To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (63 page)

16
. Quoted by Duhem,
To Save the Phenomena
, pp. 20–21.

17
. Ibid.

18
. For comments on the meaning of explanation in science, and references to other articles on this subject, see S. Weinberg, “Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?” in
New York Review of Books
48
, 9 (May 31, 2001): 47–50. Reprints:
Australian Review
(2001); in Portuguese,
Folha da S. Paolo
(2001); in French,
La Recherche
(2001);
The Best American Science Writing
, ed. M. Ridley and A. Lightman (HarperCollins, New York, 2002);
The Norton Reader
(W. W. Norton, New York, December 2003);
Explanations—Styles of Explanation in Science
, ed. John Cornwell (Oxford University
Press, London, 2004), 23–38; in Hungarian,
Akadeemia
176
, No. 8: 1734–49 (2005); S. Weinberg,
Lake Views—This World and the Universe
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2009).

19
. This is not from the
Almagest
but from the
Greek Anthology
, verses compiled in the Byzantine Empire around AD 900. This translation is from Thomas L. Heath,
Greek Astronomy
(Dover, Mineola, N.Y., 1991), p. lvii.

PART III: THE MIDDLE AGES
9. The Arabs

1
. This letter is quoted by Eutychius, then patriarch of Alexandria. The translation here is from E. M. Forster,
Pharos and Pharillon
(Knopf, New York, 1962), pp. 21–22. A less pithy translation is given by Gibbon,
Decline and Fall
, Chapter 51.

2
. P. K. Hitti,
History of the Arabs
(Macmillan, London, 1937), p. 315.

3
. D. Gutas,
Greek Thought, Arabic Culture—The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbāsid Society
(Routledge, London, 1998), pp. 53–60.

4
. Al-Biruni,
Book of the Determination at Coordinates of Localities
, Chapter 5, excerpted and trans. J. Lennart Berggren, in
The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and Islam
, ed. Victor Katz (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2007).

5
. Quoted in P. Duhem,
To Save the Phenomena
, p. 29.

6
. Quoted by R. Arnaldez and A. Z. Iskandar in
The Dictionary of Scientific Biography
(Scribner, New York, 1975), Volume 12, p. 3.

7
. G. J. Toomer,
Centaurus
14,
306 (1969).

8
. Moses ben Maimon,
Guide to the Perplexed
, Part 2, Chapter 24, trans. M. Friedländer, 2nd ed. (Routledge, London, 1919), pp. 196, 198.

9
. Ben Maimon is here quoting Psalms 115:16.

10
. See E. Masood,
Science and Islam
(Icon, London, 2009).

11
. N. M. Swerdlow,
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
117
, 423 (1973).

12
. The case that Copernicus learned of this device from Arab sources is made by F. J. Ragep,
History of Science
14
, 65 (2007).

13
. This is documented by Toby E. Huff,
Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011), Chapter 5.

14
. These are verses 13, 29, and 30 of the second version of Fitzgerald’s translation.

15
. Quoted in Jim al-Khalili,
The House of Wisdom
(Penguin, New York, 2011), p. 188.

16
. 
Al-Ghazali’s Tahafut al-Falasifah
, trans. Sabih Ahmad Kamali (Pakistan Philosophical Congress, Lahore, 1958).

17
. Al-Ghazali,
Fatihat al-‘Ulum
, trans. I. Goldheizer, in
Studies on Islam
, ed. Merlin L. Swartz (Oxford University Press, 1981), quotation, p. 195.

10. Medieval Europe

1
. See, e. g., Lynn White Jr.,
Medieval Technology and Social Change
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962), Chapter 2.

2
. Peter Dear,
Revolutionizing the Sciences—European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700
, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, 2009), p. 15.

3
. The articles of the condemnation are given in a translation by Edward Grant in
A Source Book in Medieval Science
, ed. E. Grant (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1974), pp. 48–50.

4
. Ibid., p. 47.

5
. Quoted in David C. Lindberg,
The Beginnings of Western Science
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1992), p. 241.

6
. Ibid.

7
. Nicole Oresme,
Le livre du ciel et du monde
, in French and trans. A. D. Menut and A. J. Denomy (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1968), p. 369.

8
. Quoted in “Buridan,” in
Dictionary of Scientific Biography
, ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (Scribner, New York, 1973), Volume 2, pp. 604–5.

9
. See the article by Piaget in
The Voices of Time
, ed. J. T. Fraser (Braziller, New York, 1966).

10
. Oresme,
Le livre.

11
. Ibid., pp. 537–39.

12
. A. C. Crombie,
Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science—1100–1700
(Clarendon, Oxford, 1953).

13
. For instance, see T. C. R. McLeish,
Nature
507
, 161–63 (March 13, 2014).

14
. Quoted in A. C. Crombie,
Medieval and Early Modern Science
(Doubleday Anchor, Garden City, N.Y., 1959), Volume 1, p. 53.

15
. Translation by Ernest A. Moody, in
A Source Book in Medieval Science
, ed. E. Grant, p. 239. I have taken the liberty of changing the word “latitude” in Moody’s translation to “increment of velocity,” which I think more accurately indicates Heytesbury’s meaning.

16
. De Soto is quoted in an English translation by W. A. Wallace,
Isis
59
, 384 (1968).

17
. Quoted in Duhem,
To Save the Phenomena
, pp. 49–50.

PART IV: THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

1
. Herbert Butterfield,
The Origins of Modern Science
, rev. ed. (Free Press, New York, 1957), p. 7.

2
. For collections of essays on this theme, see
Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution
, ed. D. C. Lindberg and R. S. Westfall (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990), and
Rethinking the Scientific Revolution
, ed. M. J. Osler (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000).

3
. Steven Shapin,
The Scientific Revolution
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1996), p. 1.

4
. Pierre Duhem,
The System of the World: A History of Cosmological Doctrines from Plato to Copernicus
(Hermann, Paris, 1913).

11. The Solar System Solved

1
. For an English translation, see Edward Rosen,
Three Copernican Treatises
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1939), or Noel M. Swerdlow, “The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus’s Planetary Theory: A Translation of the
Commentariolus
with Commentary,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
117
, 423 (1973).

2
. For a review, see N. Jardine,
Journal of the History of Astronomy
13
, 168 (1982).

3
. O. Neugebauer,
Astronomy and History—Selected Essays
(Springer-Verlag, New York, 1983), essay 40.

4
. The importance of this correlation for Copernicus is stressed by Bernard R. Goldstein,
Journal of the History of Astronomy
33
, 219 (2002).

5
. For an English translation, see
Nicolas Copernicus On the Revolutions
, trans. Edward Rosen (Polish Scientific Publishers, Warsaw, 1978; reprint, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md., 1978); or
Copernicus—On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
, trans. A. M. Duncan (Barnes and Noble, New York, 1976). Quotations here are from Rosen.

6
. A. D. White,
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
(Appleton, New York, 1895), Volume 1, pp. 126–28.
For a deflation of White, see D. C. Lindberg and R. L. Numbers, “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter Between Christianity and Science,”
Church History
58
, 3 (September 1986): 338.

7
. This paragraph has been quoted by Lindberg and Numbers, “Beyond War and Peace,” and by T. Kuhn,
The Copernican Revolution
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 191. Kuhn’s source is White,
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology.
The German original is
Sämtliche Schriften
, ed. J. G. Walch (J. J. Gebauer, Halle, 1743), Volume 22, p. 2260.

8
. Joshua 10:12.

9
. This English translation of Osiander’s preface is taken from Rosen, trans.,
Nicolas Copernicus On the Revolutions.

10
. Quoted in R. Christianson,
Tycho’s Island
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000), p. 17.

11
. On the history of the idea of hard celestial spheres, see Edward Rosen, “The Dissolution of the Solid Celestial Spheres,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
46
, 13 (1985). Rosen argues that Tycho exaggerated the extent to which this idea had been accepted before his time.

12
. For claims to Tycho’s system and for its variations, see C. Schofield, “The Tychonic and Semi-Tychonic World Systems,” in
Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics—Part A: Tycho Brahe to Newton
, ed. R. Taton and C. Wilson (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989).

13
. For a photograph of this statue, taken by Owen Gingerich, see the frontispiece of my essay collection
Facing Up—Science and Its Cultural Adversaries
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

14
. S. Weinberg, “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant,”
Physical Review Letters
59
, 2607 (1987); H. Martel, P. Shapiro, and S. Weinberg, “Likely Values of the Cosmological Constant,”
Astrophysical Journal
492
, 29 (1998).

15
. J. R. Voelkel and O. Gingerich, “Giovanni Antonio Magini’s ‘Keplerian’ Tables of 1614 and Their Implications for the Reception of Keplerian Astronomy in the Seventeenth Century,”
Journal for the History of Astronomy
32
, 237 (2001).

16
. Quoted in Robert S. Westfall,
The Construction of Modern Science—Mechanism and Mechanics
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977), p. 10.

17
. This is the translation of William H. Donahue, in
Johannes Kepler—New Astronomy
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992), p. 65.

18
. Johannes Kepler,
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World
, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Prometheus, Amherst, N.Y., 1995), p. 180.

19
. Quoted by Owen Gingerich in
Tribute to Galileo in Padua, International Symposium a cura dell’Universita di Padova, 2–6 dicembre 1992
, Volume 4 (Edizioni LINT, Trieste, 1995).

20
. Quotations from Galileo Galilei,
Siderius Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger
, trans. Albert van Helden (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1989).

21
. Galileo Galilei,
Discorse e Dimostrazione Matematiche.
For a facsimile of the 1663 translation by Thomas Salusbury, see Galileo Galilei,
Discourse on Bodies in Water
, with introduction and notes by Stillman Drake (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1960).

22
. For a modern edition of a seventeenth-century translation, see Galileo,
Discourse on Bodies in Water
, trans. Thomas Salusbury, intro. and notes by Stillman Drake.

23
. For details of this conflict, see J. L. Heilbron,
Galileo
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010).