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January 18 - January 30, 2019
Even today people dominated by their religion let themselves be governed by the cycles of the moon. The daily inconvenience of living by a lunar calendar becomes a daily witness to religious faith.
“Easter-Day,” prescribes the English Book of Common Prayer, “is always the first Sunday after the Full Moon which happens upon, or next after the Twenty-first day of March; and if the Full Moon happens upon a Sunday, Easter-Day is the Sunday after.”
The bitter quarrel over the calendar led to one of the earliest schisms between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Church of Rome. The Eastern Christians, holding to the lunar calendar, continued to observe Easter on the fourteenth day of the lunar month, regardless of the day of the week. At the very first ecumenical (worldwide) council of the Christian Church, held at Nicaea in Asia Minor in 325, one of the world-unifying questions to be decided was the date of Easter. A uniform date was fixed in such a way as both to stay with the traditional lunar calendar and to assure that Easter would
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To prevent the accumulation of another 11-minute-a-year discrepancy, the Gregorian calendar omitted the leap day from years ending in hundreds, unless they were divisible by 400. This produced the modern calendar by which the West still lives.
The world never entirely accepted the Gregorian reform. The Eastern Orthodox Church, wary of subjecting itself to any Romish rule, has kept the Julian calendar for its own calculation of Easter. And so the Christian world, supposedly held together by a Prophet of Peace, has not been able to agree even on the date to celebrate the resurrection of their Savior.
In each year the festival of Ramadan and the Pilgrimage occur ten or eleven days earlier than in the previous year. The everyday inconveniences of this kind of calendar are simply another reminder of the good Muslim’s surrender to the will of Allah. The calendar itself, for others a mere schedule of worldly affairs, the Muslim makes an affirmation of faith.
The ancient Greeks, it seems, had no week. Romans lived by an 8-day week. Farmers who worked in the fields for 7 days came to town for the eighth day—the market day (or nundinae). This was a day of rest and festivity, a school holiday, the occasion for public announcements and for entertaining friends.
By the third century the seven-day week had become common in private life throughout the Roman Empire. Each day was dedicated to one of the seven planets. Those seven, according to the current astronomy, included the sun and the moon, but not the earth. The order in which planets governed the days of the week was: sun, moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.
It is not surprising that earliest man was awed by the heavens and enticed by the stars. These first night-lights which inspired the priests of ancient Babylonia also sparked the popular fancy. The changelessness of the rhythm of life on earth made the shifting fireworks of the sky into melodrama. The coming and going of the stars, their rising and falling, their moving about the heavens, became the conflicts and the adventures of the gods.
This lure of the skies produced a fertile lore of the skies. The powers of sun and rain, the correspondence between happenings in the heavens and happenings on earth, stirred the search for other correspondences. The Babylonians were among the first who elaborated a mythological frame for these universal correspondences. Their vivid imaginings would be perpetuated by Greeks, Jews, Romans, and others over the following centuries. The theory of correspondences became astrology, which sought new links between space and time, between the movements of physical bodies and the unfolding of all human
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The Epicureans, whose philosophy was built on the belief in each man’s freedom to shape his destiny, attacked astrology as a way of making men think they were mere slaves of the stars.
astral religion was not to be separated from astral science. The leading scientists took for granted the influence of the stars on human events. They disagreed only over how the stars exerted their powers.
The popular claims of pagan astrologers disturbed the early prophets of Christianity. Church Fathers who declared their own power to forecast everyman’s fate in the next world begrudged the powers of prophecy to those who pretended to know any man’s destiny on earth. If the astrologers’ horoscopes meant what they said, where was the room for free will, for freedom to choose good over evil, to forsake Mammon or Caesar for Jesus Christ?
The very struggle to become a Christian—to abandon pagan superstition for Christian free will—seemed to be a struggle against astrology.
Time was, in Plato’s phrase, “a moving image of eternity.”
While the Romans doubtless shared our view that “time is money,” they often equated time with water. In Rome the phrase aquam dare, “to grant water,” meant to allot time to a lawyer, while aquam perdere, “to lose water,” meant to waste time. If a speaker in the Senate spoke out of turn or talked too long, his colleagues would shout that his water should be taken away. Under other circumstances they might petition that more water be allowed.
In England, sandglasses were frequently placed in coffins as a symbol that life’s time had run out.
The unique use of the sandglass, after the sixteenth century, was measuring a ship’s speed. Knots were tied at seven-fathom intervals on a line tied to a log chip that would float astern. A sailor dropped the log chip off the end of the speeding ship and counted off the number of knots paid out while a small sandglass measured a half-minute. If five knots passed in the interval, the ship was making five nautical miles an hour. Throughout the nineteenth century, sailing vessels still “heaved the log” every hour to keep track of the speed.
It was around 1330 that the hour became our modern hour, one of twenty-four equal parts of a day. This new “day” included the night. It was measured by the time between one noon and the next, or, more precisely, what modern astronomers call “mean solar time.” For the first time in history, an “hour” took on a precise, year-round, everywhere meaning.
We have seen how the Egyptians fixed 360 days as the regular days of their year—12 months of 30 days each, supplemented by 5 additional days at the end of each year. They also marked off 360 degrees in a circle, perhaps by analogy to the yearly circuit of the sun. Sixty, being one-sixth of the 360 and so a natural subdivision in their sexagesimal system, became a convenient subdivision of the circle, and also of each “degree” or each hour.
An everyday relic of the primitive identification of the circuit of the sun with the full circle is our sign for a “degree.” The tiny circle we now use to designate a degree is probably a hieroglyph for the sun. If the degree sign was a picture of the sun, then 360°—a full circle—would also properly mean a cycle of 360 days, or a full year.
The “second” was at first an abbreviation for “second minute,” and originally described the unit resulting from the second operation of sexagesimal subdivision. Long used for subdivisions of a circle, seconds were not applied to timekeeping until clockmaking was refined in the late sixteenth century.
In Western Europe the hours of the clock continued to be numbered from noon, when the sun was at the meridian, or from midnight midway between two noons. In most of Europe and in America a new day still begins at midnight by the clock.
When we mark each hour of our 24-hour day, and designate the minutes after the hour, we are living, as a historian of ancient science reminds us, by “the results of a Hellenistic modification of an Egyptian practice combined with Babylonian numerical procedures.”
THE great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments and contradictory witnesses.
People who could agree on few other facts about remote regions of the earth somehow agreed on the geography of the afterworld. Even while the shape of most of the earth’s surface was still unknown, the Nether World was described in vivid detail.
Very early, by the fifth century B.C., Greek scholars saw that the earth was a globe. The first firm evidence is in Plato’s Phaedo. Then serious Greek thinkers ceased thinking of the earth as a flat disk floating on the waters. The Pythagoreans and Plato based their belief on aesthetic grounds. Since a sphere is the most perfect mathematical form, the earth must of course have that shape. To argue otherwise would be to deny order in the Creation.
Classical writers after Aristotle, not only the great philosopher-scientists like Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23–79) and Ptolemy (A.D. 90–168) but even the popular encyclopedists, assumed and elaborated on the sphericity of the earth. This discovery was to be one of the most important legacies of classical learning to the modern world.
It was far more difficult to imagine the unknown than to chart the outlines of what people imagined that they knew.
The all-embracing character of the Muslim faith, which saw no distinction between the realm of Caesar and the realm of God, made the reach of the faith coterminous with the reach of the sword.
The empire that they had conquered on horseback, the Mongols discovered, could not be governed on horseback.
The revival of Ptolemy, then, would mean the awakening, or the reawakening, of the empirical spirit. Now men would use their experience to measure the whole earth, to mark off the known from the unknown, and to designate newfound places for return. The rediscovery of Ptolemy was a signal event in the revival of learning that marked the Renaissance, a prologue to the modern world.
the very meaning of “Ocean” would have to be changed. Until that time Europeans made a sharp distinction between the Ocean and a sea (mare). There was, in fact, only one Ocean. In Greek mythology it was Oceanus, the great circular stream that was supposed to encompass the disk of the earth. Hence, in English, until about 1650, the Great Outer Sea of Boundless Extent was commonly called the Ocean Sea, from mare oceanum, and was opposed to the Mediterranean inland sea or the other inland seas.
The dimensions of life had broadened and become more public and more popular. While ancient lays celebrated a god-hero, modern lays would celebrate heroic peoples.
Without a satisfactory winter fodder, which would not be developed yet for several centuries, European farmers could keep over the winter only the few animals needed for draft and for reproduction. Meat from the others, which had to be killed, was generally preserved by “salting”—a process that required large quantities of pepper, in addition to salt, to inhibit the unpalatable effects of the salt itself.
Modern racing yachtsmen agree that a sailing vessel today, after all that has been learned in the last five centuries, could not do better than follow Columbus’ route.
Early in January 1610 he did what now seems most obvious—he turned his telescope toward the skies. Today this would require neither courage nor imagination, but in Galileo’s day it was quite otherwise. Who would dare use a toy to penetrate the majesty of the celestial spheres? To spy out the shape of God’s Heaven was superfluous, presumptuous, and might prove blasphemous. Galileo was no better than a theological Peeping Tom.
The Copernican doctrine had lain semidormant for a half-century after Copernicus. Without the telescope the heliocentric theory might long have remained an interesting but unpersuasive hypothesis. Now the telescope made all the difference. What he saw persuaded Galileo of the truth of what he had read. And he was not alone. Until the telescope, the defenders of Christian orthodoxy felt no need to ban Copernican ideas. But this new device, which spoke directly to the senses, short-circuited the priests’ appellate jurisdiction over the heavens. Astronomy was transformed from a preserve of arcane
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Causes that had nothing to do with astronomy conspired to defeat his hopes of converting the Church of Rome. Galileo would be caught in the cross fire between Catholics and Protestants. The rising attacks of Protestantism made it necessary that Pope Urban VIII respond by showing the determination of the Church of Rome to preserve the purity of ancient Christian dogmas.
IN sixteenth-century Europe, common sense and folk wisdom, like that which stood between man and the stars, obstructed his vision of himself, and his exploration of the human body.
In England the early development of a strong central government tended to produce common standards. The early Tudors established a “furlong” (i.e., a “furrow-long”) as 220 yards. Then Queen Elizabeth I decreed that the traditional Roman mile of 5,200 feet should instead be 5,280 feet, precisely eight furlongs, and therefore more convenient for everyday use.
the French went ahead on their own, recommending that the new units be based on decimals, and that the basic unit should be one ten-millionth of the length of a quadrant of the earth’s meridian (i.e., of the length of an arc between the equator and the North Pole). Soon this unit would be christened a “meter,” from the Greek word for measure, and from it all other metric units would be derived.
Europe’s ancient institutions of learning, colleges and universities, had been founded not to discover the new but to transmit a heritage. By contrast, the Royal Society and other parliaments of scientists, with their academies in London, Paris, Florence, Rome, Berlin, and elsewhere, aimed to increase knowledge.
The mathematical world adopted Leibniz’s symbols—the letter d, as in dx or dy, and the long s written as f (the initial letter of summa)—and the name calculus integralis (which had been suggested to Leibniz by Jakob Bernoulli I in 1690) and these dominated mathematics textbooks into the late twentieth century.
Biblical scholarship in the seventeenth century kept biologists focused on those six days of Creation. It seemed both absurd and heretical to suggest that nature had a history. What interested Biblical scholars was the chronology of the Bible in relation to human events.
Throughout geological, time, Lyell explained, new species had been emerging, and others had become extinct. Survival of a species depended on certain conditions of its environment, but geological processes were constantly changing those conditions. Failure in competition with other species in the same habitat might extinguish a species. The success of one prosperous species might crowd out others to extinction.
Lyell’s interest in these problems had been piqued by the French naturalist Lamarck (1744–1829). But Lamarck, insisting on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, had really abandoned the concept of species. For him a species was only a name for one set of generations while the animal was adapting to its environment. And if every species was infinitely plastic, then no species would ever have to become extinct.
The facts of geographical distribution that provided the cautious Darwin with questions supplied the brash Wallace with answers. Seeing natural selection led Darwin away from religious faith.
For the trivium, the whole curriculum for the Bachelor of Arts degree in the Middle Ages consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, read in the Latin works of ancient Rome. Only for the advanced degree, the Master of Arts, was the student examined in the broader quadrivium, which comprised arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
Gutenberg’s crucial invention was his specially designed mold for casting precisely similar pieces of type quickly and in large numbers. This was a machine tool—a tool for making the machines (i.e., the type) that did the printing.
