Orbiting Ourselves

SCIENCE IS THE CENTER of educated modern awareness, the source of the most reliable knowledge about what and where mankind is. When Karl Marx declared religion was the opium of the people, he followed it up with a scientific metaphor urging people to concentrate instead on purely human concerns. Disillusioned by the critique of religion, Man was to “move around himself and thereby around his real sun. Religion is only the illusory sun, which moves around Man all the time he does not move around himself.”

The metaphor is decidedly hit-and-miss. Orbiting ourselves is hard to visualize—we have to be simultaneously the sun at the center and the earth going round it. And it never was an illusory sun, only ever the real sun, of which there were illusory perceptions. But the metaphor remains striking, and its reference is clear, to Copernicus and Galileo who set the sun at the center of the universe in place of the earth. That revolution became (to stay with astronomical metaphors) a fixed star in the history of science, enlightenment, and human progress, emerging in the seventeenth century, but in principle timeless. Science was a bridgehead in the campaign to replace religious and philosophical dogma with a tenable, testable worldview, often at great personal risk to the innovator. Scientific discovery was damned as religious heresy. Accordingly, the monument to the Polish astronomer Copernicus in the church of St Anne in Kraków is dedicated to “the man who dared (auso),” which picks up the motto “dare to know” (sapere aude) from Kant's great essay of 1784, What is Enlightenment? Aptly so, since not just science but specifically astronomy was consciously a model for Enlightenment thinkers because of its diametrical reversal of a set way of thinking.

The two astronomers naturally figured in the pantheon of Marxism. Their example was once again timely when science and freedom of thought came under attack in Nazi Germany, driving intellectuals, writers, and scientists (among them fourteen Nobel laureates and twenty-six professors of theoretical physics) into exile. The life of Galileo was an obvious dramatic subject.