GOING AFTER GALILEO

I make no claims to understand the Byzantine logic of Catholicism, but I do feel empathy for Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. History records that it was Bellarmine who was the instrument of Galileo Galileo’s destruction. But that charge is unfair.  The Cardinal was not a brainless evil little toady like Caccini, or a Machiavellian social tyrant such as Maffeo Barberini (aka Pope Urban VIII), and they both played far larger roles in bringing down the best brain in Europe since Pythagoras. 

And the Cardinal did write, early the fifteenth century,  a revolutionary sentence “…Civil authority is instituted by men; (and that power resides) in the people, unless they bestow it on a Prince.” Such revolutionary thought could almost have been written by Thomas Paine, a century and a half later, and it speaks of a faith that values logic and democracy. It is a brand of Catholicism that at times today feels nostalgic.

Things began to go ugly in the spring of 1615 when the Dominican monk Tommasco Caccini took it upon himself to journey to Rome (above).  Caccini was very suspicious of mathematics, which he did not understand, and his intent was to throw what he saw as “intellectual money changers” out of the Vatican. 

On the surface Caccini (above)  was complaining about Copernican astronomy, but Copernicus was beyond earthy correction, having died in 1543. In fact this “dreadful fool”, as his own brother described Caccini, sought to overturn the dominance of the Jesuit order in the Church. This was an internal Catholic  "cultural war".

Of course the Pope himself, Paul V (above), was a Jesuit, so Caccini aimed at a stand-in instead; Galileo Galilei. Caccini told the Holy See that Galileo had contaminated all of Florence with his heresies about the sun being the center of the solar system, and the moon not being a pristine celestial orb. Worse, Caccini alleged that Galileo was saying in public that God did not perform miracles.

Caccini was indeed  a “turbulent ignoramus”, as Galileo described him, and Pope Paul V might know that his own nose was being tweaked by the Dominican, but Catholic politics did not allow the Vatican to ignore the charges that had been made. And Galileo was no longer an energetic young man, self confident and  able to defend himself.

The pope had originally turned to his most dependable cultural warrior, 73 year old Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (above). It had been the intellectual Bellarmine who had out maneuvered and isolated the clever James I of England over his English translation of the bible, and who had prosecuted the magician Giordano Bruno sixteen years earlier. 

They had been forced to put a wooden clamp on Bruno’s tongue to prevent him from shouting heresies while they burned him at the stake (above), but in the end Bruno was silenced. It is doubtful the Pope wanted Galileo silenced so absolutely, but he expected Bellarmine to remove the Flrointine as an irritant, whatever that demanded.

The problem was that Bellarmine understood enough about mathematics to know that Galileo’s numbers were right. When the old and ill Bellarmine interviewed Galileo, which he did three times, he fell under the genius’s spell. In the end Bellarmine provided the Florentine with a letter that allowed him to "discuss" the idea of a sun centered universe, so long as he did not claim publicly that it was not opinion but fact. 

Despite what Bellarmine and Galileo both knew to be fact, officially, according to the Church, the Earth remained at the center of the universe because several Popes had said it was so.  Robert Bellarmine would die in 1624, and later become a saint. But the saint's letter of instruction for Galileo would prove to be a dead letter.

That letter rose from the dead after Pope Paul V died in 1621. He was followed by the brief and sickly Pope Gregory XV, and in 1623 by the energetic and energetically ignorant Pope Urban VIII, aka Maffeo Barberini (above). How Barberini’s mind worked was revealed in 1624 when he issued a Papal Bull, or pronouncement, making it a sin to smoke tobacco - not because it was unhealthful but because it often caused its users to sneeze, an act which Barberini considered similar to sexual ecstasy - which leaves me wondering about Signor Barberini’s boudoir habits during flu season.So, for the next eight years it was war and not sin which occupied Barberini. If he was not fighting battles to extend the Church’s (and his families') dominions, then he was preparing to fight battles. Barberini turned the Vatican into an arsenal, and built a factory in Tivoli to supply it with weapons. And when the Holy See ran short of cannon Barberini had bronze ripped from the roof of that temple to the Roman Republic, the Pantheon, and melted it into more cannon. As an unknown sage put it at the time, “That which the barbarians did not do, Barberini did” (in Latin – “quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini”).

But finally, in February of 1632, with the printing of Galileo’s newest book, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”,  the prosaic world of ideas captured Barberini’s attention. Seeing criticism of himself in Galileo’s arguments (and, honestly, it seems to have been there) Barberini ordered the book seized and the printer arrested. And he ordered the Inquisition to investigate Galileo.The Church had been at war with dissenters from the moment Christ died on the cross, and by 1542, when Pope Paul III established the “Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition” in Rome, that war had become formalized and institutionalized, replete with all forms of torture, including water boarding, and with all the advantages and disadvantages found in any bureaucracy, even a bureaucracy of torture.

By 1633, when an ailing Galileo was ordered to Rome (he arrived carried in a litter) to face the Dominican Cardinals who had been given responsibility for his inquisition, the machinery of correction had been perfected. To be charged was to be guilty.

Galileo thought his 1616 letter from Cardinal Bellarmine would protect him, but Bellarmine was a decade dead, and instead the Cardinal’s letter would be the clamp used to silence Galileo’s tongue. Galileo was presented with an “official” copy of that letter which included a phrase – “Galileo agrees to neither hold, defend, nor teach the Copernican opinion in any way whatsoever” – that had not been in the original letter, which the old man still had. 

Holding this official forgery Galileo mumbled, “I don’t remember the clause “in any way whatsoever… ”. And then his voice fell silent. He must have understood at that instant that this Pope (and his army of sycophants) was willing to commit the sin of bearing false wittiness to secure Galileo's silence, or his death.

When presented with his false confession the old man signed. To have refused would have been to invite a death by fire. And in the last act of the farce Galileo was required to openly announced his “abiurare”, that he abjured and renounced the idea that the sun was at the center of the solar system. 

Later generations would insist the old man left the court muttering his independence, but that was just wishful thinking. Barbarini used the power of Galileo's imagination, which had once opened the universe to all of humanity, by showing him the instruments of torture, to frighten  him and close that universe. He could imagine the endless pain the Pope could cause him. That is not faith. It is obedience. 

In exchange for his “abiurare” the old man was allowed to return to his home in Florence but he was never allowed to write another word on science. He died in January of 1641, blind and gagged. It was a great victory for Barbarini.

It was not until 31 October, 1992 – Halloween, 350 years later –that Pope John Paul II expressed the Church’s official regret at the way Galileo had been persecuted. John Paul admitted that the Earth does indeed revolve around the sun, once a year. According to John Paul II, “The error of the theologians of the time…was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of sacred scripture.”It seemed, at least for a time, that Catholicism would enter the twenty-first century in peaceful coexistence with science, or, perhaps, even mutually supportive.. Cardinal Bellarmine would have been dis-pleased, but I remain  more than a little wary of the sins the church might commit tomorrow, all in God's name, of course.

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TOWER OF BABBEL TWO

 

I doubt you would have heard of the English monk Roger Bacon were it not for his corpulent boss  Pope Clement IV.   Clement the Fat was famous for only three things. First, that he was really fat. Secondly, he really hated Jews. And third, he ordered the “brilliant, combative, and somewhat eccentric” Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon to write a compendium of philosophy and science.

Bacon's “Opus Majus” laid the foundation for our world, beginning with the startling suggestion that since humans are made of the same stuff as the stars, we should be able to understand the stars.  Further, Bacon wrote, "Grammar is one and the same in all languages, substantially, though it may vary, accidentally, in each of them"  He was thus hinting that all languages must at one time have had common ancestors. Eight centuries later, Bacon still appears correct about both of those ideas. 

It makes you wonder how far Bacon's mind might have taken us  had not fat Clement IV died just four yeas after becoming Pope. With Clement's early demise Roger Bacon lost his financial and moral support.  

Roger went right on thinking great thoughts, even when he had to hide them from his new regressive church superiors (above), inventing the magnifying lens among other things, but since the Cardinals would not chose Clement's successor for three years, Europe had to wait another two hundred years for The Renaissance, which  Roger had been trying to midwife into existence. The Black Death putting half of Europe in mass graves did not help, but the singular death of the anti-Semitic fat man was a real blow to the evolution of humanity.

The theory of a Universal Grammar, first postulated by Roger Bacon and most recently by Noam Chomsky, is supported by the existence of “cognates”.   

As Bacon pointed out in 1254, cognates are words which share "the same linguistic family or derivation”. Such as:  “la misma familia lingüística o derivación” (Spanish), “a mesma família lingüística ou derivação” (Portuguese), “la stessa famiglia linguistica o derivazione” (Italian), “la même famille linguistique ou dérivation” (French), “la mateixa família lingüística o derivació (Catalan), “din aceeasi familie lingvistice sau derivare” (Romanian)..or, in English, lexical cognates. They make up about  quarter of  all English words .  

The reality of Universal Grammar makes the work of code breaking possible, and drew Alice Elizabeth Kober into the Minoan labyrinth created by little Arthur Evans.  Remember him?

On the day in 1928 when 18 year old Alice Kober (above) received her Bachelor's Degree from Hunter College in Manhattan, she confidently announced she would decode Evan's mysterious Linear B language. It was not merely that Alice was arrogant. As far as I can tell she had no ego about her science. But she was very, very, very smart. And she knew it.

Alice got her Phd from Columbia in 1932, excavated in Greece, and in 1940, landed a job as an assistant to Sir John Linden Myers, professor of Ancient History at Liverpool University. Myers had worked directly under Professor Arthur Evans. And when age and illness had forced Evans into retirement, Myers took over his work on Linear B. But Myers didn't get very far.

Alice Kober agreed the mother tongue of Minoan was probably Etruscan, a culture which dominated the northern Italian peninsula after about 700 B.C. The rational as handed down from Evans to Myers and now to Alice, was that because the Linear B inscriptions were found on Etruscan amphora at several Minoan sites on Crete, it had to be based, at least in part, on Etruscan. 

During World War Two Professor Myers went to work for the Royal Naval Intelligence service. That left Alice, now a professor herself at Brooklyn College in New York City (above), as the leading expert still working on decoding Linear B. And she decided to make a fresh start.

Alice chose our old friend, frequency analysis. She knew the 90 characters generally acknowledged as Linear B, did not represent a phonetic alphabet like modern languages, but closer to Egyptian hieroglyphics.   Evans himself had suggested it might use voice inflection to define tenses, with the nouns changing their endings to fit past, present and third person perfect. But that also made a paper translation all the more difficult. So Alice began to collect every crumb of information she could about all of the 90 most probable Linear B symbols, as well as the two hundred possible ones. And she taught herself ancient Greek, Akkadian, Sumerian, Sanskrit and Egyptian, so she could do that.

Had this been a modern research project, Alice would have input it all into a computer. But the world's first one of those had just been built to crack the German Enigma codes, and its very existence was so secret, the allies officially referred to it as the “Ultra Secret”.  So Alice had little choice but to use 3X5 inch “index cards”. When the war caused a shortage of those, she scavenged paper from old calendars, greeting cards and catalogues, even stealing library index cards. She carefully filed her homemade index cards into handmade drawers constructed from empty cigarette cartons provided by her addiction to nicotine.

Alice explained the problem in a 1948 paper published by the American Journal of Archeology. “People often say,” she wrote, “ that an unknown language written in an unknown script cannot be deciphered. They are putting the situation optimistically. We are dealing with three unknowns: language, script and meaning.... Forty years of attempts to decipher Minoan by guessing....have proved that such a procedure is useless. Minoan cannot be deciphered, because we do not know if "Minoan" existed....If, as seems probable, it was a highly inflected language, it should be possible to work out some of the inflection pattern.” And she ended that paper with a warning about speculation. “When we have the facts, certain conclusions will be almost inevitable. Until we have them, no conclusions are possible.

After a full day of teaching, Alice would return to her home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, which she shared with her widowed mother. There is no record she ever had a romantic life. Perhaps Alice was gay, or had little sexual drive. But for whatever reason, her life was clearly devoted to Linear B. After dinner and grading papers, she would engage her opponent. Said one writer, familiar with her work, “She suffered no fools. She demanded precision of herself and others. She spoke and wrote in no-frills, spin-free English, direct and blunt, prickly and undiplomatic”.

I wonder what old King Minos would have thought, had he caught a glimpse of Alice around a corner in the labyrinth of ages, her research scattered across the kitchen table, a cigarette balanced on the edge of an ashtray, its smoke curling romantically to the ceiling, as Alice shuffled and rearranged the 186,000 cards she had created, and the symbols and notes they contained. Like an alchemist she was trying to conjure an ancient world out of what came to be called her “Triplets”, three-word sets she had uncovered, with similar suffixes. Deciphering an entire language out of that would be a real magic act. And she darn near pulled out a rabbit

Prophetically, Alice had delivered a lecture on Linear B in 1948, in which she did speculate about the doors which a solution to Linear B might unlock - and might not.. “We may find out if Helen of Troy really existed, if King Minos was a man or a woman...On the other hand, we may only find out that Mr. X delivered a hundred cattle to Mr. Y on the tenth of June 1400BC.” After learning of her terminal cancer diagnosis, Alice wrote to a colleague, “The important thing is the solution of the problem, not who solves it. ” She died on 16 May, 1950, at the age of just 43, with the great mystery of her life unresolved.

The odd thing is, just after the end of the war in Europe, in 1945, Alice had met the solution to the great mystery.  She had traveled to England, to visit with her mentor Professor Sir John Myers. He had arraigned a brief meeting between Alice and a man he thought was a promising young architectural student named Michael Ventris (above). The meeting did not go well. Alice was an academic, the daughter of blue collar parents, respected for her hard won achievements in science and the byzantine politics of academia. Michael was the son of a wealthy family, raised by a mother influenced by the cold and imperial psychiatrist Carl Jung. They were both socially inept to a degree and managed to say just the wrong things to each other. But being socially inept, they did not hold it against each other, and exchanged a few letters over the next five years, all strictly on the topic of Linear B. And oddly, that was where the solution would be found, in the unpleasant pauses in their conversations.

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CLEVER HANS

 

"I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that, my art is not above the ordinary."

Mark Twain.

I have no doubt Hans was clever. But what was he clever about?  What are the odds the only genius mind-reading horse would be bought by a retired gym teacher who was just happened to be anxious to prove that horses could memorize the multiplication tables? Perhaps I should rein myself in here, and start at the beginning.

"Horses do think. Not very deeply, perhaps, but enough to get you into a lot of trouble."

Patricia Jacobson and Marcia Hayes - "A Horse Around the House"

Right out of the gate, Hans just looked smart (above). He was handsome, sleek, athletic and big, almost a thousand pounds and five and a half feet high at the shoulders. His breed had been founded by Count Orlov who crossed Russian mares with Arabian stallions, to produce spirited trotters. And then Count Rostophin threw in three oriental stallions to breed gentle, empathetic riding horses. So popular was the breed that by 1866 nearly half of all horses on Russian stud farms were Orlovs. And by the end of the 19^th century, they were even being sold in Europe.

"Small children are convinced that ponies deserve to see the inside of the house."

Maya Patel

The popularity of the Orlov is explained by the web site, InfoHorse.com (http://www.infohorse.com/ShowAd.asp?id=3693) ; “Possessed of amazing intelligence, they learn quickly and remember easily with few repetitions. There is often an uncanny understanding of what is wanted and needed of them....They can become extremely sensitive to the moods and emotions of their riders/owners, even reflecting them in self-carriage. Under saddle this makes for a partner of such willingness and awareness that traditional (dressage) exercises become poetry.”

"Horses are uncomfortable in the middle and dangerous at both ends."

Ian Fleming - Sunday Times of London, October 9, 1966

Which brings us to Wilhelm von Osten (above), a retired, grouchy, grumpy Berlin prep school mathematics teacher who believed that animal intelligence was sorely underrated. Beginning in the 1880's he attempted to teach simple math to a cat. The feline did not care scratch for his efforts, so von Osten switched his subject to a bear. The Ursula proved a bear market for von Osten's educational techniques. So in 1888 he bought a pony, whom he named Hans. Von Osten was giddy when, after a few weeks effort, he wrote the number three on a blackboard, Hans tapped his right hoof three times. It seemed clear, to William at least, that he had harnessed the genius in the young stallion.

"It's always been and always will be the same in the world: The horse does the work and the coachman is tipped"

Old proverb

Von Osten now had the bit between his teeth. He asked Hans for the sum of three plus two, and the black beauty tapped his hoof five times. Eventually Hans was even figuring square roots and working with fractions. Hans even read a calendar, answering  the question “, "If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?” - something I would have trouble with. But there was more. Asked to identify a member of the crowd,  Hans was able to tap out a name, using a complicated code chart, even though no one had told the horse the man's name.   

But after years of giving public demonstrations before enthusiastic crowds, von Osten grew frustrated by official indifference.  So, in the summer of 1902, he advertised for sale his “beautiful, gentle 7 year old stallion”, in a military newspaper.  In fact Hans was not seven, and he was not really for sale, but the ad did mention, “He distinguishes ten colors, reads, knows the four arithmetic operations, etc.” That elicited the sought after response from cavalry officers, who stampeded to von Osten's house. They came prepared to mock but left impressed. Because of this growing support by such a respected segment of Emperial German society, within two years even the Minister for Education was singing Han's (and of course, von Osten's) praises.

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him participate in synchronized diving.”

Cuthbert Soup - “Another Whole 'Nother Story”

The mockery poured upon the Minister for those statements finally achieved Von Osten's goal. A panel of 13 “experts” was herded together; a veterinarian, a circus manager, a Cavalry officer, the Director of the Berlin Zoo, some school teachers and the psychologist Carl Stumpf,  The panel put Hans through his paces, and when faced with Han's 89.9% accuracy,  came to the unanimous conclusion there were no tricks involved.  That declaration even made the New York Times chuckle (“Berlin’s Wonderful Horse. He Can Do Almost Everything but Talk.”)  The German government was now facing a night-mare of public humiliation.  So before declaring himself mentally un-stable, Professor Stumpf decided to go one step further.  He asked his assistant, Oskar Pfungst, to put Hans through his paces, again.

I'd rather have a goddamn horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.

J.D. Salinger - “The Catcher in the Rye”

Pfungst designed experiments for Dr. Stumpf, and he now laid down four restrictions to begin a series of new tests for Hans,  to be conducted in the courtyard of the Psychological Institute of the University of Berlin.  First Pfungst cut von Osten right out the herd.  Then he put blinders on Hans, so he could only see the human asking the question.  And then he varied whether the questioner knew the answer or not.  The key turned out to this last bit. When the human was ignorant of the correct answer,  Han's accuracy dropped to just 6%.  So Hans was only as smart as the human asking the questions.  That lead to testing the questioner.  

By closely watching the humans and not the horse,  Pfungst found they were subtly and unconsciously tensing their muscles as Han's approached the correct answer, and showed a similar relaxation immediately afterward.  Pfungst's theory was that Hans was watching for the same muscle clues he expected when a human was riding on his back. In his December 1904 report – "Clever Hans (the horse of Mr. von Osten) A Contribution To Experimental Animal And Human Psychology" - Plungst revealed, that he could now “call forth at will all the various reactions of the horse by making the proper kind of voluntary movements, without asking the relevant question.” .

"Horse sense is the thing a horse has, which keeps it from betting on people."

W.C. Fields

But for me, von Osten's mane arguments were finally reduced to horse d'oeuvres when Pfungst used von Osten's techniques to train his own dog, (above, left center),  Nora, to duplicate all of Hans' feats...or hoofs.  Of course, having hitched his reputation to his halter-ego, Von Osten bridled at the suggestion he did not own a genius horse – Hans, that is.  So he bolted for the exit - von Osten did, that is.  He told a newspaper “one can hardly see in these experiments more than a kind of scholarly jest....”  He retreated to his families' estate in Prussia.  And there the bitter old man died, on 3 July, 1909.  He was buried at the Church of Zion (Zionskirchhof) back in Berlin

"If the world was truly a rational place, men would ride sidesaddle."

Rita Mae Brown

Hans, still as clever as ever, was adopted by Karl Krall, a wealthy jeweler in the west German town of Elberfeld. Krall was also determined to prove Hans a genius, and the stallion continued to spend hours each day, now with two stall mates,  standing through interminable instruction and testing sessions. The horse genius was last heard of in 1916 when he was drafted, and probably died pulling wagons in World War One. 

Meanwhile, the "Clever Hans (in German “Kluge Hans”) Effect", still plagues researchers by producing false positive results by search, drug and bomb sniffing dogs, dolphins and primates used in language research and even human sufferers of autism. And I suspect it also occurs in contestants on American Idol.

"There are only two emotions that belong in the saddle; one is a sense of humor and the other is patience."

John Lyons

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