Over the course of some four centuries, the telescope, in its various technological iterations, has transformed the way we see both the universe and ourselves. The transformation became most dramatic since 1990 when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and has since probed the very frontier of the universe, showing us reality as it existed some 13.82 billion years ago. This transformation has only multiplied as NASA launched its other “Great Observatories”—the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory in 1991, the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 1999, and the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2003.
Before these events, the most powerful perceptual and intellectual transformation wrought by the telescope came at the very beginning of its first years of use. In 1608, Galileo Galilei heard news of a Dutch spectacle-maker, Hans Lippershey, and the patent he filed for a device that could see beyond the sky. Within a day, Galileo got busy making his own version of this new, magical instrument. As with many inventions, the inventor and the innovator are not necessarily one and the same person. Lippershey deserves credit for inventing the telescope, but it was Galileo who made it an instrument of profound innovation.
Through this transformational lens—which in its first year allowed humankind to understand more of the universe than had been known over the preceding two thousand years—Galileo could see the mountains and craters of the moon and the daylit side of Venus. This revealed to him two earth-shaking facts. First, our universe was far bigger—and our place in it therefore far smaller—than previously understood. Second, those jagged mountains and pock-like craters were hardly evidence of the “perfect” and “eternal” work of a perfect and eternal God.
This convinced Galileo that the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus had been correct some hundred years earlier, when he said the sun and not the earth was the center of what came to be called the solar system.
The shift to the view of the sun as the center of the solar system took many years and, as innovation so often does, questioned, eroded, and even destroyed old beliefs. Chipping away at cherished faiths requires fresh faith in the new belief. And there is often a price to pay. In 1633, many refused to believe they on earth were not the center of everything. They took steps to suppress the heretical idea that it was not the sun moving, but rather the earth itself. Galileo was summoned to the Inquisition and ultimately compelled to retract his Copernican view. In a formal allocution, he was forced to say aloud that, in God’s creation, the earth was stationary.
Aging and ill, Galileo did as he was told, denying that the earth orbited the sun. But legend has it that, after pronouncing the required allocution, he whispered more to himself than to those present, “E pur si muove”—“And yet it moves.”
