Have you seen the Smithsonian Atlas of Space? It’s a very nice-looking book published last year by Smithsonian Books (DC). It was written by NASA chief historian Roger D. Launias.
The book is not a history of astronomy book. Nevertheless, the stated motivation for the book is historical. The book opens by noting that a century has passed since Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the Big Bang Theory, and the idea of an expanding universe “first gained currency.” Yes, the book does cite the work of Fr. Georges Lemaître regarding the Big Bang Theory.
And yet, despite the Smithsonian name and the expertise of a NASA chief historian, some of the same tired old tales are found in the book.
On page 24, in the discussion of heliocentrism, is the claim that “the irregular movement of certain planets could not be explained even with Ptolemy’s epicycles. This ‘heliocentric’ model of the universe resolved the flaws in the Ptolemaic system”. Surely the author understood that Copernicus’s heliocentric model itself had epicycles, circles upon circles, to help explain those irregular movements, and that, because Copernicus’s version of the heliocentric model was itself based on circles, it could not explain motions any better than the geocentric model of Ptolemy that was based on circles.
Likewise, the author certainly understood that the thing Copernicus could explain that Ptolemy could not was that the retrograde motions of planets were connected to the position of the sun. In the model of Ptolemy, planets circled the earth, riding on large epicycles that explained the retrograde motions. The sun was not part of the picture. In the model of Copernicus, planets circled the sun, and the retrograde motions were a function of their relative positions going around the sun (the small epicycles served to correct details of planetary motion). Thus, the sun was part of the picture.
One might argue that, since the Smithsonian Atlas of Space is not a history of astronomy book, the explanation I am giving here is too much historical detail. Perhaps “the irregular movement of certain planets could not be explained” is supposed to cover what I just wrote above. Of course, then it would be better to write “the irregular movement of the planets could not be explained”. All the planets undergo retrograde motion, not “certain” planets.
And then, further down the page there is this:
Although Christian thinkers, believing that humanity was at the center of the universe, refused to accept the Copernican model until the seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and others reinforced the findings of Copernicus. Commonly called the Copernican Revolution, this transformation of ideas represented a fundamental shift in our understanding of the universe until Albert Einstein….
Oh, for crying out loud! The same old “Christians with their heads in the sand over science” story. Do we have to have this in a book published in 2024?
Consider first: Kepler, Galilei, and Newton were all Christian thinkers. Kepler is a clear example. His diagram of the heliocentric universe, shown above, stemmed from his conviction that God used the five platonic solids of geometry to determine the spacing of the planets. But he is the one who did away with the little epicycles, later figuring out that planetary orbits were elliptical, as we understand them to be even today. He closed his 1619 book Harmony of the World with:
If I have been enticed into brashness by the wonderful beauty of thy works, or if I have loved my own glory among men, while advancing in work destined for thy glory, gently and mercifully pardon me: and finally deign graciously to cause that these [astronomical] demonstrations may lead to thy glory and to the salvation of souls, and nowhere be an obstacle to that. Amen.
And he wrote lots more like that — for example, “There is nothing I want to find out and yearn to know with greater urgency than this: Can I find God, who I can almost grasp with my own hands in looking at the universe, also in myself?”
Likewise, Galileo was a practicing Catholic with a clear belief in God. Newton wrote in his Principia about the (heliocentric) solar system being a testimony to the King of the Universe. He wrote more about religion than he did about math and science.
Second: Who were the Christian thinkers who, because of a belief that humanity was at the center of the universe, refused to accept the Copernican model? My area of research, where I have many scholarly publications and count as an expert, is those astronomers who refused to accept the Copernican model during the Copernican Revolution. I’m hard pressed to come up with knowledgeable Christian thinkers who, because of a belief that humanity was at the center of the universe, refused to accept the Copernican model. I can come up with knowledgeable Christian thinkers who, because of a lack of scientific evidence for the Copernican model over the geocentric model of Tycho Brahe, combined with a respect for Scripture and the feeling that one should not get into the business of reinterpreting Scripture on the basis of unproven ideas, refused to accept the Copernican model until some hard evidence for it came along. St. Robert Bellarmine, Christoph Scheiner, Giovanni Battista Riccioli (all S.J., by the way) are all examples.
In the language of today, those “same old tales” are “misinformation” — misinformation from Smithsonian and Launias, who should be reliable sources. As a researcher and scholar of history of astronomy, things like this make me wonder what the point is of research and scholarship? Why study reality, why dig into what people in the Copernican Revolution were really writing, why publish peer-reviewed books and papers, and popular articles, too, when seemingly reliable publishers and authors are going to repeat tales (misinformation) that have been going around since the nineteenth century?
At least they put them in a nice-looking book.
Note: I write most of my posts well in advance of when they actually appear, and simply put them in a queue to automatically publish on a certain date. I put this post in the queue on March 19, unaware that the Smithsonian would shortly become a point of debate. Thus, this post was not written in response to, or as a comment on, current events.
