Unravelling the mysteries of the universe, with a wooden tube and a polished lens

What do these things have in common – a star-speckled sky, a spyglass and an avant-garde thought process? One man! A multi-faceted inventor, astronomer and physicist whose precocious epiphanies fostered the beginnings of modern astronomy

The stars, the omnipresent bystanders, have always had an alluring mystery around them. Perhaps it’s their expansive nature where they feel so close and yet so far. We know so much about them and yet so little. Some of our best theories of human existence have found substance in their study. Still, thus far, we struggle to comprehend their cosmic proportions. But mankind is undoubtedly stubborn if nothing else. Every mystery must be resolved, no matter how insurmountable the challenges. Imaginably that’s why science is always on a quest to find answers.

Pushing the boundaries of our understanding is what we humans do best. We are constantly striving to alter the unknown into the known through the power of scientific inquiry. History has been a steady witness to this notion. It’s filled with tales of revolutionary thinkers and innovative minds, seeking answers and questioning the very essence of commonplace understanding.

This story is of one such person. Galileo Galilei, who, against all odds, defied what for many of his times was sound logic and set into motion something even more significant than he could envision – the birth of science as we know it.

Galileo and the Telescope

If you were to ever find yourself strolling through the Mueseo Galileo in the city of Florence, Italy, you would likely chance upon a rather ordinary object. At least, that’s what it looks like at first glance. Do give it a second peek, as this relic is one of the most important artifacts in the history of science - Galileo’s telescope.

It was this object that set into motion the debunking of a 2000-year-old theory. It bolstered and fueled the perceptions of the so-called heretic astronomers. Plus, in the last 400 years, it has triggered a collective response in the field of cosmology to find answers to one of the most complex questions that science has faced – “how did we come to exist?”. Most of the knowledge gleaned of our ever-expanding cosmos is easily contributed to this ubiquitous item and also to Galileo, who, with his single discovery and steadfastness, unleashed the new perception of our comic existence.

It was Galileo who, at the start of the 17th century, gave substance to Copernicus’s heliocentric (planets revolve around the Sun) theory. He helped humanity belie the abstract ideas of our selfcentred existence, albeit not necessarily during his lifetime, and unleashed the rather hefty idea that we were not the centre of the universe.

With that being said, it’s not the discovery of the solar system that is crucial in this story.

Instead, it’s the discovery of the ‘telescope’ - a powerful example of the vital role that advent in technology has played in empowering scientific curiosity. The breakthrough of technological applications in science has continued to inform our systems of thought for centuries. Both science and technology represent a

larger category of activities that are distinct and yet highly interdependent. While technology has provided a fertile source for novel scientific questions, science has provided new knowledge that serves as a direct catalyst for new high-tech possibilities.

And this give-and-take has been the case for thousands of years of our existence. Engineers like Galileo used innovation as the steppingstone to finally lend scientific credence to a field that had been the purview of philosophers like Aristotle, Plato and Ptolemy. From the latter, all three were great mathematicians, astronomers and scientists, but lacked the technological advances that could rightly inform their thoughts on our cosmos.

The Historical Acceptance of The Geo-Centric Model

Up until the 17th century, astronomy was firmly in the grips of 2000-year-old philosophies laid out by Aristotle and Ptolemy. Both believed that all celestial bodies were perfect spheres and shared a common centre – The Earth. This was understandable considering that when people looked up at the skies, it seemed evident that the Sun, the Moon and the stars rotated around the Earth once a day. Their theory of a stationary Earth was so widely accepted that it formed part of religious scriptures for civilisations to come.

But in the early 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish mathematician, suggested the now accepted heliocentric theory that it was the Earth that revolved around the Sun, much like other celestial bodies. His ideas were considered radical by many of his times. Copernicus himself feared retribution, so he waited until he was almost at his deathbed before publishing his astronomical treatise commonly called the Commentariolus, or “Little Commentary,” which laid the basis for his suncentred system. He correctly hypothesised the order of the known planets, including Earth, from the Sun and estimated their orbital periods relatively accurately in the treatise.

But his ideologies were primarily considered heresy, and that led many to study his philosophies in secret. Those who did believe in its substance started calling themselves ‘Copernicans’.

Here is one thing that we need to remember. All of these theories and assumptions were made based on what the naked eye could see. Yet, when proof from advents in technology came knocking at the door, the acceptance was rudimentary at best.

But One Starry Evening…

In 1609, Galileo, a Copernican himself, became the first to turn an invention he perfected to the star-speckled sky. Possibly the earliest of the many acts of dissent, Galileo knew that there was more to the cosmos than the neatly laid out models that had become part of everyday life. So exasperated was he with the complacency of the stargazers of his time that he wrote in frustration, about how astronomers “wish never to raise their eyes from those pages, as if this great book of the universe had been written to be read by nobody but Aristotle, and his eyes had been destined to see for all posterity.” *

So, imagine his enthusiasm when he first used his new contraption to view our cosmos. His telescope model was a vast improvement over the spyglass that a Dutch optician had created the year before. Initially providing up to 8 times the magnification, Galileo quickly scaled his refractive telescope to provide up to 30 times more magnification.

This is the first documented use of the telescope. What he saw made him realise the immensity of what he was beholding. His initial discovery was that the milky way was actually a conglomeration of innumerable stars. It was so expansive that his tired fingers would never be able to map every bright light the way his predecessors had done. He then saw the cratered surface of the moon, which, far from being perfectly spherical, was, in fact, full of cavities and mountains much like our planet. Soon, he would note that Jupiter had four moons of its own (almost 79 in total have been discovered today). Like our moon, he also realised that Venus had phases, sometimes waxing to a disk and in another waning to a crescent.

Not realising the error of staring at the Sun too long, he turned his magnified scope to the big bright star. His revelation? Sunspots and an imperfect sun. Each discovery built on the other, slowly and steadily chipping away at Aristotle’s system and coming dangerously close to the revolutionary view of his inspiration Nicolaus Copernicus—that Earth did indeed travel around the Sun.

While Galileo’s telescope was a success, his theories received widespread condemnation for being ‘false and contrary to scripture’. Some who did deign to use the telescope to view the skies still disbelieved their own eyes. Records of a Bohemian scholar named Martin Horky have found mentions like “below, it works wonderfully; in the sky, it deceives one”*.

Unfortunately for Galileo, magical thinking and ignorance won the tug of war between ordinary perception and scientific revelation. Even with sufficient proof, his ideology, while taking a grip on the scientific community, took a few more years to become part of the accepted norm.

A New Era of Astronomy Is Born

The telescope, though, continued to be refined. Better reflective models came to be, and our view of the cosmos only continued to expand. Improvements of his invention have led humans to discover that not just this planet but eight other planets (okay, maybe just seven) elliptically trace a path on a star that is halfway through its lifetime. Science certainly owes a 400-yearold debt to this man, who, with a wooden tube and some polished lenses and a critical and inquisitive mind, paved the way for humanity to trace its beginnings and helped expand our vision astronomically.

Astronomers have now mapped billions of stars and galaxies that have coalesced, light-years away, in the darkened gloom of our universe. They have observed the powerful gravity of a black hole and even persevered in searching for signs of life in exoplanets that have circled nearby stars. All this and more have been supported by the advent of more powerful telescopes, ones not bound on land but floating in the ever-expanding cosmic space.

The Search for EARTH 2.0

The telescope’s advents and the new knowledge we have gained have only served to fuel our curiosity even more. What’s the reason for our cosmic loneliness? Are there any more earths out there? How many far-flung planets exist that could harbour life as we know it? . Telescopes like NASA’s Hubble and Kepler have already provided us evidence of billions of galaxies, each containing stars much like our Sun. We have also devised telescopes that help us study objects in the universe by detecting the heat or radio waves or X-rays they emit. In the fall of 2021, we are already looking towards a launch that could significantly expand the vision of what we can see.

All to answer just one question – In about 100 billion galaxies and counting, could there be another Earth with life forms like ours?

But what’s the point, one may ask? Because that’s what science is all about! It’s an amalgamation of dreamers, thinkers and doers who dare to imagine what the ordinary man could not conceive. The search for even an ounce of slime on some planet could revolutionise biology; water on a distant planet could give us clues on our molecular DNA, all of which is a worthy agenda for the foreseeable future. And so scientists relentlessly work at it, one matter at a time, hoping someday we could answer the quintessential questions on our cosmic loneliness.

The endless curiosity that Galileo set into motion with his one discovery has had enormous proportions on mankind. He made us realize that studying the one thing that truly inspires us, what we feel is worthwhile and what we sometimes suspect to be accurate, even against all odds, is essentially the crux of modern science.