In “What Galileo saw,” an article that came out in the February 11, 2013 issue of
The New Yorker, the magazine’s critic-at-large Adam Gopnik writes about how new historical research is producing a significantly revised picture of the scientist Galileo Galilee and his enemies, particularly the Roman Catholic Church. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the Church had threatened Galileo with torture and kept him on lifetime house arrest for championing the Copernican concept of
heliocentrism—that the sun was actually the center of the universe—in opposition to the long-held Church dogma of
geocentrism—that it was Earth that was the center of the universe.
“The newer (and, unsurprisingly, Church-endorsed) view,” Gopnik writes, “is that Galileo made needless trouble for himself by being impolitic, and that, in the circumstances of the time, it would have been hard for the Church to act otherwise. The Church wanted, as today’s intelligent designers now say, to be allowed to ‘teach the controversy’—to teach the Copernican and Aristotelian views as rival hypotheses, both plausible, both unproved. All Galileo had to do was give the Church a break and say that you could see it that way if you wanted to. He wouldn’t give it a break. The complaint is, in a way, the familiar torturer’s complaint: Why did you force us to do this to you? But the answer is the story of his life.”
OLD CHURCH DOGMA: GEOCENTRISM
MODERN CONCEPT: HELIOCENTRISM
Indeed, to save body and soul from his Inquisitors, Galileo abjured his belief in heliocentrism in these ironical words: “I do not hold the Copernican opinion, and have not held it after being ordered by injunction to abandon it.” Gopnik argues that when Galileo set this precedent in ducking and avoiding the consequences of his scientific discovery, it may be no accident that so many of the great scientists who came after him—Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Werner Heisenberg among them—had followed his example. “In the roster of genius, evasion of worldly responsibility seems practically a fixed theme,” Gopnik says.
Read Adam Gopnik’s “What Galileo saw” in The New Yorker Arts & Culture section now!OTHER INTERESTING READINGS:In “Is Writing Torture?”, an article that came out in the February 8, 2013 issue of
The New Yorker, book author Avi Steinberg says it remains an open question as to whether writers are happy that they became writers. The article was Steinberg’s response to the furor triggered by the advice given by noted novelist Philip Roth to a writer, Julian Tepper, when the latter presented his first novel to Roth a few months ago. Roth’s advice: “I would quit while you’re ahead. Really. It’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.” Peeved by Roth’s advice, Tepper launched an earnest defense of the writing craft that was published in the
Paris Review Daily.
Read Avi Steinberg’s “Is Writing Torture” in The New Yorker now!In “The Paperback Quest for Joy,” an article she wrote for the Autumn 2012 issue of the
City Journal, book author Laura Vanderkam surveys the history of self-help books in the United States, from Benjamin Franklin’s 1757 book
The Way to Wealth to Napoleon Hill’s 1937 book
Think and Grow Rich to the still-burgeoning
Chicken Soup for the Soul series that dispenses specialized comtemporary advice to all sorts of needful people. Today, Vanderkam reports, there are more than 45,000 self-help titles in print, and the self-improvement industry does $12 billion worth of business each year. She says there’s much to mock and to criticize about some of these books, but she concedes that “at its best, self-help captures something uniquely American: the belief that anyone can pursue happiness.”
Read Laura Vanderkam’s “The Paperback Quest for Joy,” in the City Journal now!
