7.5 Comets  (Page 2/3)

But practicing astronomers, that is those who observed the positions of heavenly bodies and calculated their positions, increasingly began to measure the positions of comets. If they were below the Moon, then their parallax    could be no less than the Moon's, about 1 degree (the horizontal parallax, which is the angle subtended at the Moon by the Earth's radius). Why did not a few carefully executed measurements settle this issue quickly?

First, there was in Europe no great tradition of making accurate, or even regular, astronomical observations before about 1500. For that reason, measuring instruments were primitive, not even taking advantage of the capabilities of existing technology. They were simple, hand-held, wooden instruments--little more than roughly calibrated sticks--and their accuracy was perhaps at best 1/4 degree, usually perhaps 1/2 degree. There was little accuracy and even less consistency in the measurements of individual astronomers. When it came to comparing the measurements of practitioners in places all over Europe, the situation became hopeless. The results were parallaxes ranging from 10 degree to negative values.

Second, astronomers and others who practiced the mathematical sciences dealt only with positions and motions. These were accidental properties of bodies and could tell you nothing about their essences. A mathematician could tell you where the apple was and he could describe its motion if it fell. But this information could not tell you what made this body an apple and why it fell. These were questions that belonged to philosophy. It was therefore not at all obvious that the measurements of the astronomers could turn an obviously changing cometary phenomenon into a perfect and immutable heavenly body.

By the time Galileo was beginning to turn his attention to the study of mathematics, the science of astronomy was changing. Copernicus's De Revolutionibus (1543) had been around for a generation, and there were other cosmological theories as well that challenged the existing cosmology. When in 1577 a huge comet appeared whose tail spread in a great arc across the sky, observers all over Europe, Tycho Brahe among them, made measurements of its changing positions. The resulting literature was huge, and if the verdict was by no means unanimous, it was clear that the opinion that comets were heavenly bodies had become respectable in learned circles. The rising authority of Tycho Brahe , based on his noble birth and his miraculous instruments, gave added impetus to the change of opinion. Over the next two generations the perfection of the heavens was abandoned, as were the crystalline spheres of which they were supposedly composed.

But placing comets in the heavens raised new questions. What were their paths? What was their nature? Through much of the seventeenth century the debate ranged. in his Assayer of 1623 Galileo argued that comets were optical phenomena and that therefore one could not measure their parallaxes. In this opinion he was not followed by others. It was argued that comets moved in straight lines or parabolic arcs. Descartes argued that comets were bodies that traveled from one solar system to another.

The mechanical philosophy of the second half of the seventeenth century had a great bearing on this debate, as we can see in Isaac Newton's conclusions. In his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy of 1687, Newton argued that all matter attracts all other matter. If comets are made of matter, then they are attracted to the Sun just as the planets are. Given rectilinear inertia and a centrally directed force, the moving body's path must be a conic section. Edmond Halley took this notion and drew up a table of the parameters of the twenty-odd brightest comets that had been seen over the previous several centuries. He pointed out that the parameters of the comets of 1533, 1607 and 1682 were the same and concluded that this was a periodic comet. He predicted its return in 1758. In that year (Halley had died in 1742) the comet appeared as predicted and has been called Halley's Comet ever since.