observational astronomer, and experimental scientist; and the world’s first
physiologist, who explained how blood circulated through our blood
vessels. Galileo and Harvey represent the best and worst of their time.
Galileo is one of the last scientists to be tried by the Roman Inquisition,
spending the last decade of his life under house arrest for his belief in
heliocentrism. Harvey rose to fame as Physician Extraordinary to King
James I and “Doctor of Physic” at Oxford.
“Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1665, thought that there was no astronomy
worth the name before Copernicus, no physics before Galileo, no
physiology before William Harvey.”^7 Both Harvey and Galileo saw the
world with mechanical sensibilities, perceiving orbits and revolutions;
their insights into the ambulations of satellites, the motion of blood, and
trajectory and velocity of moving objects were radical indeed, but were
limited by simple, Euclidian geometry.
The Scientific Revolution had been launched, but what was desperately
needed was an earth-shattering insight into how to numerically describe
and predict the world. In the same year that Galileo died, in a small hamlet
far north of London, Isaac Newton was born a fatherless, premature infant
who would become perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived, and who
would provide the rules and the calculus to contemplate our world.
The year 1610 found the city of London as the principal North Sea port,
with an exploding population of a quarter-million people enjoying the
English Renaissance of Elizabethan times. Literary giants like William
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne held center stage; performances
of Macbeth at the Globe Theatre delighted crowds (although there was no
bathroom for the three thousand spectators). The Jamestown settlement
was underway in the New World, and the Ulster Plantation had just been
initiated by King James I, who authorized an English translation of ancient
scripture for the Bible that would bear his name.
The fragile world of the 17th century left the European metropolitans
“extremely liable to disease, physical suffering, and early death ... with
life expectancy not much over thirty years of age.”^8 Plagues, epidemics,
famine, overcrowding, rampant poverty, and poor sanitation meant that
London was awash in both poetic brilliance and excrement; new
institutions and outdated, filthy traditions.
When Galileo released his Starry Messenger in March 1610, it didn’t
take long to reach Gray’s Inn, one of the four “inns of the court” in