Big Bang. Simon Singh

was published, the war had been raging for fourteen years, and the Catholic Church felt increasingly alarmed by the growing Protestant threat. The Pope had to be seen to be a strong champion of the Catholic faith, and he decided that part of his new hard-hitting populist strategy would be to make a deft U-turn and condemn the blasphemous writings of any heretical scientists who dared question the traditional Earth-centred view of the universe.

      A more personal explanation for the Pope’s dramatic change of heart is that astronomers jealous of Galileo’s fame, together with the more conservative cardinals, had stirred up trouble by highlighting parallels between some of the Pope’s earlier and more naive pronouncements on astronomy and statements uttered by the Dialogue’s buffoon, Simplicio. For example, Urban had argued, much as Simplicio does, that an omnipotent God created a universe with no regard to the laws of physics, so the Pope must have been humiliated by Salviati’s sarcastic response to Simplicio in the Dialogue: ‘Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn.’

      Soon after the Dialogue’s publication, the Inquisition ordered Galileo to appear before them on a charge of ‘vehement suspicion of heresy’. When Galileo protested that he was too ill to travel, the Inquisition threatened to arrest him and drag him to Rome in chains, whereupon he acquiesced and prepared for the journey. While waiting for Galileo’s arrival, the Pope attempted to impound the Dialogue and ordered the printer to send all copies to Rome, but it was too late – every single copy had been sold.

      The trial began in April 1633. The accusation of heresy centred on the conflict between Galileo’s views and the Biblical statement that ‘God fixed the Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved for ever.’ Most members of the Inquisition took the view expressed by Cardinal Bellarmine: ‘To assert that the Earth revolves around the Sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.’ However, among the ten cardinals presiding over the trial, there was a sympathetic rationalist faction led by Francesco Barberini, the nephew of Pope Urban VIII. For two weeks, the evidence mounted against Galileo and there were even threats of torture, but Barberini continually called for leniency and tolerance. To some extent he was successful. After being found guilty, Galileo was neither executed nor thrown into a dungeon, but sentenced instead to indefinite house arrest, and the Dialogue was added to the list of banned books, the Index librorum prohibitorum. Barberini was one of three judges who did not sign the sentence.

      Galileo’s trial and subsequent punishment was one of the darkest episodes in the history of science, a triumph for irrationality over logic. At the end of the trial, Galileo was forced to recant, to deny the truth of his argument. However, he did manage to salvage some small pride in the name of science. After sentencing, as he rose from his knees, he reputedly muttered the words ‘Eppur si muove!’ (‘And yet it moves!’). In other words, the truth is dictated by reality, not by the Inquisition. Regardless of what the Church might have claimed, the universe still operated according to its own immutable scientific laws, and the Earth did indeed orbit the Sun.

      Galileo slipped into isolation. Confined to his house, he continued to think about the laws that governed the universe, but his research was severely limited when he became blind in 1637, perhaps through glaucoma caused by staring at the Sun through his telescope. The great observer could no longer observe. Galileo died on 8 January 1642. As a final act of punishment, the Church refused to let him be buried in consecrated ground.

      

      The Ultimate Question

      The Sun-centred model gradually became widely accepted by astronomers over the course of the next century, partly because there was more observational evidence being gathered with the aid of better telescopes, and partly because there were theoretical breakthroughs to explain the physics behind the model. Another important factor was that a generation of astronomers had passed away. Death is an essential element in the progress of science, since it takes care of conservative scientists of a previous generation reluctant to let go of an old, fallacious theory and embrace a new and accurate one. Their recalcitrance is understandable, because they had framed their entire life’s work around one model and were faced with the possibility of having to abandon it in favour of a new model. As Max Planck, one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, commented: ‘An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and the growing generation is familiarised with the ideas from the beginning.’

      In parallel with the acceptance of the Sun-centred view of the universe by the astronomical establishment, there was also a shift in the attitude of the Church. Theologians came to realise that they would look foolish if they continued to deny what men of learning regarded as reality. The Church softened its stance towards astronomy and many other areas of science, which gave rise to a new period of intellectual freedom. Throughout the eighteenth century, scientists would apply their skills to a wide variety of questions about the world around them, replacing supernatural myths, philosophical blunders and religious dogmas with accurate, logical, verifiable, natural explanations and answers. Scientists studied everything from the nature of light to the process of reproduction, from the constituents of matter to the mechanics of volcanoes.

      However, one particular question was conspicuously ignored, because scientists agreed that it was beyond their remit, indeed inaccessible to rational endeavour of any kind. Nobody, it seemed, was keen to tackle the ultimate question of how the universe was created. Scientists restricted themselves to explaining natural phenomena, and the creation of the universe was acknowledged to be a supernatural event. Also, addressing such a question would have jeopardised the mutual respect that had developed between science and religion. Modern notions of a godless Big Bang would have seemed heretical to eighteenth-century theologians, much as the Sun-centred universe had offended the Inquisition back in the seventeenth century. In Europe, the Bible continued to be the indisputable authority on the creation of the universe, and the overwhelming majority of scholars accepted that God had created the Heavens and the Earth.

      It seemed that the only issue open to discussion was when God had created the universe. Scholars trawled through the lists of Biblical begats from Genesis onwards, adding up the years between each birth, taking into account Adam, the prophets, the reigns of the kings, and so on, keeping a careful running total as they went along. There were sufficient uncertainties for the estimated date of creation to vary by up to three thousand years, depending on who was doing the reckoning. Alfonso X of Castile and León, for instance, the king responsible for the Alphonsine Tables, quoted the oldest date for creation, 6904 BC, while Johannes Kepler preferred a date at the lower end of the range, 3992 BC.

      The most fastidious calculation was by James Ussher, who became the Archbishop of Armagh in 1624. He employed an agent in the Middle East to seek out the oldest known Biblical texts, to make his estimate less susceptible to errors in transcription and translation. He also put an enormous effort into anchoring the Old Testament chronology to an event in recorded history. In the end, he spotted that Nebuchadnezzar’s death was indirectly mentioned in the Second Book of Kings, so it could be dated in terms of Biblical history; the death and its date also appeared in a list of the Babylonian kings compiled by the astronomer Ptolemy, so it could be linked to the modern historical record. Consequently, after much tallying and historical research, Ussher was able to pronounce that the date of creation was Saturday 22 October, 4004 BC. To be even more precise, Ussher announced that time began at 6 p.m. on that day, based on a passage from the Book of Genesis which proclaimed: ‘And the evening and the morning were the first day.’

      While this may seem an absurdly literal interpretation of the Bible, it made perfect sense in a society that judged Scripture to be the definitive authority on the great question of creation. Indeed, Bishop Ussher’s date was recognised by the Church of England in 1701, and was thereafter published in the opening margin of the King James Bible right the way through to the twentieth century. Even scientists and philosophers were happy