Music of the Spheres

THE SLEEPWALKERS (624 pp.)--Arthur Koestler--Macmillan ($6.50).

Arthur Koestler, 53, is an ex-rebel without a cause. In the '305, he was a Communist; in the '40s and well into the '50s, a trenchant antiCommunist. While he remains as firmly anti-Red as ever, he seems to have wearied of the battle. A few years ago, the author of Darkness at Noon announced: "Cassandra has gone hoarse and is due for a vocational change." Lately, the polemicist has turned pedagogue. The Sleepwalkers is an animated and diverting lecture on cosmology, man's vision of the universe from the Babylonians to Newton.

Change Is Decay. To the Babylonians, Egyptians and Hebrews, the world was an oyster, water below, water above (it seeped through the upper dome as rain), with the earth as snug and central as a pearl. But between the 6th and 3rd centuries B.C., the Greeks reached certain conclusions that were to be ignored for the next 2,000 years, e.g., that the earth rotated on its axis, that the sun was the center of the universe.

A failure of nerve, Koestler believes, sabotaged these true starts toward knowledge. Faced with a Greek society already in decline, Plato equated any change with decay. For philosophic reasons, he decided that the sphere was the only perfect shape, that the world must be a perfect sphere and that the motion of heavenly bodies must be in perfect circles at uniform speed. Aristotle returned to the idea of an immobile earth and placed it in the center of nine concentric, transparent spheres, outside which was the Unmoved Mover who kept the whole machinery turning. To make the heavens jibe with Aristotle, the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy, in the 2nd century A.D., posited a universe of wheels within wheels called epicycles. Of this system, the best comment is perhaps that of Alphonso X of Castile, who said: "If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon the Creation, I should have recommended something simpler."

In recording the hammer blows of 16th and 17th century discoveries that finally put Ptolemy's epicycle machine on science's junk heap, Author Koestler offers personable profiles of the leading cosmologists--Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo--as well as lively popularizations of their thought. He also makes his book's mildly controversial point, which is almost beside the point, that these scientific greats sleepwalked their way to profound insights, with a kind of intuitive genius that turned even wrong questions into right answers.

P:The first of the revolutionary, astronomical thinkers was as timid and tentative as the first raindrop before a flood. Canon Nicolas Koppernigk, known as Copernicus (1473-1543) lived for 30 years in the watchtower of an East Prussian cathedral town. It was not only an ivory tower, it was fear-lined. Copernicus had nothing to fear in the way of censure or persecution from ecclesiastical authorities. The Jesuits were among Europe's leading astronomers, and Galileo's trial and the beginning of the split between science and religion was a century in the future. What Copernicus dreaded, in his own words, was to "be hissed off the stage," ridiculed by his academic peers. For 36 years Copernicus hugged his secret. Then an avid young Boswell named Rheticus cajoled the aging scholar into publishing On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. On his' dying day, May 24, 1543, a comatose Copernicus fingered the first bound copies. It was an alltime worst-seller, says Koestler, but Copernicus' universe carried shattering-implications because it was heliocentric. Among the implications: infinite space and "cosmic democracy." With a non-central earth, the hierarchical Golden Chain of Being that stretched from God's throne to the lowliest earthly worm seemed to have been broken.

P:While Copernicus' book sputtered like a long, slow fuse, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) held the stage. As Koestler portrays him, Mathematician Kepler was endearingly Chaplinesque. He regularly tripped over his own hypotheses, boldly matched wits with his social betters, yet was ill at ease when he himself became a big name. His blustering, ne'er-do-well father was all but hanged, and his potion-brewing mother was tried for witchcraft and barely pardoned. Kepler's boyhood in Germany bore all the stigmata of an intellectual ugly duckling, together with boils, rashes, piles, stomach and gall bladder trouble and acute hypochondria. As an added irony, the future stargazer was myopic. His chief fame rests on his three laws, and the first alone was revolutionary enough to destroy the symmetry of Platonic thought. The planets, he discovered, move elliptically, not in circles. And he nearly stumbled on the reasons why--gravity, the varying pull of the sun's force of attraction. Typical of Kepler's inspired stumbling, feels Koestler, is the way he picked his second wife. He wanted an upper-class girl who was well-mannered and well-moneyed. After two years of weighing the pros and cons, he disregarded the horoscopes he had cast and his own best judgment, and married a penniless household servant. She bore him seven children and, domestically at least, he lived happily ever after.

P:When Galileo (1564-1642) reported his telescopic discovery of four new planets (they were actually satellites of Jupiter), Kepler was the first scientist in Europe to believe, and generously offered himself as "your shield-bearer." It is Galileo's disregard of Kepler, even to the point of not sending him a telescope he asked for, that influences Koestler's frank distaste for Galileo. Far from being a martyr, Koestler believes, Galileo was a pompous megalomaniac, who alienated his Jesuit friends and the benevolence of Pope Urban VIII, until he forced his own trial. But in the main, Author Koestler is equable-tempered and gives Galileo full marks for crumbling the Aristotelian notion of the eternal immutability of the upper heavens.

The New Baal. To the scientific orchestra that had been tuning up in sections for centuries, Newton's law of gravity brought the exhilarating unity of a conductor's baton. The music of the spheres, in which the ancients believed literally, at last existed symbolically in the harmony of a Newtonian universe under the common rule of certain natural laws. But the post-Newtonian universe has again become something of a mystery, notes Koestler. He quotes the late Sir James Jeans, who suggested that "the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine."

What mankind now needs, Author Koestler strongly implies, is a great sleepwalker who could resolve the tragic and longstanding schism between science and faith. Otherwise, he fears, science will become simply "the new Baal, lording it over the moral vacuum with his electronic brain."

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