Back in May 2023, Renaissance Mathematicus friend, Michael Barton, expert for all things Darwinian, drew our attention to a new piece of history of science hot air from the HISTSCI_HULK’s least favourite windbag, Neil deGrasse Tyson. This time it’s a clip from one of his appearances on the podcast of Joe Rogan, a marriage made in heaven; they compete to see who can produce the biggest pile of bullshit in the shortest time. NdGT is this time pontificating about Galileo and the telescope.
A couple of weeks back, another Renaissance Mathematicus friend, David Hop, drew my attention once again to the same Rogan/Tyson interview, this time a longer section in which NdGT extemporises about the space telescope, Hubble, and Antoni Leeuwenhoek before he reaches the section I dissected back in May last year. As to be expected Motor-Mouth-Tyson spews out a non-stop stream of pure drivel, which truly demands the attention of the HIST_SCI HULK:
NdGT: Why do you think the Hubble Telescope…the mirror issues notwithstanding, which were ultimately fixed when, it was first launched…Why was it so successful? Version of the Hubble telescope previously launched by the military, looking down. The model for that telescope had already been conceived and built and was operating. Then we said we want one of those OK but that’s not public that this is going on. The telescope gets designed has the benefit of previous versions of it having been used successfully but looking down. We look up, this the perennial two way street astronomy in the old days and in modern times astrophysics.
One doesn’t need to be a fucking rocket scientist to recognise that a military spy satellite, looking down, is technically, optically, functionally, conceptionally different to a space telescope, looking up. But is there any truth in Tyson’s stream of verbal garbage? Now neither Hulky nor I are experts on the Hubble Telescope, it wasn’t built in the seventeenth century, but Wikipedia has good articles on the history of Hubble and on the history of military spy satellites too. Tyson could have taken the time to read them before opening his mouth. But what the hell, why ruin a good story with facts? Neil, who cares about facts, Tyson obviously didn’t bother.
To save you having to turn to Wikipedia, a brief synopsis. We start with the military as Motor-Mouth-Tyson thinks they started the ball rolling and NASA jumped on the bus having seen that it works.
The United States Army Ballistic Missile Agency launched the first American satellite, Explorer I, for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on January 31, 1958. The information sent back from its radiation detector led to the discovery of the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts.
Wikipedia
Note the date!
The theoretical idea goes back a bit further:
Herman Potočnik explored the idea of using orbiting spacecraft for detailed peaceful and military observation of the ground in his 1928 book, The Problem of Space Travel. He described how the special conditions of space could be useful for scientific experiments. The book described geostationary satellites (first put forward by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) and discussed communication between them and the ground using radio, but fell short of the idea of using satellites for mass broadcasting and as telecommunications relays.
Wikipedia
Note once again both civil and military!
Turning to space telescopes and Hubble:
In 1923, Hermann Oberth—considered a father of modern rocketry, along with Robert H. Goddard andKonstantin Tsiolkovsky—published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (“The Rocket into Planetary Space”), which mentioned how a telescope could be propelled into Earth orbit by a rocket.
Wikipedia
So not exactly a recent idea!
The history of the Hubble Space Telescope can be traced to 1946, to astronomer Lyman Spitzer’s paper “Astronomical advantages of an extra-terrestrial observatory.”
Wikipedia
Note the date, twelve years before that first military launch of a satellite looking down!
Spitzer devoted much of his career to pushing for the development of a space telescope. In 1962, a report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recommended development of a space telescope as part of the space program, and in 1965, Spitzer was appointed as head of a committee given the task of defining scientific objectives for a large space telescope.
Wikipedia
Also crucial was the work of Nancy Grace Roman, the “Mother of Hubble”. Well before it became an officialNASA approved, she became the program scientist, setting up the steering committee in charge of making astronomer needs feasible to implement and writing testimony to Congress throughout the 1970s to advocate continued funding of the telescope. Her work as project scientist helped set the standards for NASA’s operation of large scientific projects.
Space-based astronomy had begun on a very small scale following World War II, as scientists made use of developments that had taken place in rocket technology. The first ultraviolet spectrum of the Sun was obtained in 1946, and NASA launched the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) to obtain UV, X-ray, and gamma-ray spectra in 1962. An orbiting solar telescope was launched in 1962 by the United Kingdom as part of the Ariel programme, and in 1966 NASA launched the first Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO) mission. OAO-1’s battery failed after three days, terminating the mission. It was followed by Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2(OAO-2), which carried out ultraviolet observations of stars and galaxies from its launch in 1968 until 1972, well beyond its original planned lifetime of one year.
Wikipedia
I could go on, but I think that is enough to show that the Hubble Space Telescope was definitively not a case of the civil space programme copying an idea from the military space programme and that Motor-Mouth-Tyson is, as per usual, spreading high grade bovine manure.
NdGT: The invention of the telescope [babble between Tyson and Rogan] Galileo perfects the telescope He learns that the telescope has just been invented in the Netherlands the Dutch were opticians, so they invented the telescope and the microscope within a couple of years of one another This transforms science.
The Dutch were opticians! So what? So were people all over Europe. Funnily enough the man credited with having invented the telescope, Hans Lipperhey, lived in Middelburg in the Netherlands but was actually a German. The invention of the telescope and/or microscope had nothing to do with nationality.
Rogan: Why did they invent the eyeglass the reading glass?
NdGT: The reading glass was earlier than that, but I don’t know when, The real advance was putting two lenses in line with one another. Trivial in modern times but that was a huge conceptual leap and what you would accomplish [sic] and in so doing depending on how you curve them and how you grind the shape of those lenses you would get a microscope or a telescope. And we’re off to the races!
It you are going to pontificate about the history of optics and the invention of the telescope and the microscope, you really should know when eyeglasses were invented, as one of the central questions, in that history, is why did it take so long from the invention of eyeglasses, around 1260, to the invention of the telescope in 1608? The accepted thesis in answer to this question is contained in Rolf Willach’s magisterial Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope: A Life of Influence and Exile (American Philosophical Society, 2008). Willach argues convincingly that it was not putting two lenses in line with one another that led to the telescope, several people had done that without creating a telescope, but masking or stopping down the lens. The shape or form of a hand ground lens becomes more inaccurate the further one goes from the middle. These inaccuracies in the outer areas of the lens cause a distorted image, no problem in eyeglasses where one looks through the centre of the lens, but a major problem in the attempt to create a telescope. Lipperhey was probably the first to mask or stop down the lens so that only the central, correctly ground, portion of the lens gets used to create the image.
I could write a whole book about Motor-Mouth-Tyson, “depending on how you curve them and how you grind the shape of those lenses you would get a microscope or a telescope.” Let’s just say an explanation it is somewhat wanting in more ways than one.
NdGT: That’s basically the birth of modern science as we think of it and conduct it. Because you say to yourself, my senses I don’t trust them to be the full record of what’s going on in front of me.
That the telescope and the microscope extended human perception and added new layers of empiricism to the study of nature is beyond discussion but to call it the birth of modern science is typical Motor-Mouth-Tyson hyperbole.
NdGT: You pull out a microscope, oh my gosh, Leeuwenhoek , the microscope guy, he got a drop of pond water, puts it under his microscope, just to think to do this, it’s just water, why do you think that’s something interesting to do? He said, I wonder, he was curious and puts it under and sees little, what he described as animalcules happily aswimming.
Rogan: Animalcules!
NdGT: Animalcules, these are like the amoebas and paramecia. So, he writes to…he reports on this to the scientific authorities, and they don’t believe him. They say Van Leeuwenhoek, we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter. Why would anyone believe this that there’s entire creatures, an entire universe of creatures thriving in a drop of pond water. And so, the way science works, one report does not make it true, you need verification. They sent people to the Netherlands to verify his results and there it was the birth of microscopy and then they look at everything. Cells you know, they need vocabulary to describe what you are seeing.
Leeuwenhoek now gets the Motor-Mouth-Tyson stir some half facts with a portion of liquid bovine manure and splatter the result over the listener treatment. Leeuwenhoek did not put his drop of pond water under his microscope because that is not how his single lens microscopes worked. Wait a minute didn’t our narrator just explain that to make a microscope you need to put two lenses in line with one another? If you are building a compound microscope you do indeed need at least two lenses and often more, but Leeuwenhoek is famous for the fact that he used single lens microscopes of his own special design.
The small spherical lens is embedded in a metal plate and the specimen to be viewed in placed on the spike behind the lens and the whole apparatus is held up to the light. At the time Leeuwenhoek examined pond water with his microscope, microscopists were examining anything and everything with their microscopes, so nothing very special in this act. “He reports on this to the scientific authorities” sounds like something out of a dystopian novel by Kafka or Orwell. At the time he was corresponding with the Royal Society in London, basically, at the time, a private gentleman’s club for those interested in natural philosophy, who were publishing the results of Leeuwenhoek’s microscopic investigation in the Philosophical Transactions.
The letter with the animalcules, a term coined by Henry Oldenburg Secretary of the Royal Society, when translating from Leeuwenhoek’ original colloquial Dutch was sent in 1676 and was by no means his first letter.
.. this was for me, among all the marvels that I have discovered in nature, the most marvellous, and I must say that, for me, up to now there has been no greater pleasure in my eye as these sights of so many thousands of living creatures in a small drop of water, moving through each other, each special creature having its special motion.
Leeuwenhoeks animalcules letter to Oldenburg
The prominent Dutch physician Reinier de Graaf made Oldenburg aware of Leeuwenhoek’s investigations in a letter from 1673:
That it may be the more evident to you that the humanities and science are not yet banished among us by the clash of arms, I am writing to tell you that a certain most ingenious person here, named Leewenhoek [sic], has devised microscopes which far surpass those which we have hitherto seen, manufactured by Eustacio Divini and others. The enclosed letter from him, wherein he describes certain things which he has observed more accurately than previous authors, will afford you a sample of his work: and if it please you, and you would test the skill of this most diligent man and give him encouragement, then pray send him a letter containing your suggestions, and proposing to him more difficult problems of the same kind.
Oldenburg followed de Graaf’s suggestion and from then on the Royal Society regularly published Leeuwenhoek’s letters with his latest investigations until his death in 1723.
Motor-Mouth-Tyson’ comment, “They say Van Leeuwenhoek, we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter” is a piss poor joke and has no place in an account of the history of science. Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of single cell organisms did indeed cause some consternation because the Royal Society’s resident microscopists, Robert Hooke and Nehemiah Grew where initially unable to replicate his observations, their microscopes were not powerful enough. Later Hooke would succeed but in the meantime the Royal Society was justifiably sceptical. The situation was not improved by Leeuwenhoek’s refusal to explain his methods out of fear of being plagiarised.
Tyson is quite correct that scientific results have to be verified, usually by replication. Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, which Tyson introduces in the part of the interview that I dissected last time, were also initially met with scepticism, particularly as people were unable to replicate them. Something Tyson doesn’t mention. They were only accepted after the Jesuit astronomers of the Collegio Romano had finally succeed in replicating them.
The Royal Society did indeed send a delegation to control Leeuwenhoek’s results. This was not in anyway exceptional in the seventeenth century where personal testimony from reliable witnesses was a common form of verification. When the Royal Society doubted the accuracy of Johannes Hevelius’ astronomical observations, because he refused to use telescopic sights on his instruments, they sent Edmond Halley to Danzig to investigate the matter. The measuring of atmospheric pressure using a primitive barometer by Pascal’s brother in law, Florin Périer, was witnessed and confirmed by Minim Fathers from a local friary. Here we have an interesting aspect of personal witness verification, church officials, rather than natural philosophers, were regarded as the most reliable and trustworthy witnesses. The delegation that went to visit Leeuwenhoek to investigate his animalcules’ reports was led by Alexander Petrie, minister to the English Reformed Church in Delft; Benedict Haan, at that time Lutheran minister at Delft; and Henrik Cordes, then Lutheran minister at the Hague. The visit was for Leeuwenhoek a success and his observations were fully acknowledged by the Royal Society.
NdGT: … and there it was the birth of microscopy and then they look at everything. Cells you know, they need vocabulary to describe what you are seeing.
As I pointed out in an earlier post this was not the birth of microscopy, although Leeuwenhoek took it to a new level. Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680), Robert Hooke (1635–1703, and Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) were all prominent microscopist contemporaries of Leuwenhoek, who all started their investigations and also published some of their results before Leeuwenhoek began his investigations. The were also not to first and these scholars, particularly Robert Hooke, had already been looking at everything. Ironically, Motor-Mouth-Tyson’s example “cells” had already been discovered by Hooke. His Micrographia (1665) contains a microscopic image of the cells in cork. Hooke coined the term because he thought they looked like the monk’s cells in monasteries.
NdGT That was the journey down small then the journey went big, and Galileo perfects the telescope…
This is where the section of the interview that we dissected back in May last year begins. Motor-Mouth-Tyson is slowly becoming the HISTSCI_HULKS favourite punch bag although the man is so dumb, it’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. On a serious note, NdGT is wildly successful all over the Internet and almost everything he spews forth, and there’s an awful lot fit, about the history of science is either highly inaccurate or simply false and unfortunately his adoring fans don’t know better. Equally unfortunate is the fact that he simply ignores the criticisms of those who know better.