --> 00:56:27,680
Speaker 1: which gets a little bit into the the into the

1011
00:56:27,719 --> 00:56:31,120
Speaker 1: spectacles area, but not completely. Oh, I should have mentioned this.

1012
00:56:31,160 --> 00:56:33,680
Speaker 1: I can't believe I forgot when we're talking about Giovanni

1013
00:56:33,760 --> 00:56:38,960
Speaker 1: Della Giovanni Batista della Porta. Uh, he apparently proposed some

1014
00:56:39,160 --> 00:56:41,840
Speaker 1: changes I think to the camera obscura. I don't know

1015
00:56:41,880 --> 00:56:43,800
Speaker 1: if he was the first person to do this, but

1016
00:56:43,880 --> 00:56:46,360
Speaker 1: I think he proposed a camera obscura with a lens

1017
00:56:46,600 --> 00:56:49,879
Speaker 1: on it as opposed to just depenhole. Basically, what we're

1018
00:56:49,880 --> 00:56:52,400
Speaker 1: saying is it eventually on Invention we will cover the

1019
00:56:52,440 --> 00:56:57,480
Speaker 1: complete history of optical technology because there's a lot. There's

1020
00:56:57,520 --> 00:56:59,719
Speaker 1: a lot kind of Again, it comes back to what

1021
00:57:00,040 --> 00:57:03,440
Speaker 1: we are and such. We're such highly visual creatures that

1022
00:57:03,640 --> 00:57:08,280
Speaker 1: optical technology is of course groundbreaking. It is of course

1023
00:57:08,360 --> 00:57:12,479
Speaker 1: world changing, be it the way the motion picture changed

1024
00:57:12,520 --> 00:57:15,759
Speaker 1: the world or the way that the telescope change the world. Yeah.

1025
00:57:16,080 --> 00:57:19,439
Speaker 1: I'm also feeling a little bit of regret that we maybe,

1026
00:57:19,560 --> 00:57:21,600
Speaker 1: maybe in this episode we went too far with the

1027
00:57:21,640 --> 00:57:25,680
Speaker 1: egg based cryptography and and barred ourselves the opportunity to

1028
00:57:25,760 --> 00:57:28,720
Speaker 1: do a whole episode on egg based cryptography in the future.

1029
00:57:28,880 --> 00:57:30,440
Speaker 1: I don't know, there could be more. I don't know.

1030
00:57:30,920 --> 00:57:35,080
Speaker 1: This is my my introduction to egg based cryptography. So well,

1031
00:57:35,480 --> 00:57:38,800
Speaker 1: perhaps there's there's a whole episode's worth of additional data

1032
00:57:38,840 --> 00:57:42,160
Speaker 1: out there we should consider. We're just egg technology in general, right,

1033
00:57:43,000 --> 00:57:48,480
Speaker 1: Who invented that wire slicer thing for your hard boiled eggs? Oh?

1034
00:57:48,640 --> 00:57:52,080
Speaker 1: You know this is actually you bringing this up. Unitaskers

1035
00:57:52,240 --> 00:57:55,560
Speaker 1: is the term that sometimes use for kitchen devices like

1036
00:57:55,680 --> 00:58:00,040
Speaker 1: this Brown. I don't know if, but he uses it

1037
00:58:00,120 --> 00:58:04,920
Speaker 1: all the time. He loathes unitaskers. Uh, you know, it

1038
00:58:04,960 --> 00:58:06,800
Speaker 1: depends on the un task or some of them. I love.

1039
00:58:07,240 --> 00:58:09,520
Speaker 1: But I would actually love to do an episode where

1040
00:58:09,560 --> 00:58:13,640
Speaker 1: we just look at different unitasker devices, you know, because

1041
00:58:13,680 --> 00:58:15,920
Speaker 1: those are kind of like the ultimate and invention right

1042
00:58:16,240 --> 00:58:18,800
Speaker 1: where you have you've, you've you've come up with with

1043
00:58:19,240 --> 00:58:22,520
Speaker 1: with this device that doesn't really change the world. What

1044
00:58:22,680 --> 00:58:25,960
Speaker 1: changes the world in very small and specific ways, such

1045
00:58:26,040 --> 00:58:28,840
Speaker 1: as cutting down the time it takes to slice a

1046
00:58:28,960 --> 00:58:32,640
Speaker 1: boiled egg into several pieces, not just cutting down the time,

1047
00:58:32,680 --> 00:58:36,439
Speaker 1: also ensuring regularity in the word of slices. Yeah, I'm

1048
00:58:36,480 --> 00:58:39,480
Speaker 1: also generally against unitaskers, but there are a few I

1049
00:58:39,560 --> 00:58:41,880
Speaker 1: can probably think of that I get into every time

1050
00:58:41,920 --> 00:58:44,040
Speaker 1: I use a spatula, I I wonder, like, what is

1051
00:58:44,080 --> 00:58:46,120
Speaker 1: the like the full history of the spatulate? How did

1052
00:58:46,160 --> 00:58:48,600
Speaker 1: we get to this point? And then I forget to

1053
00:58:48,680 --> 00:58:51,840
Speaker 1: look into it afterwards. No, yeah, the differences the history

1054
00:58:51,880 --> 00:58:55,200
Speaker 1: of cooking culture is really interesting, like like using chopsticks

1055
00:58:55,200 --> 00:58:58,120
Speaker 1: to cook versus using them to eat. You know, yeah, yeah,

1056
00:58:58,120 --> 00:59:01,320
Speaker 1: that was previous episode of Invention. All right, So as

1057
00:59:01,560 --> 00:59:05,040
Speaker 1: as you can tell, we're open to all manner of

1058
00:59:05,080 --> 00:59:07,560
Speaker 1: subjects here on Invention, and we would love to hear

1059
00:59:07,600 --> 00:59:11,400
Speaker 1: from you if you have any particular request. If there's

1060
00:59:11,560 --> 00:59:14,760
Speaker 1: a UNI tasker out there, uh, you know that we should,

1061
00:59:15,160 --> 00:59:16,920
Speaker 1: you know, give due diligence on the show. Let us

1062
00:59:16,960 --> 00:59:19,160
Speaker 1: know we would love to hear from you. In the meantime,

1063
00:59:19,200 --> 00:59:21,560
Speaker 1: if you want to check out other episodes of Invention,

1064
00:59:22,320 --> 00:59:25,080
Speaker 1: head on over to invention pod dot com. That's where

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Speaker 1: we'll find them all. And remember, the most important thing

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Speaker 1: you can do to support this show and ensure we

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Speaker 1: keep delivering it to you is to make sure you

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Speaker 1: have subscribed to it somewhere and then make sure that

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Speaker 1: you have left or review uh and a rating if

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Speaker 1: that is at all possible. Huge thanks as always to

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Speaker 1: our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would

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Speaker 1: like to get in touch with us with feedback on

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Speaker 1: this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for

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Speaker 1: the future, just to say hi, you can email us

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Speaker 1: at contact dot invention pod dot com. Invention is production

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Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio from our podcasts, from my heart Radio,

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Speaker 1: because the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

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Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows. H