Aspects of the film Two Small Pieces of Glass

¶ … Small Pieces of Glass: The Amazing Telescope

In the era of the ancient Greeks, science was a subset of philosophy. The scientific method for the Greeks was conducted mainly through empirical observation and deduction, rather than by using technical instruments. Some of the Greeks' findings predated modern theories, despite their limits in methodology, such as the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles' concept of atoms (Fowler 2008:2). However, although Empedocles may have been correct in his theories, he lacked the ability to conclusively prove them. The reliance upon observation and the lack of technical instruments at the disposal of the Greeks is one reason why some grave errors were made in their calculations, such as the commonly-held Ptolemaic viewpoint that the planets revolved around the sun (Fowler 2008:2). This makes sense to the eye, but through mathematical calculations and observations his telescope the great astronomer Galileo was able to prove this ancient theory wrong.

The film Two Small Pieces of Glass: The Amazing Telescope describes Galileo's philosophy and the impact it had upon the world. In the film a group of teenagers learn about the importance of the telescope. By observing natural phenomenon through modern instruments, like sunspots and the rings of Saturn, they are able to see how a telescope enabled Galileo to prove, against all accepted conventional wisdom, that the earth went around the sun, rather than vice versa. This created a foundation for virtually all of modern understanding of the solar system, as well as the technology used today. Now, observation no longer takes place with the naked eye alone. "Galileo dropped all Aristotelian talk of why things moved and focused instead on the how, through painstaking observations and measurements….Galileo sought quantifiable entities such as time, distance, and acceleration to describe the way everyday objects move, bend, break, and fall. His emphasis on the practical application and value of science set him apart from most philosophers of his time" (Sobel 2002).

The importance of early Greek philosophy, however, cannot be discounted in its importance. Anaximander, one of the very earliest Greek scientific philosophers, for example, theorized "that the earth was a cylinder, and the sun, moon and stars were located on concentric rotating cylinders: the first recorded attempt at a mechanical model. He further postulated that the stars themselves were rings of fire. Again, a very bold conjecture -- all heavenly bodies had previously been regarded as living gods" (Fowler 2008:2). The clash between religion and science would manifest itself again more starkly in the instance of Galileo, given that the idea that the heavens revolve around the earth had become a codified part of Church dogma.

The Greeks used Euclidian geometry and observation to arrive at their conception of a cosmological worldview. Although most believed that the earth was at the center of the universe, as early as Aristarchus some philosophers of science came to the hypotheses "that the fixed stars and the sun remain motionless, that the earth revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same center as the sun, is so great that the circular orbit of the earth is as small as a point compared with that sphere" (Fowler 2008:8). This model was not accepted, nor even was the suggestion that the earth rotates about its axis every twenty-four hours (Fowler 2008:8). Instead, the model proposed by Ptolemy, which proposed that the earth was the center of the universe, was widely accepted.

This acceptance was likely grounded in philosophical as well as scientific reasoning. The idea that humanity was the center of the universe was appealing, and later this would also confirm to the Christian concept of Man as God's greatest creation (Fowler 2008:9). The Ptolemaic model was accepted by most philosophers of note until it was radically challenged by the Polish astronomer Copernicus in 1530. The Catholic church condemned the Copernican System in 1616 and forbade holding, defending, or even teaching alternatives to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe endorsed by the Church (Fowler 2008:10). But both theories were mere conjecture until the development of the Galilean telescope. Galileo's telescope was a modification of the currently existing lenses used for reading by the long -- and short-sighted. Galileo did not invent corrective lenses or even the telescope, but he did substantially improve them. By making use of both convex and concave lenses, Galileo was able to expand the magnification power and distance vision of ordinary gazers, enabling to look wide into the heavens (Fowler 2008:10).

"Galileo's belief that his discoveries with the telescope strongly favored the Copernican world view meant he was headed for trouble with the Church" (Fowler 2008:10). As illustrated in Two Pieces of Glass, a critical aspect of Galilean theory was the presence of sunspots, or dark patches on the surface of the sun. "He observed," through the use of his telescope, "motion of the sunspots indicating that the Sun was rotating on an axis. These blemishes on the Sun were contrary to the doctrine of an unchanging perfect substance in the heavens, and the rotation of the Sun made it less strange that the Earth might rotate on an axis too, as required in the Copernican model. Both represented new facts that were unknown to Aristotle and Ptolemy" (Galileo: The telescope and laws of dynamics, 2010, Astronomy 161).

Other critical findings of Galileo were the presence of moons orbiting around Jupiter, and evidence that "Venus went through a complete set of phases, just like the Moon. This observation was among the most important in human history, for it provided the first conclusive observational proof that was consistent with the Copernican system but not the Ptolemaic system" (Galileo: The telescope and laws of dynamics, 2010, Astronomy 161). Other discoveries included the rings of Saturn; that the planets were disc-shaped, not points of light; the 'cloud' of stars now known as the Milky Way and the fact that the moon was covered by a series of craters and not smooth (Galileo: The telescope and laws of dynamics, 2010, Astronomy 161).