Optical Revolutions How the Telescope Essay

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The universe viewed through a telescope looked different, and this difference in itself played into the Protestant argument that received truths may be fallible. In fact, the notion of truth outside empirical evidence became unsteady:

For most thinkers in the decades following Galileo's observations with the telescope, the concern was not so much for the need of a new system of physics as it was for a new system of the world. Gone forever was the concept that the earth has a fixed spot in the center of the universe, for it was now conceived to be in motion…gone also was the comforting thought that the earth is unique (Cohen 79)

However, while the telescope was transforming ideas about the shape of the cosmos and the relationship between science and faith, the microscope essentially remained a toy through much of the early modern era. If anything, the revelation of the microscopic universe, far from engendering a revolution in the intellectual community, was often characterized as a deeply conservative support for the old divinely centered cosmos, with the existence of microbes arguing for the infinite creative power of God.

As English microscopic pioneer Henry Power put it, the microscope provides evidence of divine creation:

To our mind the [ethereal] wisdom brings how God is greatest in the least of things

And in the smallest print we gather hence

The world may best read his omnipotence (quoted in Ruestow 59).

Five decades after the telescope and microscope were invented and Galileo gazed at the moon (Ruestow 16), Robert Hooke saw microbes not as destabilizing entities not found in classical science but as little automatons "ordered and disposed [by] the All-Wise God of Nature" (194) and "without derogating at all from the infinite wisdom of the Creator" (134).

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Further speculation pondered the role of microscopic perspectives in the transmigration of souls (234) or as "enobled with a pedigree as ancient as the first creation" (201).

Hooke was steeped in the apothecary and alchemical tradition of science; with its many accounts of the "congruities" between "subtle spirits,"(15) his Micrographia looks backward to the Platonic universe, and not forward to the post-Galilean cosmos. And yet, while the microbial world he and his colleagues discovered may not have had an immediate impact on early modern life, it would ultimately have far-reaching effects on the way our century looks at medicine, agriculture, and even fundamental questions like life and death.

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