Astronomers From England

"The marked superiority of Ibn al-Haytham's treatise did not necessarily cause interested readers, even those of intelligence, to reject the Optics out of hand. On the contrary, it was precisely among the most avid disciples of Ibn al-Haytham in the West—the so-called Perspectivists, whose members included Roger Bacon, Witelo, and John Pecham—that Ptolemy's Optics found the most eager audience."

"There were many natural philosophers, particularly in the West, who looked to al-Kindi for support in their defense of a combined intromission-extramission theory. Grosseteste, an early defender of such a combined theory, was in all likelihood familiar with al-Kindi's De aspectibus and probably had al-Kindi in mind when he wrote: "However, mathematicians and physicists, whose concerns is with those things that are above nature, ...maintain that vision is produced by extramission." Later in the thirteenth century Roger Bacon and John Pecham also appealed to the authority of al-Kindi to support their contention that rays issue from, as well as enter, the observer's eye."

"It has been observed that as Wycliffe displays a bias against prelates and friars, so does Peckham against the secular clergy, and this is shown by his Lambeth Canons. But that monks came equally under his lash when they deserved it, is proved..."

"Pecham's Perspectiva was published in as many as nine editions, one in Italian, between 1482 and 1627."

"In the realm of psychology (in the medieval sense), Pecham's writings are extensive. ...each soul is created singly and "daily" by God. The soul... is everywhere in its little world as God is everywhere in the the bigger world. The soul is united to the body as a form is to matter. ...The human will is free and cannot be coerced by anything else. ...The will is free to the extent that it can withhold consent to the dictates of practical reason."

"In the study of light, he said, the argument proceeded both from the effect to the cause and from the cause to the effect, and he prayed God, the light of all, to help him. He arranged his work as a structure of theory built up from a set of empirical facts and the rules of geometry, with the argument sometimes ascending inductively to a 'common nature' and the grasping of a universal, and sometimes descending deductively by 'composition' to consequences by means of which a theory could be verified or falsified by experiment."

"Giambattista della Porta, who seems to have been the first to try combinations of lenses to form a microscope, based his optical work almost entirely on that of Roger Bacon, Witelo, and Pecham."

"Light from a concave luminous body is received most powerfully at the centre. The reason for this is that, for every point of a concave body, perpendicular rays, which are stronger than others, converge in the centre. Therefore the virtues of celestial bodies are incident most powerfully in and near the centre of the world."

"The Perspectiva is a clear and concise summary of the science of light at the time... a popular text on optics until the seventeenth century... used and cited by many medieval and Renaissance scholars, including Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Kepler."

"Formerly the Church with its prelates of old time, was golden in wisdom, silver in cleanness of life, brazen in eloquence, which are three things needful to a preacher; that is, brightness of wisdom, cleanness of life, and sonorousness of eloquence. But of the feet, the last, that is the modern prelates, part is iron through their hardness of heart, and part is clay by their carnal luxury."

"Follow the Constitutions... which consists of the Lambeth Canons, ix—xiii. They run in the name of the Archbishop, who begins by stating his desire to remedy present evils, and his hope to make progress in that direction, by the favour of Christ, and with the assistance of his brethren and bishops. Ignorance on the part of the clergy is the source of error in the people whom they are bound to guide. Therefore he directs that every priest shall explain to his people simply and clearly, four limes a year, the Creed, the ten commandments, the two precepts of the Gospel, viz., love to God and man, the seven works of mercy, the seven deadly sins, the seven cardinal virtues, and the seven sacraments of grace. Furthermore, lest any priest should put forward the excuse of ignorance, he (the Archbishop) will explain briefly in what these things consist. And a short and simple exposition of the elements of faith and practice, completes this division of the Canons of the Council of Lambeth."

"Witelo seems to have used the Optics more sparingly than Bacon, and this trend continues with John Pecham, whose Perspetiva communis reveals no unequivocal borrowings and has only a handful of possible ones."

"The difference between Pecham's Tractatus de perspectiva and his Perspectiva communis is striking. The former has significant religious content and was apparently intended as a devotional aid. The latter deals exclusively with optics, and reveals neither biblical nor theological influence."

"As you see double if you push the eye out of its place with your finger; so prelates, through evil counsel, judge a priest to be worthy of two benefices, when he ought to be contented with one."

"[Perspectiva communis was written to] compress into concise summaries the teachings of perspective, which [in existing treatises] are presented with great obscurity."

"And therefore, Sire, altho' I am ready, so far as is in me, to dedicate the place for the Cistercian monks at Meynan, yet I could not do it without the full assent of the bishop and of his chapter, and of the parson of the place, who, with plenty of other people, have a very great horror of the approach of the forsaid monks. For though they may be good men, if God please, still they are the hardest neighbours that prelates and parsons could have. For where they plant their foot, they destroy towns, take away tithes, and curtail by their privileges all the power of prelacy."

"Another Oxford writer who appreciated experimental science was John Pecham... In his Perspectiva Communis Pecham gave a very clear and concise summary of contemporary optics, based largely on Alhazen, Witelo, and pseudo-Euclid's De Speculis. His book contained nothing original but it remained a popular text book until the seventeenth century."

"Among all the studies of natural causes and reasons, light most delights the contemplators; among the great things of mathematics, the certainty of its demonstrations most illustriously elevates the minds of its investigators; perspective must therefore be preferred to all human discourses and disciplines, in the study in which radiant lines are expounded by means of demonstrations and in which the glory is found not only of mathematics, but also physics: it is adorned with the flowers of one and the other."

"One of the latest documents of a personal nature is the licence to the bishop of Hereford to confer orders at Wye in March 1292, in place of the archbishop, whose health, both bodily and mental gave way some time before his death. In September this event was so soon expected that prior Henry of Eastry wrote him a letter to remind him that he had promised to be buried in the cathedral and had chosen a place of rest there. All his predecessors, said the prior, reposed in the cathedral, and it would be a great scandal and a bad precedent if he did not do the like. As to the disposal of the archbishop's body the Prior had his wish. The archbishop was buried on the 19th December in the north cross aisle, near the spot where his predecessor Becket was murdered. On the tomb is an oak figure in fairly good preservation... The figure is not fixed, and it has been suggested that it did not originally belong to this tomb... but the face appears to be rather individual than conventional. It bears some resemblance in features to the figure on the archbishop's seal, of which there is a good specimen among the archives in the cathedral."

"The archbishop, on the 2d of November, 1281, addressed a letter to the king, which, still further, proved the impolicy of permitting a friar to occupy the archiepiscopal throne of Canterbury. He affirmed that Catholic emperors had submitted to the laws of the papacy, and abolished any local laws which were contrary to the same. Peckham... openly declared that whatever oaths he may have taken, he should feel himself absolved from them, if they interfered with his duty to the pope."

"In the four mediaeval documents which form the text of this volume, we have an interesting survival of the efforts of three of the earliest of the English Reformers. For John de Thoresby and John Peckham, the Northern and the Southern Primates, no less than John de Wyclif, the Oxford scholar and leader, deserved that title. All three men were anxious, before everything else, to amend the carelessness and the inconsistency of the clergy, and the consequent ignorance and corruption of the laity of their day."

"[There was a] long standing contention between the sees of York and Canterbury as to the right of either metropolitan to bear his cross erect in the province of the other. ...Peckham, on hearing that his brother [ William of Wickwane, Archbishop] of York had returned from abroad, and was intending to pass through his province with his cross erect, wrote a letter forbidding the clergy to show him any mark of respect, ordering them to shut the church-doors in his face, and threatening all persons, clerical and lay, with excommunication, who ventured to supply him with food, or render him the slightest service."

"You see, anyone who is interested in astronomy will gravitate to it, as I did. If you start teaching it as a school subject, it's going to be taught badly, like everything else these days, and enthusiasm is going to be killed."

"Patrick was the last of a lost generation, a true gentleman, the most generous in nature that I ever knew, and an inspiration to thousands in his personal life, and to millions through his 50 years of unique broadcasting. It's no exaggeration to say that Patrick, in his tireless and ebullient communication of the magic of astronomy, inspired every British astronomer, amateur and professional, for half a century. There will never be another Patrick Moore. But we were lucky enough to get one."

"William Herschel was the first man to give a reasonably correct picture of the shape of our star-system or galaxy; he was the best telescope-maker of his time, and possibly the greatest observer who ever lived."

"Nuclear power plants are, next to nuclear warheads themselves, the most dangerous devices that man has ever created."

"I may be accused of being a dinosaur, but I would remind you that dinosaurs ruled the Earth for a very long time."

"Admiral Smyth says that no family is quite civilized unless it possesses a copy of some encyclopaedia and a telescope."

"This object, which somewhat resembles a flight of wild ducks in shape, is a gathering of minute stars."

"The significant fact lies in the possession of the manuscripts by Bacon during his lifetime. He studied them, he knew their contents. And in those great Monuments wherein he has invoked for his own fame the judgment of the next age, he attacks and condemns over and over again the opinions of a man who could neither speak for himself, being in his grave, nor be spoken for by the only written words wherein he had set them forth, and which in the cabinet of my Lord Verulam, were as effectually silenced and entombed."

"The famous treatise which opened the modern era by treating magnetism and electricity on a scientific basis appeared just 300 years ago. The author, William Gilbert, M.D., of Colchester... was an exact and diligent explorer, first of chemical and then of magnetic and electric phenomena. ...Working nearly a century before the time when the astronomical discoveries of Newton had originated the idea of attraction at a distance, he established a complete formulation of the interaction of magnets by what we now call the exploration of their fields of force. His analysis of the facts of magnetic influence, and incidentally of the points in which it differs from electric influence, is virtually the one which Faraday reintroduced. A cardinal advance was achieved, at a time when the Copernican Astronomy had still largely to make its way, by assigning the behavior of the compass and the dip needle to the fact that the earth itself is a great magnet, by whose field of influence they are controlled. His book passed through many editions on the Continent within forty years; it won the high praise of Galileo. Gilbert has been called the 'father of modern electricity' by Priestley, and 'the Galileo of magnetism' by Poggendorff."

"The "New Philosophy" [De Mundo Nostro Sublunari Philosophia Nova] of Gilbert came to be published half a century after his death in the following curious circumstances. Within the period of apparently some two years after his demise, William Gilbert, of Melford, his elder brother, bearing, oddly enough, the same name... found, among Gilbert's scattered papers, the fragmentary New Philosophy and the Meteorology. These (as he says, being governed by fraternal affection, as well as by an appreciation of the importance of the arguments advanced, whereof he felt unwilling to deprive the world), he arranged, caused to be translated into Latin, and prefixed to them a dedication... That he intended to publish the book is clear; nevertheless, he departed, as its author had done with his purpose unfulfilled."

"In 1626 Bacon succumbed to the results of his ill timed experiment in preserving chickens with snow... The Bacon manuscripts were sent to [Sir William] Boswell's residence at the Hague, and there lay until Boswell, who died in 1647, confided them to the editorial care of Isaac Gruter who... published them all together in 1653. Among the papers which thus came into his hands, Gruter found the two manuscripts of William Gilbert, of Colchester, which William Gilbert, of Melford, had prepared, and these he edited and issued... in 1651."

"Gilbert does not seem to have known that there were any other bodies than iron or the lodestone that possessed magnetic properties; for he called particular attention to the fact that all other substances that possessed magnetism to some degree owe their power to the presence of iron in some condition or other."

"Gilbert... repeatedly asserts the paramount value of experiments. He himself, no doubt, acted up to his own precepts; for his work contains all the fundamental facts of the science [of magnetism], so fully examined, indeed, that even at this day we have little to add to them."

"Gilbert shall live till loadstones cease to draw, Or British fleets the boundless ocean awe."

"Gilbert, in his work, De Magnete printed in 1600 has only some vague notions that the magnetic virtue of the earth in some way determines the direction of the earth's axis, the rate of its diurnal rotation, and that of the revolution of the moon about it. Gilbert died in 1603, and in his posthumous work (De Mundo nostro Sublunari Philosophia nova, 1631) we have already a more distinct statement of the attraction of one body by another. "The force which emanates from the moon reaches to the earth, and, in like manner, the magnetic virtue of the earth pervades the region of the moon: both correspond and conspire by the joint action of both, according to a proportion and conformity of motions, but the earth has more effect in consequence of its superior mass; the earth attracts and repels, the moon, and the moon within certain limits, the earth; not so as to make the bodies come together, as magnetic bodies do, but so that they may go on in a continuous course." Though this phraseology is capable of representing a good deal of the truth, it does not appear to have been connected... with any very definite notions of mechanical action in detail."

"The year 1600 was the first in which England produced a remarkable work in physical science; but this was one sufficient to raise a lasting reputation to its author. Gilbert, a physician, in his Latin treatise on the magnet, not only collected all the knowledge which others had possessed on that subject, but became at once the father of experimental philosophy in this island, and by a singular felicity and acuteness of genius, the founder of theories which have been revived after the lapse of ages, and are almost universally received into the creed of the science. The magnetism of the earth itself, his own original hypothesis... was by no means one of those vague conjectures... He relied on the analogy of terrestrial phenomena to those exhibited by what he calls a terrella, or artificial spherical magnet. ...Gilbert was also one of our earliest Copernicans, at least as to the rotation of the earth; and with his usual sagacity inferred, before the invention of the telescope, that there are a multitude of fixed stars beyond the reach of our vision."

"[Gilbert] has himself become a magnet; that is, he has ascribed too many things to that force and built a ship out of a shell."

"When Gilbert of Colchester, in his “New Philosophy,” founded on his researches in magnetism, was dealing with tides, he did not suggest that the moon attracted the water, but that “subterranean spirits and humors, rising in sympathy with the moon, cause the sea also to rise and flow to the shores and up rivers”. It appears that an idea, presented in some such way as this, was more readily received than a plain statement. This so-called philosophical method was, in fact, very generally applied, and Kepler, who shared Galileo’s admiration for Gilbert’s work, adopted it in his own attempt to extend the idea of magnetic attraction to the planets."

"Lucid gems are made of water; just as Crystal, which has been concreted from clear water, not always by a very great cold, as some used to judge, and by very hard frost, but sometimes by a less severe one, the nature of the soil fashioning it, the humour or juices being shut up in definite cavities, in the way in which spars are produced in mines."

"How far away from the earth are those remotest of stars: they are beyond the reach of eye, or man's devices, or man's thought. What an absurdity is this motion (of spheres). He also argues for the extreme variability of the distance to the various heavenly bodies and states that situated "in thinnest aether, or in the most subtle fifth essence, or in vacuity - how shall the stars keep their places in the mighty swirl of these enormous spheres composed of a substance of which no one knows aught?"

"We, therefore, having directed our inquiry toward a cause that is manifest, sensible, and comprehended by all men, do know that the earth rotates on its own poles, proved by many magnetical demonstrations to exist. For not in virtue only of its stability and its fixed permanent position does the earth possess poles and verticity; it might have had another direction, as eastward or westward, or toward any other quarter. By the wonderful wisdom of the Creator, therefore, forces were implanted in the earth, forces primarily animate, to the end the globe might, with steadfastness, take direction, and that the poles might be opposite, so that on them, as at the extremities of an axis, the movement of diurnal rotation might be performed."

"The electric effluvia differ much from air, and as air is the earth's effluvium, so electric bodies have their own distinctive effluvia; and each peculiar effluvium has its own individual power of leading to union, its own movement to its origin, to its fount, and to the body emitting the effluvium."

"In the discovery of hidden things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort."

"Neither in any if the stars, nor in the sun, nor in the planets that are most operant in the world, can organs be disntinguished or imagined by us; nevertheless, they live and endow with life small bodies at the earth's elevated points. If there is aught of which man may boast, that of a surety is soul, is mind; and the other animals, too, are ennobled by soul; even God, by whose rod all things are governed, is soul."

"Only on the superficies of the globes is plainly seen the host of souls and of animate existences, and their great and delightful diversity the Creator taketh pleasure"

"The Alchemists have made a philosophy out of a few experiments of the furnace and Gilbert our countryman hath made a philosophy out of observations of the lodestone."

"William Gilbert of Colchester, Physician of London: On the Load Stone and Magnetic Bodies by William Gilbert, Edward Wright; J. Wiley & Sons (1893) public domain @GoogleBooks."

"This is exactly the kind of thing Templeton is ceaselessly angling for – recognition among real scientists – and they use their money shamelessly to satisfy their doomed craving for scientific respectability. They tried it on with the Royal Society of London, and they seem to have found a compliant Quisling in the current President, Martin Rees, who, though not religious himself, is a fervent 'believer in belief'."