Galileo’s Dream

‘A fleet!’ the Doge exclaimed. He straightened and looked at the crowd, his face red. ‘A fleet is approaching, well out from San Niccolo.’

The Sages of the Order crowded to the front of the line to see for themselves. Every Venetian holding in the eastern Mediterranean was subject to attack by Turks and Levantine pirates: individual ships, fleets, coastal towers, even fortress towns as formidable as Ragusa had suffered surprise assaults. Thus the rulers of Venice, all of them with naval experience of one sort or another, were now nodding to each other meaningfully, and circulating into the crowd surrounding Galileo to shake his hand, slap him on the back, ask for future meetings. Fra Micanzio and General del Monte in particular had worked with him at the Arsenale on various engineering projects, and their congratulations were especially hearty. They had first met him twenty years before, when they had brought him in to consider if there were ways the oars of their galleys could be reconfigured to give them more power, and Galileo had immediately sketched out analyses of the oars’ movement that considered their fulcrum to be not the oarlocks, but the water surface; and this surprising new perspective on the problem had in fact led to improvements in oarlock placement. So they knew what he was capable of; but this time del Monte was shaking his hand endlessly, and Micanzio was grinning, with eyebrows raised as if to say: Finally one of your tricks will really matter!

And at this moment Galileo could afford to laugh with him. Galileo suggested to him that they time the interval between this observation of the fleet through the glass, and the moment when ordinary lookouts saw the ships with their unaided vision. The Doge overheard this and required that it be done.

After that Galileo had only to stand by the device and accept more congratulations, and point the thing to resight it if someone requested it. He drank their praise and he drank wine from a tall gold cup, feeling expansive and generous, the colourful throng around him with its impressive percentage of purple sparking more memories of Carnivale, memories that gave every festive evening in Venice an aura of splendour and sex. Combined with the height of the campanile, and the beauty of the watery city below them, it felt like they stood on Olympus.

On the winding way back down the campanile stairs, Galileo was joined on one dark landing by the stranger, who then clomped down the iron stairs beside him. Galileo’s heart leaped in his chest like an animal trying to escape: the man was dressed in black, and must have lurked in waiting for Galileo, like a thief or an assassin.

‘Congratulations on this success,’ the man said in his hoarse Latin.

‘What brings you here?’ Galileo asked.

‘It seems you listened to what I told you before.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘I was sure you would be interested. You of all people. Now I will return to northern Europe.’ Again: Alta Europa. ‘When I come back to your country, I will bring a spyglass of my own, which I will invite you to look through. Indeed I invite you now.’ Then, when Galileo did not reply (they were nearing the bottom of the stairs and the door to the Piazzetta), he said, ‘I invited you.’

‘It would be my pleasure,’ Galileo said.

The man touched the case Galileo carried from his shoulder. ‘Have you used it to look at the moon?’

‘No-not yet.’

The man shook his head. As his face was a blade, his nose was its sharpened edge, long and curved, tilted off to the right. His big eyes gleamed in the stairwell’s dim light. ‘When you achieve a power of magnification of twenty or thirty times, you will find it really interesting. After that I will visit you again.’

Then they reached the ground floor of the campanile, and walked together out onto the Piazzetta, where they were interrupted by the Doge himself, there waiting to escort Galileo back to the Signoria: ‘Really my dear Signor Galileo, you must do us the honour of returning with us to the Sala del Senato to celebrate the incredible success of your extraordinary demonstration. We have arranged a small meal, some wine-’

‘Of course, Your Beneficent Serenity,’ Galileo said. ‘I am yours to command, as you know.’

In the midst of this exchange the stranger had slipped away and disappeared.

Unsettled, distracted by the memory of the stranger’s narrow face, his black clothing, his odd words, Galileo ate and drank with as much cheer as he could muster. A chance meeting with a colleague of Kepler’s was one thing, a second encounter deliberately made, something else-he wasn’t sure what.

Well, there was nothing to be done now but to eat, to drink more wine, and to enjoy the very genuine and fulsome accolades of Venice’s rulers. Two full hours of the celebration of his accomplishment were marked by the giant clocks on the sala’s walls before the lookouts on the campanile sent word down that they had spotted a fleet approaching San Niccolo. The room erupted in a spontaneous cheer. Galileo turned to the Doge and bowed, then bowed again to all of them: left, right, centre, then again to the Doge. Finally he had invented something that would make money.

Chapter Two I Primi Al Mondo (#ulink_65124f62-3346-5fea-a3e8-51c0ec39233a)

Having come to this pass, I appealed out of my innocent soul to the high and omnipotent gods and my own good genius, beseeching them of their eternal goodness to take notice of my wretched state. And behold! I began to descry a faint light.

-FRANCESCO COLONNA, Hypnerotomachia PoliphiliThe Strife of Love in a Dream of Poliphili

The next night, back in Padua, Galileo went out into his garden and aimed his best occhialino at the moon. He left Mazzoleni sleeping by the kitchen fire, woke none of the servants; the house was asleep. This was his hour, as on so many nights when his insomnia took hold of him.

Now his mind was filled with the stranger’s blade of a face, his intense gaze: have you looked at the moon? The moon tonight was near its first quarter, the bright part almost exactly half the whole, the dark part easily visible against the night sky. An obvious sphere. Galileo sat on a low stool, held his breath, brought his right eye to the eyepiece. The little black circle of glass was marked on its left side by a luminous white patch. He focused on it.

At first he saw nothing but a chiaroscuro flecking of greyish black and brilliant white, the tremble of the white seeming to flow over the dark spots. Ah: hills. A landscape. A world seen from above.

A view from world to world.

He loosened the screw on the tripod head and tapped the tube, trying to capture in the glass the tip of the moon’s upper crescent. He tightened the screw, looked again. Brilliant white horn: a dark grey in the curve of the horn, a blackness just slightly washed with white. Again he saw an arc of hills. There, at the border of light and dark, was a flat dark patch, like a lake in shadow. The sunlight was obviously shining horizontally over the landscape, as it would be of course, as he was looking at the area experiencing dawn. He was looking at a sunrise on the moon, twenty-eight times slower than a sunrise on Earth.

There was a little round valley; there another one. Any number of circles and arcs, in fact, as if God had been fooling around up there with a compass. But the strongest impression remained the range of hills, there on the border of black and white.

The moon was a world, the Earth was a world. Well, of course. He had always known this.

As for the assertions the Aristotelians made about the moon, that because it was in the heavens it was therefore a perfect sphere, made of some unearthly crystal that was of unchanging purity-well, its ordinary appearance had always rendered that a very suspicious statement. Now it was clearer than ever that Aristotle had been wrong. This was no great surprise-when indeed had he been right, in the natural sciences? He should have stuck to his strength, which was rhetoric. He had had no mathematics.

Galileo got up and went in to the workshop to get his current folio, and a quill and inkpot. He wondered if he should wake Mazzoleni, then decided against it. There would be other nights. This one was his. He could feel his blood pounding in his head; his neck muscles were sore. It was his night. No one had ever seen these things. Well, perhaps the stranger had. But Galileo suppressed that thought in order to glory in his own moment. All the years, all the centuries and their millions come and gone, the stars rotating above them night after night, and only now had someone seen the hills of the moon.

The moon must rotate on its axis at the same speed it circled the Earth, to keep the same side always facing it; this was odd, but no odder than many other phenomena, such as the fact that the moon and the sun were the same size in the sky. These things were either caused, or accidental; it was hard to tell. But it was a rotating sphere, that was clear. And so was the Earth also a rotating sphere? Galileo wondered if Copernicus’s advocacy of this old Pythagorean notion could be right.

He looked through the glass again, relocated the white hills. The dark part west of them was extremely interesting. Land in shadow, obviously. Perhaps there were lakes and seas too, though he could see no sign one way or the other. But it was not as black as a cave or a dark room at night. One could make out dim large features, because the area was very slightly illuminated. That could not be direct sunlight, obviously. But just as the moonlight illuminating his garden at this moment was really sunlight bouncing off the moon to him, he was no doubt also seeing the dark part of the moon illuminated by sunlight that had bounced off the Earth and struck it-and then bounced back yet again, of course, to get to his eyes. From sun to Earth to moon and then back to him-which would explain the successive diminutions in brightness. As sunlight was to moonlight, moonlight was to the dark side of the moon.

The next morning he said to Mazzoleni, ‘I want a stronger magnification, something like twenty or thirty times.’

‘So you say, maestro.’

They manufactured a lot of spyglasses. Making the objective lenses bigger and smoother, while keeping the eyepiece lenses at their original size and grinding them both deeper and smoother, led to very satisfactory jumps in magnifying power. In a matter of weeks they had glasses that showed things twenty-twenty-five- thirty-finally thirty-two times closer than the unaided eye saw them. There they hit their limit; the lenses could not be made bigger or smoother, and the tubes were twice as long as when they had begun. Also, as magnifying power grew, what one actually saw through the glass contracted down to a very small field of view. One could move one’s eye around the eyepiece a bit to broaden the view, but not by very much. Accurate aiming was important, and Galileo got better at this by attaching an empty spotting tube to the side of the strongest glass. They also had to deal with a white glare that invaded the sides of the larger images, where the irregularities in the lenses also tended to cluster, so that the outer circumference of the image was often nearly useless. Here Galileo put to use a solution he had discovered to deal with the rainbow rings that plagued his own vision, especially of things seen at night. This unhappy phenomenon he tended to attribute to the strange incident of his near-death experience in the cellar of the Villa Costozza, which he also believed had caused his rheumatism, bad digestion, headaches, seizures, melancholia, hypochondria, and so on. Vision problems were only one more remnant of that ancient disaster, and he had long since discovered that if he looked at something through his fist, the aurora of coloured light surrounding the thing would be blocked from view. Now he tried the same remedy with the new spyglasses, fashioning with Mazzoleni’s help a cardboard sleeve that could be fitted over the objective. The most effective one left an oval opening over the lens that blocked most of the outer third of its area. Why an oval worked better than a circle he had no idea, but it did; the glare was eliminated, and the image that remained was about as large as before, and very much sharper.

As the spyglasses got stronger, things in the sky were becoming visible that had not been visible before. One night, after a long inspection of the moon, he swung the glass across the sky toward the Pleiades, just risen above the house. He looked into the glass.

‘My God,’ he said, and felt his body ringing. Around the Seven Sisters were scores of stars. The familiar seven stars of the gorgeous little constellation were brighter than the rest, but surrounding them were thickets of lesser stars, granulated almost to white dust in places. The sense of enormous depth in the little black circle was palpable, almost vertiginous; he swayed a little on his stool, mouth hanging open. Even the spectacle of the mountainous moon had not prepared him for such a thing. No one else in the history of the world had ever seen these stars, until this very night, this very moment. It was the oddest feeling in the world. He sketched a quick map of the newly crowded group, making the familiar sisters little sixpointed stars like a child would draw, with the new stars tiny crosses-the drawing done almost unconsciously, a kind of nervous habit, deeply engrained after so many years of exercising it. Until he sketched something down his hand would itch with the urge.

He looked until his eyes hurt, and the points of light swam in the eyepiece like gnats in the sun. He was cold, almost shivering, his bad back like a rusty hinge inside him. He felt that he would sleep the moment he lay down: a luscious feeling for a lifelong insomniac, he bathed in it as he stumbled off to bed.

His empty bed. No Marina. He had kicked her out, and life was ever so much more peaceful. Nevertheless he felt a quick stab of regret as he dived into the deep pool of sleep. It would have been nice to have someone to tell. Well-he would tell the world. The thought almost woke him.

Only six days after his demonstration to the Venetian Senate, his reward came, in the form of a new contract offer. Procurator Antonio Prioli, one of the heads of the university in Padua, came out of the Sala delle Senato to take Galileo by the hand. ‘The Senate, knowing the way you have served Venice for seventeen years, and sensible of your courtesy in offering your occhialino as a present to the Republic, has ordered your election to the Professorship for life, if you are willing, with a salary of a thousand florins a year.’ He raised his other hand: ‘They are aware that there remains a year on your current contract, and yet want the increase in salary to begin this very day.’

‘Please convey to His Serenity and all the pregadi my deepest thanks for this most kind and generous offer, Your Honour,’ Galileo said. ‘I kiss their hands, and accept with the utmost gratitude.’

‘Shit,’ he said the moment he was out of earshot. And back home he started cursing in a way that emptied the rooms well before he stormed through them. ‘Shit shit shit. Those pricks! Those cheap bastards, those soddomitecci!’

He remembered as he always did that Cremonini, an old duffer Galileo had enjoyed sparring with through the years, already made a thousand florins a year from the Venetian Senate. That was the difference between the standing of philosophy and mathematics in this world, an inverse ratio to justice, as so often happened: the worst philosopher had been paid twice the best mathematician.

Then also, a salary fixed in perpetuity meant there would never be another raise, and Galileo already knew to the last quattrini his expenses, which were such that this raise would only just cover them, leaving him still unable to pay off his sister’s dowry and his other outstanding debts.

Also, the salary was a salary, paid for his teaching, as before-meaning there would be no time to write up his experiments, or make new ones. All that work in the notebooks in the workshop would continue to lie there mouldering.

So this was not exactly the most exciting result one could have imagined, given the extraordinary power of his new device, and its strategic importance, obvious to everyone who had witnessed the demonstration. The triumph of that day had had Galileo imagining a lifetime sinecure, all his debts and expenses paid, and afterward free from all work except research and consultation, which he would have applied most faithfully to the good fortune of La Serenissima. They would have benefited greatly; and in any duchy or principality or kingdom this kind of patronage would not have been unusual. But Venice was a republic, and courtly patronage as it was practised in Florence or Rome, or almost anywhere else in Europe, did not exist here. Gentlemen of the Republic worked for the Republic, and were paid accordingly. It was an admirable thing, if you could afford it.

‘Shit,’ he repeated weakly, staring at his workshop table. ‘Those cheap bastards.’ But a part of his mind was already calculating what the thousand florins a year would do to meet expenses and knock off debts.

Then he heard in a letter from Sarpi that some of the Senators had complained to the body at large that the spyglass was a commonplace in Holland and elsewhere in northern Europe, so that it had not really been Galileo’s achievement, and he had presented his device under false pretences.

‘I never said I invented the idea!’ Galileo protested. ‘I only said I made it much better, which I did! Tell those cheap bastards to find a spyglass as good as mine somewhere else if they think they can!’ He ripped off a long letter that he sent to Sarpi to give to the senators: