The Day The Universe Changed - Infinitely Reasonable: Science Revises the Heavens

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] whatever your domestic circumstances these days palace or one-room flat your life is structured pretty much the same way by science and technology isn't it I mean what we all take for granted the power that comes out of the wall that's just a bit of it we fly to the moon engineer genes computerised nature to play with it and find out how it works we should fill the Emperor's Maria Theresa's palace in Vienna so you can watch it on TV we boil water to make steam to drive turbines to produce the current to make music come out of the air or not and we expect to go on being able to learn new tricks like that because one of our science-based abilities is to be able to predict that after all is what science is about learning enough about how I think works so you'll know what comes next because as we all know everything are these universal laws all you need is to understand the laws we're healthier wealthier more comfortable better informed than ever before in history thanks to science and each one of us has more power at a fingertip than in the Emperor's who ever built a palace [Music] I can for instance go to the local library and pick up an almanac that will tell me to the second what time the Sun came up here in Vienna this morning as a matter of fact at 6:55 it came up exactly eleven minutes and three seconds ago and I know that the Earth's rotation in solar orbit will cause the Sun to come up when it's supposed to whether I see it or not just as I know why this stone will fall like that gravity and we know that like we know almost everything else about science thanks to a crisis that was making all the headlines here in Vienna about 450 years ago and it was a crisis funnily enough that was to lead to people wondering why stones did what they did when you threw them [Music] in 1535 you wanted a very private crisis meeting with the imperial family you went for a hunt by the Vienna Lakes what crisis Luther and what his Protestants were doing to the Catholic Church that's what so here's the Pope's man bending the Imperial ear with papal plans for an emergency summit meeting to sort it all out trouble is the Germans won't come to the Italians who won't go to the French who can't stand the English after weeks of horse trading the imperial decision is the northern Italian city of Trento and get on with it [Music] in Trento it all turned into a kind of don't do today which you can put off till tomorrow Imperial reps would turn up a couple of Cardinals somebody'd go off sick the Germans had walk out nobody would turn up at two meetings in a row summit preparations took on every appearance of musical chairs you had better believe this but for ten years the church and the increasingly indifferent imperial invitees went on having talks about talks about what the summit meeting would be about never mind what it would actually start finally here on a bitter December day in the Cathedral they stopped hanging about and got the show on the road even though only 32 members the caster turned up for the opening chorus this was where the church was supposed to get a grip on itself and over 30 years and 5 Pope's the council did just that they made every priest go to school and pass exams crackdown on high leading bishops beefed up the Inquisition and effectively gave it power of some screw produced a list of the books you couldn't couldn't read laid down Dogma on marriage purgatory indulgences prayer books worship you name it set up the Jesuits as theological shock troops all over Europe to teach obedience and above all they made it crystal clear that anybody who questioned the literal meaning of one single word in the Bible would find himself in the cells before he knew what hit him now in all this great counter-offensive against the Brussels the council was - okay something that would change the face of Europe I mean put yourself in their position in a gloomy church that was exactly the problem religion was boring and if they were gonna get the crowds back in again they really had to put on a bit of performance so the last vote the council took was just a touch theatrical here's the simple cross in front of which they announced all their decisions and here's what they did to it the council had gone bananas they ordered lights music drama razzmatazz into all the churches to turn them into a kind of 16th century Hollywood heaven this was a stuff to pull the crowds in we call it Baroque art [Music] meanwhile as they say when the plots about to thicken meanwhile up here in the Polish port of Lombok the plot was about to thicken the plan you remember with all that song and dance stuff was to get them flocking into church right okay then what I mean when was then were you in Easter Lent or every the 29th because salvation was what you did in church depended on what the date was that was just it they didn't know exactly for instance if Easter was supposed to fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the beginning of the spring equinox which depended on a moon Sun cycle that couldn't be checked correctly except every three hundred and twelve and a half years and anyway that night the moon didn't come up and the calendar you were using was nine days out which it was I mean what but church authority was what held the whole of society together everybody from the prince in his castle down and it depended on the faithful doing what they were supposed to do at the right time small wonder the Pope wanted the Sun on the moon checked out better than they have been so far well when they were here at the Cussler from Bach his troubles were over but not for long [Music] because the astronomer priests here who had a go at clearing up the confusion in the sky succeeded and in doing so blew everything to kingdom come if you'll forgive the phrase let me explain why his work was so revolutionary see back at the beginning of the sixteenth century what was up there was what Aristotle said there was had said two thousand years before it was a straight common sense as I see it view let me show you a model of it here at the center of everything the earth static well you can't feel any motion can you all around here on concentric crystal spheres pushed through the sky by angels the moon the Sun the planets and the stars all wheeling around once a day in heavenly unchanging circles well they do did that heavenly motion was evident be circular here on earth on the other hand things only moved one way in straight lines up or down so if celestial circles were eternal obviously straight-line earthly movement had to be the reason we weren't eternal movement special to us okay this priest here in 1512 or so took a closer look at the heavenly arrangement and didn't much like what he saw which was Mars for instance among others being very own Aristotle I mean it appeared sometimes to get backwards now that was supposed to be impossible so if people have got round the difficulty this little gizmo here see there's Mars it gets forward on its main circle while on an extra mini circle it goes backwards backwards good Hey solve the problem travel was to make the entire service system work and pure Aristotle term like that took over 90 of those little fiddly bits it occurred to Copernicus our priest that there might be a simpler way that would still be circular and it would allow for things seeming to go backwards so he came up with this if you put the Sun at the center and the earth in orbit then you know what we now know that that view of Mars going backwards isn't real it's because it's in a slower orbit further out than Earth most of the time everybody appears to be going forwards and then when we passed Mars it appears to go backwards and then another time this forwards again and similar problems for the whole sky were solved by this sun-centered system Copernicus published his manuscript in 1543 just in time for the Council of Trent so you're a church father what this new system of Copernicus is saying is this the earth moves although the Bible says it doesn't it's no longer at the center of God's universe although the Bible says it is it's a planet so heaven and earth are no longer separate and Aristotle is wrong though church authority depends on Aristotle being right so you're a church father you pick up this subversive heretical revolutionary lunacy and what do you do foam at the mouth right wrong when the Council of Trent got around to reading what Copernicus had said they were delighted his new system would make calendar reform more precise and the business of turning every basic belief regarding the nature of the universe upside down a mere Bagatelle since from the church his point of view back here in Fromm Bork Copernicus was talking nonsense literally after all astronomy drew lines and circles up there in the sky but they weren't really there were they they were a mathematical convenience for measuring or teaching astronomy while the Copernican system might well have been brilliant mathematics nobody thought for a second he really meant the earth was whizzing around the Sun don't be silly that kind of talk would blow holes in everything most unfortunately it was already too late for that kind of talk a thing immediately theologically dangerous you understand just some people asking questions about one Aristotle had said about motion on earth what were they up to nothing much just blowing holes in everything [Music] here's nicolò Tattaglia expert on that new terror weapon the cannon trying very sensibly to find out how to shoot it more accurately so his boss the local Duke and put his military and political standing up by knocking his enemy's military and political standing down in the course of these dynamic deliberations Tattaglia was to discover something extremely awkward regarding that business you remember about what aristotle said on how things moved when they got propelled in straight lines on earth and in curves only in heaven well the more tota he looked at what his cannonballs were doing the more it looked as if they weren't doing what they were supposed to the ball went straight all right straight out of the muzzle but he very definitely didn't just stop in midair and fall straight down it curved now if the official view of circular motion only happening in heaven was wrong then stuff about planets on crystal spheres was wrong and if that was wrong everything was wrong Talya however was interested only in what could have created a curving trajectory air resistance and then back in Venice where he lived Tattaglia found the answer in the most obvious of Venetian places on the canals all the boats in the canals and with his mania for practical application he made the idea available to everybody because in 1551 he translated into Italian a book in Greek by Archimedes about why boats floated the way they did now it doesn't take a genius to see why a book like that would go over big with the Venetians a because Tattaglia wrote it in Italian and not Latin so the ordinary boat builders and engineers could understand it and be because missing about in boats is the Venetian ladder business they were after all the greatest maritime Empire in the world at the time so the book was a rave bestseller but the real reason why was what it said about how when I boat hit the water it got lighter by the weight of the water the hull displaced the water as it were changed the way to the boat [Music] well if that happened two boats in one medium water did it happen two different things in another medium air things like it's flying cannonballs because they were going through the air just like the boats were going through the water that was a burning question well the answer said boring authoritative Aristotle remember him the answer was no nothing could change the way an object behaved because every object had its own unique characteristics one would always behave the same in every medium well it was time to call our stoppers bluff and you could see was talking rubbish look here is a stick falling through air and not falling through water maybe to Italia's hunch about air resistance having some kind of effect on the flight of cannonballs was right after all the answer had to be out there somewhere on the water it was but on a totally different tack it was totally --is least favorite student guy called benedetti who first saw the answer well it could hardly miss it in Venice it wasn't weight that affected how anything moved it was surface area Brod boughs went slowly sharp boughs went fast the more surface area it was the more resistance [Music] well if that happened with water Benedetti asked himself did air offer resistance to surface area was that why it's a a downy feather fell so slowly if falling down behave like this what about the general kind of falling down Benedetti decided to drop everything and drop everything if you see what I mean with the aid of some trusting friends below - first of all the assistance timed the falls are various balls oh no door right oh no way they seem to fall about the same speed but dropping one ball at the time wasn't good enough so Benedetti tried dropping - Aristotle said weight mattered two balls of different weights would fall at different speeds wrong maybe Aristotle whose word had ruled everything scientific for over 2,000 years was wrong elsewhere - as Benedetti dropped his umpteenth ball it struck him that circular motion only being heaven was rubbish here was earthly circular motion and when he tried making his own circular motion he got the answer circular motion became straight-line motion once you released it [Music] [Music] excuse me well some more things that weren't supposed to happen we're about to hear on what has to be one of the more underwhelming places on earth the island of Vayne between sweden and denmark both of whom often claim it belongs to the other still if it hadn't been quite so featureless he might have been less observant he him the one with a crick in his neck Danish nobleman and the only astronomer in history with a metal replacement knows Tycho Brahe one evening in 1572 in his customary position staring up bra he noticed a new light in the sky and made a few notes on the subject and became the range of Europe because Aristotle had said the sky was perfect and unchanging and new stars couldn't happen so what was this and it had no parallax parallax is the way a thing seems to shift as you do look watch this nearby card compared with that distant lighthouse as I move my view see the card move that's a shift in parallax the lighthouse doesn't shift because it's too far away to show on that small move now you take a giant move like the earth going around the Sun anything you watch during that will have to be a long way away not to shift at all and Bryce knew star didn't so it was a star well the King of Denmark was so impressed he offloaded the island on bra as a base of operations plus a financial sweetener and bra he turned up here Douglas held up at a castle in and generally started behaving like a little Hitler nasty piece of work by all accounts anyway you'll have noticed the wind so did he and built his Observatory down another hole to get away from it went down this second hole every night for twenty years not much else to do around here and whereas all other astronomers were content with the odd observation or two brah he watched everything all night every night with instruments like this for measuring the angle of the heavenly bodies and came up with a mountain of data which was why he was able to be clever about the next chakra in the sky the comet of 1577 which she said was also a long way out and not where Aristotle said it should be in the atmosphere and it was coming in through Aristotle's crystal spheres yet no sign of breaking glance maybe there were no crystal spheres but his last discovery really flawed bra the comet was going in an oval path well a guess who said that was impossible and B how could a non circular orbit be regular not what were about all over the place hmm meanwhile the gunners were unfortunately busy demolishing the whole philosophical algae bhaji to get Aristotle he said watch this [Music] you ain't using the forbidden theory of mixed secular and straight-line motion you hit well guess what happened next yes only this time the mathematics professor involved slowed the falling ball process down by rolling his balls down a slope marked with numbers at equal intervals to see how long it all took he used a pendulum swing to get split-second timing on when he released each ball he spent months rolling different weight balls down different angle slopes hundreds of times so as to get accurate average figures and each time watching how long it took the ball to go different lengths of the slope a third quarter fifth eighth half and so on he measured the time with water as the ball rolled whatever distance it was supposed to he'd run water at a steady rate into a measuring jar because he could see immediately from each amount whether the ball was taking different times to do different bits of the journey in other words if it was accelerating as it went down the slope what Galileo was looking for was some kind of law that all falling objects are bathed in 1604 he found it everything accelerated as it fell at exactly the same rate by Galileo's law we all learnt at school 32 feet per second per second it was the first time nature had been described by mathematics it could be used in any circumstance to describe what nature was doing the beginning of what we know today as the Scientific Revolution [Music] [Laughter] [Music] now all that may look very mathematical and esoteric to you but in 1605 doing that kind of thing with balls was dangerous because what Galileo had discovered was the thing in Aristotle said couldn't exist a universal law of acceleration that every single falling object on earth would obey and never mind all that nonsense about each object its own unique characteristic now contradicting Aristotle like that could have made life very hairy for Galileo and events not taking a turn for the safer with a new business proposition in July 1609 a friend of his showed him the new wonder machine from Holland a telescope and one month later Galileo was here in some marks square in Venice with a financially very attractive idea in long-range optics he said look through this he suggested to a group of shipping merchants Galileo's new improved version of the optical gizmo would magnify distant objects nine times and that meant that you could spot the ships coming in to anchor out there or fall two hours ahead of the average naked high toughness that you can get out your little commodity list ship symbol cargo value and fix the market prices accordingly because you knew the ship was coming in and your customers didn't nice idea they said we'll take 30 and here's a fat salary to keep it in the family [Music] but a bullheaded arrogant exhibitionist like Galileo couldn't keep his mouth or his options closed and in 1610 he did something only a lunatic would do he pointed an even better version of his telescope at the one place Aristotle and the church said not to up there and when he saw what he saw he compounded the felony by going public in a little 24 page booklet called the starry messenger that blew 2,500 years of authority and status quo right out of the window because in a few scribbled illustrations Galileo took the universe apart look here's the moon not perfect and incorruptible like Aristotle said it was but with mountains just like the earth and millions more stars and they were supposed to be and look at this the unthinkable three or four little satellites going around Jupiter when everything was supposed to go round the earth and a bit later here he is saying that even the Sun isn't perfect it's got spots and then the clincher Venus looked like a moon sometimes waxing and waning and that meant that we were seeing it illuminated differently as it went round the Sun so all of this was visible proof that Copernicus was right after all everything went round the Sun even then Galileo might have managed to keep things sweet had it not been for one breakfast time when his boss's wife the Duchess of Tuscany asked a friend of his if all this didn't mean that when the Bible said the Earth Stood Still it was wrong well in a polite letter explaining things to her Galileo said yes not to put too fine a point on it scientifically speaking the Bible was wrong and then everything hit the fan now the conventional view of what happened next is that the church decided to arrest Galileo and shut his mouth for good well he was arrested and shut up but only after an infuriated church had bent over backwards not to they said look we know your rights but you can't just spring it on the masses you've got to let us tell them slowly Galileo tell them to get lost then he was arrested Copernicus was prohibited and that for a Catholic Church was that [Applause] well fortunately Galileo hadn't blown it for everybody not up here in Austria in the Protestant town of efforting and why are we here well you were called brah he'd finally gone off the work in Prague still worried about those wobbling orbits you remember the comet he saw coming into the solar system on an oval orbit and couldn't figure out how an oval path would remain stable without rolling around like a nova wine barrel did when you put it down what it was wine barrels it provided the answer the same shaped barrels they're delivering here now brought to this castle back then in 1613 for a wedding the groom was a local maths teacher fella called Johan Kepler and his blushing brides the adopted daughter the people who lived in his castle now Kepler had just come back from Prague where he had been braised assistant and being a short sighted fellow had tended to concentrate on the paperwork and the calculations rather than actually staring up at the sky so when he saw the local efforting delivery men checking the wine his barrels in what he took to be a rather imprecise manner I mean same dipstick but different shaped barrels he decided to take a look at wine barrel mathematics a Peter cake when he had cut your teeth on measuring planetary orbits which is what he'd been doing night and day for eleven years trying to make sense out of what bra he had left behind when he died a gigantic pile of nocturnal note takings apart from convincing Kepler that the planets did go round the Sun bra his mountain of data revealed something that shocked Kepler Ridgid Mars was circling the Sun but it was speeding up and slowing down as it went and when he checked the figures to see if he'd made a horrendous mistake he realized that all the planets were going at different speeds the further up from the Sun the slower but why the only explanation for the figures was a kind of magnetic force from the Sun strong near it and weaker further out a force pulling the planets into orbital paths like Benedetti swinging stones or into lopsided orbits that sped up close in and slowed down further out and stayed that way because the force was always there to keep the planets repeating exactly the same path but was he right it took Kepler for years to work it out Mars wasn't changing speed at a regular rate in a circle and no more the other planets it was doing it in an ellipse and it was doing it like clockwork the change in speed exactly relative to the distance from the Sun close in going fast taking a month from there to there far out going slow a month from here to here but these areas exactly equal you'll notice that I'm drawing little triangles like Kepler was that's because that's how they measured orbits you split the orbit into zillions of little triangles and used them to tell you the area and the approximate length of the orbit and that's why Kepler's new method for measuring wine barrels which incidentally proved the dipstick method was fine was such a big deal for astronomy it was immensely accurate look Kepler split each barrel into zillions of little cross-sections like that each one of which on the edge would look something like this now a rectangle is easy to measure and you fill this one almost with a little triangle that little leftover bit there's minimal that's why I keep using the technical term decisions the more sections you make the smaller those little leftover bits they're become and if you have an infinite number of sections you get no leftover bits at all and total accuracy on the curve of a barrel or the curve of an orbit which was all amazing stuff and advanced the state of the art of orbital dynamics is called but it didn't create a problem almost as big as the one it solved Kepler might have been a genius of getting the sky to work according to his sons which left only the mind-boggling problem of working the sun's out every time you wanted to check something you were back to that ridiculous business of horsing around with zillions of little triangles but had to be a better way of this [Music] well when it came to sums here was the place Holland the home of sums commercial thumbs and flat sober and cosmopolitan the Dutch loved science if it made money that's really all Amsterdam got worked up about financial matters cash flow bridging loans incredibly they didn't care about what the rest of Europe was burning of torturing people for the dull middle-class Dutch that you say and do and think almost anything you liked the first truly tolerant nation in Europe and because of it knee-deep in refugees one of which a French thinker called Rene Descartes in 1637 came up with an entirely new way of looking at everything including of course bald in the sky look however I move am either going along or up anti Descartes tried setting that movement against two scales one showing how far up the other how far along so run me by again with numbers up one a low five up to along sixteen up three along 25 and you could describe any movement like that on de cartes new graph now suppose I want to do that with a cannonball say I want to shoot it out of a hundred feet per second like this here's the trajectory here's the scales call up Y and along X so you can describe this trajectory in X's and Y's and you could put in Galileo's law tattaglias air resistance speed anything and fire your cannon on paper because now you can fire it in an equation now you see what that means with the system like that there's no more mumbo-jumbo just mathematics that you can now use to describe and predict everything even the stuff you can't handle like the planets all you needed to get the really precise data you could now handle with your fancy new maths was instruments and there were none better the nose made in mid 17th century England [Applause] calculators logarithms slide rules vacuum pumps microscopes theodolites quadrants thermometers barometers clocks the new instruments and techniques made it possible to examine everything from the microscopically small to more important for us the astronomically large and start getting really accurate figures [Music] the fellow who put it all together literally why benedetti stones went off in a straight line when you let them go algebra universe goes through it what am I talking about this Galileo is accelerating fall now in the dirties punch would swing and now gamblers wormans with their changing speeds [Music] fortunately for the fellow who made sense of it all he didn't have to go through this he says he just sat and watched this he reckoned the force that made things fall was the same downward pull as the one Kepler said held the planets as they swung around the Sun and stopped them flying off like Benedetti stones because this force attracted everything to everything else he worked out a formula for how the force should operate based on how far apart things were well he knew the moon was 60 times further out from the center of the earth and he was so he tried his formula on the moon the pull of the earth ought to be acting like a hold on the moon counteracting its tendency to fly straight off into space by exactly the amount of force required to keep it in orbit at that distance so our genius using an advanced form of infinitesimal calculation you remember Kepler in the wine barrels worked out where the moon's path ought to go if the force acted as his formula said it should that far from Earth at forty four thousandth of a foot per second bending the moon's path inwards sure enough that's just what the moon did to the inch [Music] his formula explained what everything else did to planets pendulums apples fairground swings everything the force Newton named gravity kept the universe balanced made it work and brought heaven and earth together in one great equation and just as his formula would tell you when what went up would come down so it told his friend Edmund Halley when the great comet he saw leaving the solar system in 1680 would come back exactly seventy-seven years later we end the story where we began here in the empress maria theresa's palace in Vienna because the year Halley's Comet was due back 1757 there was a fellow here who was so to speak to dot the i's and cross the t's on the whole affair he was a Jesuit astronomer and mathematician engineer geographer deaf assistant general genius called Roger Boscovich now Boscovich had done a lot of work on comets like how to get a very accurate handle on their trajectory from any three observations and he'd put in a prize-winning paper to the French Academy of Sciences he was one of their foreign correspondents on the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn and it was through that enormous gravitational tug of war that the returning Halle comet had to come on its way back into the solar system the question was when that's why the Boscovich work was kind of vital to the French astronomers watching for Halle because it told him that the comet would be returning late even before they picked it up on their telescopes thanks to Boscovich they knew it would be nineteen months late I said Boscovich ended the story for another reason too he was among his many talents like fixing the cracks in Maria to raise his library also science advisor to the Pope and it was mainly due to him that the prohibition on Copernicus would be lifted fittingly the great work went back into general circulation on the library shelves of Europe in 1758 the same year Halley's Comet finally came back ultimate physical proof that Newton had been right that the universe was ruled by mathematics well that was the end of friend Aristotle and magic crystal spheres in the sky and questioned science shouldn't ask and the beginning of our modern world dominated by Science and Technology and the confidence they give us to explore everything from subatomic particles to the ends of outer space without fear mind you you need the confidence if as Kepler said and Newton proved it all does work like clockwork there is nobody out there to care well it may be fun to explore nature to boldly go where no man has gone before but in Newton's universe you're no longer the center of attention while you do it you're on your own just a cog in the cosmic clock James Burke has the answers to the way the world works as the day the universe change continues next it's TV science classics weekend on the Science Channel [Music]

Channel: filosofohistoricista

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Id: fQ6XFcrh7IQ

Length: 44min 58sec (2698 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 05 2018