The Telescope: 400 Years and Counting

Quick — name the invention that has done most to redefine our place in the universe.

Hint: This invention was also the most seditious, blasphemous instrument of all time, shaking the very foundations of society.

The answer, if you haven’t already guessed it, is the telescope. It’s hard to believe that this instrument, often sold as a cheesy toy in gift shops, is perhaps the single most important scientific instrument of all time.

Now that the telescope is celebrating its 400th anniversary, it’s a good time to take stock of this marvelous invention.

For 99.9 percent of human history, most people held a Neolithic viewpoint of our world. It was a natural viewpoint: All our senses scream out to us that Earth is the center of the universe, and everything revolves around us. It’s also a comforting point of view, since it means that we stand at the very center of God’s creation.

Once in a while, scientists challenged this viewpoint — the Greeks even calculated the size of the Earth around 200 B.C. — but for the most part, it stuck around, largely because it dovetailed with powerful religious interests.

The invention of the telescope dealt a deathblow to that Earth-centric cosmology.

In antiquity, it was known to glassblowers that, while making stained glass, spherical blobs of glass could magnify images. But it took centuries for anyone to make the inventive leap of assembling two lenses into a telescope.

Most reliable accounts place the invention of the telescope in 1608 in the Netherlands, by Hans Lippershey, Zacharias Janssen and Jacob Metius. But it was the refinement of the telescope the following year by Galileo that triggered one of the greatest scientific revolutions of all time.

Before Galileo, debates were won not by making careful observations, but by arguing from the Bible and religious texts. According to church dogma, Earth was full of sin because of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, but the celestial heavens were pure, perfect and divine.

Galileo was a shrewd man. He did not become a shrill propagandist angrily haranguing the masses about their naïve beliefs. Instead, he gained notoriety among the rich and powerful, such as the Medici family, by hosting the world’s first star-gazing parties, in Piazza San Marco in Venice and elsewhere.

Seeing is believing. For the first time, people were witnessing the true splendor of the universe as never before, with their own eyes.

Instead of seeing the perfect disks of celestial objects, they saw that the moon was pockmarked with horrible craters, that Saturn had strange “ears,” that Jupiter had moons of its own, and that even the sun, the centerpiece in anyone’s cosmology, had ugly spots.

But Galileo went too far, perhaps unnecessarily tweaking the noses of powerful prelates in his books, and had to pay dearly for his sins, ultimately dying in disgrace under house arrest, a lonely, broken man. But in one letter, Galileo took solace in the expression, “the purpose of the church is not to determine how the heavens go, but to determine how to go to heaven.”

But the genie had left the bottle, and there was no way to put it back. The very year that Galileo died in ignominy, a child was born who would go on to finally complete the Galilean revolution. Isaac Newton would give us a startling new picture of our universe which would survive for another 250 years, until Einstein. Newton would even invent a new type of telescope, the reflecting telescope, which is the basis of modern telescope technology.

The telescope still exerts a magic pull on us. During a recent Yankees game, with millions watching the World Series, a cameraman had some idle time on his hands, so he turned his TV camera to Saturn. Because a TV camera today has much better optics than Galileo’s original telescopes, suddenly millions of people were seeing Saturn in its true glory for the first time.

Immediately, the phone went off the hook. People were demanding to know whether this was the real Saturn, or just a Hollywood special effect. The public reaction was such an unexpected surprise that the stunt was repeated on the second day.

Also, when NASA bureaucrats declared that the Hubble Space Telescope would be allowed to die a natural death, to burn up in the atmosphere as a piece of useless space junk, there was a deafening roar of protest. NASA, which is usually used to hearing applause, not derision, was taken aback. As a consequence, the decision was reversed and this workhorse of astronomy got a reprieve from Death Row.

The best is yet to come. Already, a new generation of monster telescopes is about to go online, with colossal, adjustable mirrors that compensate for the Earth’s atmospheric disturbance. Also, new generations of space telescopes will reveal the true splendor of the universe not just in optical frequencies, but even with gravity waves.

Then, we will have not just crude pictures of Saturn with its “ears;” we will have baby pictures of the infant universe as it emerges from the Big Bang.

The telescope may then answer the greatest question of all time: Why was there a Genesis?

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