The Clockwork Universe (34 page)

117
“flies which look as big as a lamb”
: “Commentary on Galileo Galilei,” in James Newman, ed.,
The World of Mathematics
, vol. 2, p. 732fn.

118
“a fine moss growing”
: Lisa Jardine,
The Curious Life of Robert Hooke
, p. 164.

118
“one who walks about”
: Westfall,
Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England
, p. 27.

119
“There may be as much curiosity”
: Shapin,
The Scientific Revolution
, p. 145.

Chapter 19. From Earthworms to Angels

120
“Cubes
,
Rhombs
,
Pyramids”
: Nicolson, “The Microscope and English Imagination,” p. 209, quoting Henry Baker,
Employment for the Microscope
. Baker wrote much later than Leeuwenhoek, in 1753, but everyone who has ever looked through a microscope has uttered some variant of Baker's remark.

121
The central idea was that all the objects
: Tillyard,
The Elizabethan World Picture
, p. 26.

121
“We must believe that”
: Ibid., p. 40.

122
He strapped himself each day
: John Carey, “Pope's Fallibility,” in
Original Copy
:
Selected Reviews and Journalism 1969–1986
(London: Faber & Faber, 1987), p. 109, and Harold Bloom,
Genius
(New York: Warner, 2002), p. 271.

123
“The work of the creator”
: Lovejoy,
The Great Chain of Being
, p. 53.

123
“worthy of an infinite CREATOR”
: Ibid., p. 133.

123
“We must say that God”
: Ibid., p. 224.

124
“If God had made use”
: Ibid., p. 179.

124
“and the characters are triangles”
: Galileo,
The Assayer.

124
“Nature is pleased with simplicity”
: G. A. J. Rogers, “Newton and the Guaranteeing God,” in Force and Popkin, eds.,
Newton and Religion
, p. 232, quoting Newton's
Principia.

124
“It is impossible that God”
: Paolo Rossi,
Logic and the Art of Memory
, p. 193.

125
“God always complies”
: Peter K. Machamer,
The Cambridge Companion to Galileo
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 193.

125
“Nature does not make jumps”
: Robert Nisbet,
History of the Idea of Progress
(New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 158.

125
“If triangles had a god”
: Montesquieu,
Persian Letters
, no. 59.

125
“Einstein was a man who”
: Jacob Bronowski,
The Ascent of Man
, p. 256.

Chapter 20. The Parade of the Horribles

126
“vast Multitude of different Sorts”
: John Ray,
The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation
, available at http://www.jri.org.uk/ray/wisdom/index.htm.

127
“How extremely stupid”
: Leonard Huxley,
The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
(New York: Appleton, 1916), vol. 1, p. 176.

127
“It is natural to admit”
: Andr
é
Maurois cites Voltaire's remark in his introduction to Voltaire's
Candide
, trans. Lowell Blair (New York: Bantam, 1959), p. 5.

128
“Some kinds of beasts”
: Michael White,
Isaac Newton
, p. 149.

128
The world contained wood
: Thomas,
Man and the Natural World
, p. 20.

128
Even if someone had conceived
: Steve Jones,
Darwin's Ghost
(New York: Random House, 2000), p. 194.

128
“a thought of God”
: David Dobbs,
Reef Madness
:
Charles Darwin
,
Alexander Agassiz
,
and the Meaning of Coral
(New York: Pantheon, 2005), p. 3.

Chapter 21. “Shuddering Before the Beautiful”

129
“all things are numbers”
: Kline,
Mathematics
:
The Loss of Certainty
, p. 12.

129fn
As one of Pythagoras's followers
: Jamie James,
The Music of the Spheres
(New York: Springer, 1995), p. 35.

130
“one of the truly momentous”
: Chandrasekhar, “Shakespeare, Newton, and Beethoven.”

130
St. Augustine explained
: Barrow,
Pi in the Sky
, p. 256.

131
“the first scientific proof”
: Kline,
Mathematics
:
The Loss of Certainty
, p. 66.

132
“You must have felt this
,
too”
: Chandrasekhar, “Shakespeare, Newton, and Beethoven.”

133
“shuddering before the beautiful”
: Ibid.

133
“the years of searching”
: From a 1933 lecture by Einstein, “About the Origins of General Relativity,” at Glasgow University. Matthew Trainer discusses Einstein's lecture in “About the Origins of the General Theory of Relativity: Einstein's Search for the Truth,”
European Journal of Physics
26, no. 6 (November 2005).

133
“to watch the sunset”
:
The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 38.

133
“Of all escapes from reality”
: Gian-Carlo Rota,
Indiscrete Thoughts
, p. 70.

134
his head
,
impaled on a pike
: Ferguson,
Tycho and Kepler
, p. 344. My references to witches and Kepler's mother come from Ferguson and from Max Caspar,
Kepler.

134
“When the storm rages”
: Benson Bobrick,
The Fated Sky
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 70.

Chapter 22. Patterns Made with Ideas

135
Mathematics had almost nothing
: For a brilliant account of the difference between math as a mathematician sees it and as the subject is taught in school, see Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician's Lament,” http://tinyurl.com/y89qbh9.

135
“A mathematician
,
like a painter”
: G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician's Apology
, p.13, available at http://math.boisestate.edu/∼holmes/holmes/A%20Mathematician's%20Apology.pdf.

135
“upon which Sir Isaac”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 192.

136
“A naturalist would scarce expect”
: Bronowski,
The Ascent of Man
, p. 227.

Chapter 23. God's Strange Cryptography

143
If two dinosaurs
: Mario Livio,
Is God a Mathematician?
, p. 11, quoting Martin Gardner,
Are Universes Thicker than Blackberries
? (New York: Norton, 2004).

143
“strange Cryptography”
: Nicolson, “The Telescope and Imagination,” p. 6, quoting Sir Thomas Browne.

143
Nature presented a greater challenge
: In an essay in 1930, Einstein wrote, “What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength.” See Albert Einstein, “Religion and Science,”
New York Times Magazine
, November 9, 1930.

144
God “took delight to hide”
: Eamon,
Science and the Secrets of Nature
, p. 320.

Chapter 24: The Secret Plan

145
“In what manner does the countenance”
: Arthur Koestler,
The Sleepwalkers
, p. 279. Half a century after its publication,
The Sleepwalkers
remains the best and liveliest account of the birth of modern astronomy. I have drawn repeatedly on Koestler's superlative history.

145
“I was born premature”
: Ibid., p. 231.

146
“That man has in every way”
: Ibid., p. 236.

147
The conjunction point after that
: My discussion of Jupiter and Saturn follows the account in Christopher M. Linton,
From Eudoxus to Einstein
, p. 170.

148
“The delight that I took”
: Koestler,
The Sleepwalkers
, p. 247.

149
“The triangle is the first”
: Ibid., p. 249.

Chapter 25. Tears of Joy

152
“And now I pressed forward”
: Koestler,
The Sleepwalkers
, p. 250.

152
“instead of twenty or one hundred”
: Ibid., p. 248.

153
Euclid proved that there are exactly five
: One way to see that there can only be a limited number of Platonic solids is to focus on one vertex and imagine the faces that meet there. There must be at least three such faces, and the angles at each vertex must all be identical and must add up to less than 360 degrees. Meeting all those conditions at once is impossible unless each face is a triangle, square, or pentagon. (Each angle of a hexagon is 120 degrees, for instance, so three or more hexagons cannot meet at one vertex.)

153
If you needed dice
: Marcus du Sautoy,
Symmetry
(New York: Harper, 2008), p. 5.

154
He burst into tears
: Caspar,
Kepler
, p. 63.

154
“Now I no longer regretted”
: Koestler,
The Sleepwalkers
, p. 251.

155
“For a long time I wanted”
: Owen Gingerich, “Johannes Kepler and the New Astronomy,” available at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1972QJRAS..13..346G.

155
He happily devoted
: Koestler,
The Sleepwalkers
, p. 269.

155
“No one
,
” he boasted
: Caspar,
Kepler
, p. 71.

155
“too pretty not to be true”
: James Watson,
The Double Helix
(New York: Touchstone, 2001), p. 204.

156
“Never in history”
: Gingerich, “Johannes Kepler and the New Astronomy,” p. 350.

Chapter 26. Walrus with a Golden Nose

157
“Would that God deliver me”
: Rossi,
The Birth of Modern Science
, p. 70.

158
“the heavenly motions are nothing but”
: Koestler,
The Sleepwalkers
, p. 392.

158fn
Not by the human ear
: Rattansi, “Newton and the Wisdom of the Ancients,” p. 189.

158fn
The first person to refer
: Curtis Wilson, “Kepler's Laws, So-Called,”
HAD News
(newsletter of the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society), no. 31, May 1994.

158
“My brain gets tired”
: Giorgio de Santillana,
The Crime of Galileo
, p. 106fn.

159
In his student days
: Ferguson,
Tycho and Kepler
, pp. 31–32.

160
had cost a ton of gold
: Gingerich, “Johannes Kepler and the New Astronomy,” p. 350.

160
“any single instrument cost more”
: Koestler,
The Sleepwalkers
, p. 278.

160
“I was in possession”
: Ibid., p. 345.

Chapter 27. Cracking the Cosmic Safe

162
Even armed with Tycho's
: By far the best account of the mathematical ins and outs is Koestler's
The Sleepwalkers.

163
But Tycho's data were twice
: Kuhn,
The Copernican Revolution
, pp. 211–12.

163
“For us
,
who by divine kindness”
: Koestler,
The Sleepwalkers
, p. 322.

163
“warfare” with the unyielding data
: Livio,
Is God a Mathematician
?, p. 249.

164
Even Galileo
,
revolutionary though he was
: De Santillana,
The Crime of Galileo
, p. 106fn.

166
“a cartload of dung”
: Koestler,
The Sleepwalkers
, p. 397.

167
“On March 8 of this present year”
: Ibid., p. 394.

167
“I have consummated the work”
: Ferguson,
Tycho and Kepler
, p. 340.

168
He saw—somehow
: Joseph Mazur provides this example in
The Motion Paradox
, p. 91.

Chapter 28. The View from the Crow's Nest

169
“I believe that if a hundred”
: Bertrand Russell,
The Scientific Outlook
, p. 34.

170
“a way of bewitching”
: Quoted in de Santillana,
The Crime of Galileo
, p. 115.

170
Galileo put the book away
: Ibid., pp. 106fn., 168.