the supernova (concluded)

See part one here

Thirty years after that supernova made its remarkable appearance in Earth’s skies, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe would recall his first sight of it:

Amazed, and as if astonished and stupefied, I stood still with my eyes fixed intently upon it. When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone forth before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt my own eyes.

Like John Dee and Francis Bacon in England, Tycho knew that according to the Ptolemaic system that had been firmly in place for hundreds of years, the real problem was “that [the supernova] was in the celestial, not the Elementary Region” — that is, that is was not within the cycles of the planets, which were known to move and change (the word “planet” means “wanderer”) but in the more distant realm of the so-called “fixed stars,” the supposedly unchanging backdrop to the celestial machinery. Whether or not the exploding star was a God-sent sign to King Charles of France or not, it was a powerful blow to the Ptolemaic system.

In a lucid essay on this event, the noted astronomer Owen Gingerich writes that “Tycho had, first of all, the imagination to formulate an interesting research strategy, secondly, the ingenuity to devise the instruments to carry out the research, and thirdly, the ability to draw significant conclusions from his results.” John Dee may have understood the general import of the event but only Tycho went about exploring it in a serious way. Gingerich is interested primarily in the technical challenges that Tycho faced, and triumphantly met, but he notes in passing that the Cassiopeia nova “was by no means the end of Aristotelian cosmology, but it was the beginning of the end.”

This is perhaps an understatement. C. S. Lewis in his The Discarded Image comments that “the great Nova in Cassiopeia of November 1572 was a most important event for the history of thought.” Lewis points to F. R. Johnson’s 1937 book Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England: A Study of the English Scientific Writing from 1500 to 1645 — which is still worth reading, by the way — for evidence that the community of natural philosophers in England at least, and presumably elsewhere, were deeply shaken by the nova’s appearance.

It’s a really fascinating moment in intellectual history. The Ptolemaic theory was already being challenged and would in any case have eventually fallen, but this single event did more rapid and serious harm to it than any articulated theory could have. A whole system of belief was effectively brought to its knees by a few incontrovertible astronomical observations.

the supernova (1)

a superbright supernova

Historians have long debated the role that King Charles IX played in the great and terrible St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Protestants in 1572. It has been common to give the primary responsibility to his mother, Catherine de Medici, and to see the King as meekly complying with her wishes — but one old tradition says that Charles said “Kill them all,” thus warranting utter extermination of the Huguenots.

It was widely believed at the time that Charles had ordered the massacre. Theodore Beza, John Calvin’s successor in Geneva, who would end up taking in many refugees from the persecution, believed that Charles had openly confessed to this role — or so says Francis Bacon in his journals.

According to Bacon, Beza believed that God had sent a sign of judgment upon Charles: a stella nova, a surprising new star that appeared in the constellation of Cassiopeia soon after the massacre — a star so bright that it could even sometimes be seen in the daytime.

Theodor Beza wittily applied it to that star which shone at the birth of Christ, and to the murdering of the infants under Herod, and warned Charles the Ninth, King of France, who had confessed him self to be the author of the Massacre of Paris, to beware, in this verse: Tu vero Herodis sanguinolente, time — “And look thou bloody Herod to thy self”; and certainly he was not altogether deceived in his belief, for the fifth month after the vanishing of this star, the said Charles, after long and grievous pains, died of excessive bleeding.

We do not know whether Charles took Beza’s warning seriously — he may have been too busy dying — but the star was not visible only in France, and at least one other great prince of the age was concerned about what it might mean. England’s Queen Elizabeth I called in her great advisor on matters scientific, astronomical, astrological, and occult, John Dee, and Dee — again according to Bacon — was able to demonstrate “that it was in the celestial, not the Elementary Region; and they are of opinion that it vanished by little and little in ascending. Certainly after the eighth month all men perceived it to grow less and less.”

Dee’s discovery was more important than we can readily perceive now.

To be continued...