What Galileo could not see yet

Last hour of light, and the wind has come up and is doing something unhelpful to the creek.

I’m on the ridge above the cove. Bo is about thirty feet behind me, on the business of his own.

The light is off the oak tops now and coming down the trail in strips.

I’ve got a piece of paper in my pocket. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve carried all week.

Here’s what happened. A man at the shop asked me what the far ridge looked like.

I told him. I said it’s one long hump, low in the middle, higher at both ends, and it looks like it’s sitting down.

That is a whole description, and I’ve been saying it for years.

He didn’t only ask, either. He came up the county road about a week later, looking for it.

He wanted to know where to park, so he could walk out to it in the evening.

That is the part I haven’t admitted. He drove up the gravel because of a hump.

So on Sunday I sat on the porch and drew it from memory. No looking out of the window, just the ridge and a pencil, and I want to describe the drawing itself.

One long smooth hump. Nicely rounded. I shaded the side that is in shadow, and I put a few trees along the top, because there are trees along the top of it.

It is a good drawing. That isn’t the point.

Then yesterday morning I walked up here to check the drawing against the actual thing.

It is three ridges.

Not three that you could argue about. Three. A low one in front, the hump I’ve been describing, and another one behind it that I’ve never once said out loud.

I described the whole of it from the part I could see.

Now let me be fair, because I’m going to be hard on this later. From the shop window you really can only see one ridge. The other two are behind the first one.

But that’s not what I said. I didn’t say one ridge. I said the valley.

And I’ve stood up here for years telling people I know this place, the way a man knows a story he has told too many times.

That is a real thing and it’s not a small thing, because I do the same with people.

Somebody tells me one thing about their week. One thing about their job. And then I’ve got their whole life, and the whole life is made out of the one thing I was told.

So I went looking for a man who had that same disease and a far better instrument than a pencil.

He has been dead a long while. That doesn’t make the looking less sensible.

So here is the question for today.

How do you keep a close look from turning into the whole story?

I’m going to answer that somewhere before the end, and I want to warn you now that it’s not a clean answer.

I’ve got a piece of it, anyway. The piece I’ve got is from a man who died a long time before me, and it’s four hundred years old.

Before I go any further, I want to put my hand up. This is a borrowing.

I’m not part of that world and I don’t live in it. I’m lifting one idea out of it and leaving the rest where it lies.

The name is Galileo.

Italian. Born in fifteen sixty four in Pisa. Dead in sixteen forty two, at Arcetri, near Florence, which is the other side of the planet from where I’m standing.

Here is the situation, because a person without a situation is just a name on a page.

In his world the sky was supposed to be a finished thing. Somebody had a number for the stars, and the stars fit in the number.

Then a tube turned up in the Netherlands. Two lenses in a pipe, made by people whose day job was making eyeglasses.

It wasn’t his. That is the part I like. He didn’t invent it and he never once pretended he did.

What he did was build one better. He heard about the Dutch tube in the summer of sixteen oh nine, and he had one of his own before the year turned.

He didn’t buy one. He made his own, out of a pipe and two bits of glass, and all summer and into the autumn he kept at it, grinding and trying again.

I’m going to tell you what he saw, because what he saw is the part everybody remembers. Then I’m going to tell you what he couldn’t see, because that’s the part this walk is for.

He looked up first at Jupiter, in January of sixteen ten.

Four little lights near it that he had never seen there before. Three of them in a line, changing every night.

They weren’t stars. Stars don’t do that. They were going around Jupiter.

He called them a family. There were four brothers in Florence and he named the lights for them.

That is a very sixteen ten thing to do, and I am not going to pretend it’s humble.

That is the one everybody knows.

Then he looked at Venus, in the autumn of sixteen ten.

Venus came in shapes. Small, then bigger, then thin as a fingernail, then gone, then back the other way round, just like the moon does.

Here is why that mattered more than the four lights. If Venus goes around the sun and not around us, then Venus has to come in shapes.

So the sky agreed with him. That is the good kind of checking, and most of us never get a shape agreed with us.

And he didn’t say it plain. He told one man in a letter, in a line of words that reads like nothing at all.

He let that sit for months, and then he printed what it actually said.

Then he looked at the moon.

The moon was not a smooth white plate. That was the surprise. There were bright peaks, and dark hollows, and the edges of the shadows had hard lines in them.

Hard lines in a shadow mean there’s height back there.

He worked out from those shadows how far the mountains stood up, and he said some of them were higher than anything on this earth.

He was right that they were mountains. He was a very long way wrong about how high they stand. It turned out the moon has mountains, and plenty of them.

He was wrong about nearly everything else he said about the moon. But that’s a later walk.

And then he counted stars.

Not planets. Stars. There were more of them than a man could count, and they weren’t scattered even. They come in clumps.

In one clump he wrote down about thirty-six. With the naked eye you see six or seven in that same place.

And he noticed something else about them. The stars had no size to them at all. Not one of them showed a face.

He used that to put them a very long way off, farther than the planets by more than he had words for.

Then he wrote it all down, printed it, and put his name on it. The book came out in March of sixteen ten.

Here is the part I keep coming back to. He printed it so that other people could go outside, look at the same sky, and check him.

That is a strange thing to do on purpose. My ridge is in my breast pocket.

So. That is what he saw with that tube, and I am not going to soften any of it.

Now the second half, and this is the half that made me go looking in the first place.

In that same year, with that same tube, he could not see any of the following.

He still had the planets going around the sun in perfect circles.

He had nothing better to put between them, and he wouldn’t let go of circles.

He had no idea how far away a star is. Nobody did, for a long time after him.

There was a planet in that sky nobody had found yet. It sat in the dark for over two hundred years after his book came out, before somebody with a better instrument got it.

There were whole living worlds too small for him to see, and there was nothing in his pocket that would ever show him one.

He couldn’t tell how big the universe was. It was going to turn out much larger than anything he had a way to think about.

He couldn’t tell whether the dark patches on the moon were water or shadow. He picked one, he wasn’t sure, and he put his pick in a book where everybody could see it.

Now I am not going to give you his words, because I haven’t got them, and because I don’t want them. Mine are these.

An instrument shows you a piece of a thing. How small the piece is says nothing at all about how much of the thing there is.

And here’s the part that took me forty years to be able to hear.

The edge isn’t a wall you’re stopped by. It is where the looking stops, and you get to say where that is.

There is a second thing in all of this, and it’s not about the tube.

The tube did not put those four lights in the sky. He had looked at that sky his whole life. It was up there and he had missed it.

What changed wasn’t the sky. What changed was his attention, and then a tool came along and gave his attention somewhere to land.

Now I want to make this hard.

The version of this story where a man is only humble is a lie told to make the walk feel good.

He wasn’t only humble. He was loud about plenty.

He said things about the moon that he couldn’t show, and he said them in print, and he wouldn’t take them back. Water in the dark patches. Land in the bright ones. Things moving the way water moves.

None of that was testable with the tube he had. He had a better thing to say than he didn’t know.

And in the sixteen thirties he was put on trial by church judges.

He was made to say out loud that the earth doesn’t move. Then he was kept at his own house at Arcetri, near Florence, until he died there.

So hold both of those at once. The man who gave us the rule about checking your eyes, and a man who sometimes didn’t check his own.

That’s the honest objection to everything I’ve said so far.

Here it is. Saying the edge of what you can see is cheap. It costs nothing to admit you’re standing in the dark.

So it can be a hiding place. A person can be humble about every hard thing and never once go and turn anything over.

And the other way round. If you only ever say the part you can see, then nobody gets a hill to stand on.

Somebody needs the ridge to be one ridge. The map needs it to be one ridge. The man at the shop needs one ridge, and my pencil said one ridge, and the drawing was right.

So the answer isn’t less knowing. I don’t think I can do the job with less.

The answer is naming the part.

You don’t have to stand at the dark edge. You have to say out loud which side of the ridge you were standing on, and then let somebody else draw the next one.

Now the claim he couldn’t test, because I promised you this walk would have one and I am not going to cheat on it.

He had an idea about a ship.

Go below deck on a ship that’s sailing smooth and steady. Shut the door. Hang up a jar that drips into a bowl. Let a few flies loose. Put a fish in a bowl of water.

The drips fall straight into the bowl. The flies wander about as they please. The fish swims the same in every direction. Nothing in that little room can tell you the ship is moving.

So nothing you feel standing still on the ground can tell you whether the ground is moving either.

He thought that far by himself, sitting down, without a ship.

He put the whole of it into a book in sixteen thirty two, argued out on paper. He never got his ship.

Now I had this part wrong for years, and I’d rather correct it while you’re here.

He didn’t do it on the deck of anything. But a French astronomer did, at Marseilles, in sixteen forty. He had stones dropped from the top of a mast on a moving ship, and they landed right at the foot of the mast. Not behind it.

Galileo was still alive then. He was about two years from the end.

And the argument about it ran for another two hundred years after that, with that ship sitting right there in the harbour.

In the eighteen eighties two men in America picked up the same thought and ran it with beams of light instead of a ship.

They looked for a push of light sideways, the way a wind would push it if there were a wind up there to do it.

They found none.

And that nothing is the whole point of the century they lived in. The thing he had argued for didn’t survive it, and it took the best experiment anybody ran to do that.

Now the other man, and I want to be fair about him too.

The name is Kepler. He is a different man and he’s here for one reason only.

He had a bad guess. He worked on the shape of the paths the planets take.

For years he assumed they were circles. He was wrong, and he was wrong for a long time.

He had no money at all. There were years when he slept in the house of a man in Ulm who was trying to make money out of metals.

He got badly ill in his fifties.

Then he let the circle go.

He tried a shape that wasn’t a circle, and it worked.

It worked so well that we’re still using what he worked out.

And he died in sixteen thirty, in the town of Regensburg, at fifty-eight.

Here is what it costs, and it’s not a nice thing to hear. Staying with a bad guess isn’t always virtue.

Sometimes the guess is a life you’re keeping because letting it go means admitting you spent years on it.

Sometimes the circle has to go.

So. Back to the ridge, and to the paper.

I’ve got it out. It has been dampening against me for an hour, which has not improved the pencil work.

I wrote one hump, low in the middle, higher at both ends. Sitting down, like a dog.

I stand up here and look at it, and the hump is there, in the middle, low. That part is true.

The other two aren’t where I said they weren’t, because I didn’t say where they were. I said they weren’t there.

Which is the same mistake wearing different clothes.

I didn’t draw the middle of the valley and call it the valley. I drew the middle of the valley and left out the part of the valley that was behind the part I drew.

And the man at the shop isn’t going to hear about the third ridge from me. He is going to get one ridge, because one ridge is what he needs in order to come up here.

I’ve decided that’s not a small thing to be handed. That is the entire job.

The light is going now. Bo hasn’t helped me once this evening.

He has been at a hole in the leaf litter by the second bend for about ten minutes. Two sticks and something brown. He has opinions about it, and his opinions are the opposite of mine.

I’ve decided not to argue with him, because I’m losing.

Here is where the week landed on me, and this bit is the part that’s for you.

You didn’t have to go and look at a valley to do this. You do this from your own kitchen.

Somebody tells you one thing about their job. One thing about their daughter, or their back, or a brother they don’t talk to.

And then you’ve got the whole person. And you’ve got opinions about the whole person. And you had one sentence.

You do that with a town too. Somebody says the water is bad this year, and you’ve decided what that town is.

That isn’t you being clever. That is you being on the near side of a ridge with a pencil.

And I do it about my own work, which is worse, because I’m the one holding the pencil.

On Tuesday I was certain about a thing at the shop. It turns out the thing was two things, and I had been carrying the wrong one for a year.

Nobody noticed but me. That is what happens with the near side of the ridge.

And I’ve got to say the part that makes it a lesson and not a history lesson.

Everything I’ve just described is going on in your pocket this morning.

A map will tell you the name of everything inside a mile. It will put a line under your feet and call it a trail. It knows the name of this cove and it doesn’t know whether there are three ridges back there.

That thing isn’t lying to you. It is answering the question it was built to answer.

Which is the trap. A tool that shows you the part gets used, inside a week, to stand in for the whole thing. And the part is so much easier to look at.

Careful here, because this is where I could cheat you.

A close look doesn’t make anybody a better person. It makes the looking better. Sometimes for about a minute, on a ridge, with mud on the boots.

So the honest answer to my question. The one I said I’d give you before the end.

I can tell you exactly where mine went wrong. It was in pencil, on Sunday, at a table, from memory.

What I can’t tell you is how to stop doing it. I haven’t found that.

If somebody hands me a way to stop, I’ll walk it up here and try it in front of you. And I’ll tell you what it cost.

Until then I’ve got the part I said I had. Say which side of the ridge you were standing on.

That is most of it, in my opinion.

So here is the thing to try.

One walk. That is the whole size of it.

Take one thing you’re sure you know by heart.

The steps from your door to the mailbox. The number of posts. The rungs in the rail by the school. Anything small and countable that you walk past all the time.

Count it the slow way. One at a time.

No doubling up. No guessing and speeding up. No doing the second half in your head and hoping it comes out right.

That is the whole of the work, and it takes less time than you would think.

Then count it again coming back. That is the second half of the assignment.

Two numbers. Say both of them out loud at your door when you get back in. Out loud, so a dog could hear you.

And here’s the part that’s the whole point, so don’t skip past it.

You aren’t doing it to be right. There is no right answer sitting in there waiting for you.

You are doing it to find out which part of the walk you were guessing, because everybody guesses a bit, and the guessing feels exactly like knowing.

If the numbers are the same, you’ve got it. You knew that walk the way you know your own kitchen.

If they’re not the same, you’ve found out something about the edge of what you can see. And you found it out on a walk you’ve taken a hundred times.

Nobody has to know you did it. There is nothing to report and nobody to send it to.

And if the thing is too big to count, make it smaller and do the small one honestly. Five posts is five posts.

A scrap of paper is plenty.

If you don’t want paper, then remember the number instead. Saying it out loud is the whole point.

If you want the long version, do the same count three days running and keep the three numbers together.

Paper again, pencil again. Do not put it in an app, and don’t wait for a reason to.

One more thing, and you can leave it if you want. Before you count, look at the thing for a moment without counting it at all.

Then count. Then have another look at it afterwards, and ask yourself whether it’s the same thing you looked at.

It never is, once you’ve counted it. Not for me, anyway.

Skip it if you want to. You still get half an hour of a damp man telling you he drew a valley wrong, and I’d not trade that for anything.

I still don’t have that ridge. It is not going anywhere.