Western Civilization

philosophically false and absurd and theologically at least

erroneous.”^3 Thus, the church attacked the Copernican

system because it threatened not only Scripture but also

the entire prevailing conception of the universe (see the

box on p. 392). The heavens were no longer a spiritual

world but a world of matter. Humans were no longer at

the center, and God was no longer in a specific place. All

this the church found intolerable. In 1633, Galileo was

found guilty of teaching the condemned Copernican sys-

tem and was forced to recant his “errors.”

The condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisition,

coming at a time of economic decline, seriously under-

mined further scientific work in Italy, which had been

at the forefront of scientific innovation. Leadership in

science now passed to the northern countries, espe-

cially England, France, and the Dutch Netherlands. By

the 1630s and 1640s, no reasonable astronomer could

overlook that Galileo’s discoveries, combined with Kep-

ler’s mathematical laws, had made nonsense of the

Ptolemaic-Aristotelian world system and clearly estab-

lished the reasonableness of the Copernican model.

Nevertheless, the problem of explaining motion in the

universe and tying together the ideas of Copernicus,

Galileo, and Kepler had not yet been solved. This would

be the work of an Englishman who has long been con-

sidered the greatest genius of the Scientific Revolution.

Newton

Born in the English village of Woolsthorpe, Isaac New-

ton (1642–1727) at first showed little promise. Then

he attended Cambridge University, and in 1669 he

accepted a chair in mathematics at the university. Dur-

ing an intense period of creativity from 1684 to 1686,

he wrote his major work,Mathematical Principles of

Natural Philosophy, known simply as thePrincipia(prin-

SIP-ee-uh), from the first word of its Latin title. In this

work, Newton spelled out the mathematical proofs

demonstrating his universal law of gravitation. New-

ton’s work was the culmination of the theories of

Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. Though each had

undermined some part of the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian

cosmology, no one until Newton had pieced together a

coherent synthesis for a new cosmology.

The Telescope.The invention of the

telescope enabled Europeans to inaugurate a

new age in astronomy. Shown here is Johannes

Hevelius, an eminent German-Polish astrologer

(1611–1697), making an observation with his

telescope. Hevelius’s observations were highly

regarded. He located his telescope on the roof

of his own house, and by the 1660s, his

celestial observatory was considered one of the

best in Europe. The inset shows a photograph

ªBibliothe of Galileo’s original telescope, built in 1609.

`que Nationale, Paris/SuperStock

Museo della Scienza, Florence//Scala/Art Resource, NY

Toward a New Heaven: A Revolution in Astronomy 391

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