Yesterday we officially got a new Director of the Vatican Observatory!
Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J. handed over the wheel to Fr. Richard D’Souza, S.J.
EWTN aired an interview with Fr. Richard last Wednesday (the 10th).
It is just under ten minutes long — click here for it!
Congratulations, and many thanks, to both!
Could the star size problem show up in the literary world of the 17th century, or was it a too technical bit of astronomy to ever make it beyond the realm of astronomers?
Much of my research and publication has been on the star size problem. That is the problem that resulted from the claims of heliocentrism in the early days of the telescope. Here’s a quick recap of the problem (if you’ve been reading my posts here at Sacred Space Astronomy for a while, you can probably skip the next paragraph):
Stars, seen either with the naked eye or with an early telescope (the drawing above, left), have measurable apparent sizes. One of the earliest “science vs. religion” conflicts arose when astronomers figured out that stars had to be far away — much farther than the Moon, for example. Stars being distant meant they had to be large to appear even as small as they do in the sky. Thus, they were larger than the Moon. This prompted the conflict, because the first chapter of Genesis speaks of the Moon as one of the two “great” lights of the heavens. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and others addressed this question. The heliocentric theory required stars to be all that much farther away, and therefore, all that much larger. In fact, heliocentrism required even the smallest of the stars to all be comparable in size to earth’s orbit. Johannes Kepler, an advocate for heliocentrism, calculated that Sirius would be well larger than the orbit of Saturn. Kepler was keen on giant stars, thinking they (1) demonstrated the power of God and (2) showed that stars were not other suns, contrary to Giordano Bruno, whose ideas Kepler did not like. But in general, giant stars were a problem for heliocentrism, and viewed as an absurdity. Tycho Brahe first proposed the star size problem as an argument against the heliocentric theory — and he probably got the idea from reading St. Augustine on Genesis. Jesuit astronomers in the 17th century, like Christoph Scheiner and Giovanni Battista Riccioli, likewise used the star size question against heliocentrism. The problem would not be resolved until astronomers realized that the apparent sizes of stars are an artifact of optics and not a reflection of the physical bodies of the stars — and that took a long time.
Recently Frederick A. de Armas, a Cervantes scholar at the University of Chicago, has proposed that Cervantes incorporated the star size problem in his famous novel Don Quixote, published in the early 17th century. De Armas argues in his paper “Circles, Mills, and Ellipses in Don Quixote 1.8: From Ptolemy to Kepler” (published in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, Vol. 42, No. 1, Spring 2022, pp. 57-79) that this incorporation appears in the part of the novel where the delusional Quixote attacks some windmills, thinking that they are menacing giants.
In a section of the paper titled “The Optics of Science and the Fear of Giants”, de Armas spends a couple pages explaining the basics of the star size problem, and then writes:
In the first section of this essay we have argued that Don Quixote attacks the mills as giants through their infernal connotations. But the knight also attacks them as representatives of a new cosmology, one where the fixed stars are giants up in space. He claims that these giants are excessive (“desaforados”). In so doing, he is mimicking Tycho Brahe’s own rejection of the stars in the Copernican system. The Universe must be harmonious and not contain such giants. It would be ludicrous, almost blasphemous, to think that God would create this kind of disharmony. Aligning himself with the anti-Copernicans, the knight rails against them, not knowing that just a few years later, Kepler would assert that we cannot know the immensity of God’s creation; that his hand is as visible in the smallest of snails as in the largest of stars….
As Don Quixote battles giants as embodiments of a false measurement of the stars caused by the heliocentric theory; and as he battles a new science that proposes that we accept what we cannot see [the Earth’s motion], he paradoxically sees the giants that are not there.
In his concluding paragraph, de Armas writes:
As we look back at the adventure, we recall that the windmills episode prefaces a novel where the discoveries of the eccentric protagonist are more often than not accompanied by defeats. After all, the circle has turned into an ellipse and the heavens and the earth bring about new and unheard of designs. If the ellipse triumphs over the circle, then the episode of the windmills, and perhaps all of Don Quixote’s adventures, can never embody one meaning or one cosmology. The episode invites us to discover what the giants are hiding — a new optics, a new cosmology that would have us believe what is not there: giant stars, false measurements or even infernal geographies. The episode also questions what the enchanters are covering up; what the Europeans are yet to discover as they and the world itself become de-centered. Don Quixote could well stand for the individual’s dislocation, a sign of modernity. Still, the knight seeks [his lady] Dulcinea, searching for Kepler’s aesthetic perfection of the heavens at a time when the last vestiges of the pagan gods fall from their Ptolemaic circles.
I am no scholar of Cervantes and Don Quixote (indeed, I’m more familiar with Graham Greene’s book Monsignor Quixote, a spinoff of Cervantes’ work!). But I’m fascinated by the idea that the star size problem made the jump from the technical discussions of people like Brahe and Riccioli into the world of literature. Is de Armas correct in his interpretation of Cervantes? And did any other non-astronomical writers incorporate the star size problem into their works?
Click here for all my Astronomy in Art & Architecture posts. Yes, this is literature and not art, but….
