1. "But it is still moving"

The dispute between heliocentric theory and geocentric theory

Galileo vs. the Catholic Church

Time: 17 Century

Pro: Galileo, the father of modern science

Con: Pope Urban VIII

Process:

1632, Sixteen years after the Copernican theory was officially banned. Galileo was sixty-eight years old. In this year, he wrote the most important work in his life, "Dialogues", in Florence. The full name of "Dialogue" is "Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus". It discusses the geocentric theory and the heliocentric theory in the form of a dialogue between three people. The three people who have conversations in the book respectively represent heliocentric believers, geocentric believers and neutrals. In the four days of discussion in the book, they used the most comprehensive logic to completely support the heliocentric system.

Both the "Hammer of Heresy" Roberto Bellamy and Paul V had passed away eleven years ago. Cardinal Barberini, who had written a poem praising Galileo, Now he occupies the Pope's throne and is called Urban VIII, changing his previous friendly attitude. The Pope was furious after reading it, and the Inquisition immediately set up a special committee of three to investigate the book "Dialogue". In September of that year, the committee held five consecutive meetings within two weeks and submitted reports. The Pope immediately asked Galileo to come to Rome immediately and face the Inquisition without any delay. Like Bruno's trial, his trial was carried out by ten bishops. Galileo initially wanted to argue that he was only discussing heliocentrism as a scientific hypothesis. Both systems were covered in the Dialogues and was impartial. However, this kind of defense is really pale. In fact, the whole book clearly expresses the tendency towards heliocentric theory, and all the defense of geocentric theory seems shallow and ridiculous. To give just one example, the character who defends the geocentric theory in the book is named Simplicio. Even those of us who do not understand Italian can find that Simplicio's "Simp" is obviously the same as "pattern, picture". The word "simple" in "semplice" is a homophonic sound. Such an unmistakable irony will certainly not escape the eyes of the Inquisition. In fact, the word in Italian comes from the root word semplice, which means "simple-minded" .

Two months later, Galileo, wearing the white cloth robe of a penitent, crawled on the cold ground of the Inquisition. The verdict was long and eloquent, running to more than ten pages, and was signed by seven of the ten cardinals. The Inquisition sentenced him to life imprisonment. According to their vision, Galileo should spend the rest of his life in a dungeon and recite penitential poems from the Bible Psalms every week.

Galileo began to read verbatim the declaration of renunciation prepared for him by the Inquisition, vowing to always support geocentric thinking. It is said that when he finished reading the declaration, he looked down at the silent earth beneath his knees and murmured: "But it is still moving."

Influence:

The imprisonment of the last master in Italy, Galileo spent the rest of his life under house arrest. All of Galileo's works were banned. In 1982, Pope John Paul II launched a panel. After ten years of re-investigation into the Galileo incident, Galileo was finally rehabilitated three and a half centuries after his death.

This is the first important conflict between the heliocentric theory and the geocentric theory. After this battle, the heliocentric theory was later perfected by Kepler and Newton, and became the mainstream theory in the scientific community.

2. "If I can see further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants."

The dispute between the optical wave theory and the particle theory

Time: the second half of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth century

Foreigner: Newton, President of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Royal Mint of the United Kingdom Director, Professor Lucas of Cambridge University, the father of modern physics

Opposite: Huygens, founder of the French Royal Academy of Sciences

Hooke, founder and experimental director of the British Royal Academy of Sciences

Process:

Newton, Huygens, and Hooker were all top optical masters in the seventeenth century. The intersection of their academic fields began with the design and production of telescopes.

Galileo's sensational lens telescope adopted the principle of lens refraction. When light passes through a high-power lens, due to the different refraction angles of light of different colors, the white light passing through the lens tube will form a colored aperture at the edge of the image. The image quality is also very worrying.

To overcome this difficulty, we can only use a lens with a long focal length and a smaller curvature to reduce image distortion. The side effect of this is that the lens barrel is greatly lengthened. The optical master Huygens creatively abandoned the lens tube and designed the "Sky Telescope". He placed the huge objective lens directly on the tower, and then the observer stood a few blocks away and observed the objective lens with the eyepiece in hand.

Newton had long known the phenomenon of refraction through prism spectroscopy experiments. He directly designed a reflecting telescope, abandoning the design of a lens and instead using a concave reflector to gather light. Due to the difference between the incident angle of light of any color and the reflection The angles are all exactly equal, in one fell swoop except for the imaging aperture of the refracting telescope. While Newton, Huygens and other optical experts were looking to the sky, Hooke was studying the field of optics, modifying Galileo's previous rough microscopes and creating the first batch of practical microscopes. Hooke once accused Newton of plagiarizing his reflecting telescope design, saying that he had already made a better version.

Later, in a letter between Newton and Hooke, Newton wrote, "If I can see further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." Due to Hooke's short stature, academic circles generally believe that this is a tribute to Hooke. Satire.

Huygens had just learned about Newton's reflecting telescope and optical papers. He praised Newton's paper on the surface and called it "extremely original", but in his heart he was not satisfied with Newton's optical results. He worked hard to improve his own optical structure. The debate between Newton's "particle theory" and Huygens and Hooke's "wave theory" began throughout the entire history of optical development. Newton started from the phenomenon of reflection of light and believed that light is composed of tiny particles. Huygens believed that light is a kind of wave, which was used to explain the phenomenon of light refraction. After that, Huygens published "On Light" and used the wave theory to derive the laws of refraction and reflection of light, giving the wave theory a head start in this debate.

Huygens published "On Light" in 1678. Newton had no intention of participating in the debate at the moment and chose to endure it for the time being. During this period, he published the book "Principles" and proposed universal gravitation.

In 1703, Newton's old enemy Hooke completed his 68-year life journey in loneliness. Newton went a step further and was elected as the new president of the Royal Society. At this time, Newton established his status as the first person in the scientific community with the help of his book "Principia"; his position as president of the Royal Society made him important in the scientific community, and he quickly and efficiently began to liquidate his old opponents. .

The first person to bear the brunt was the deceased Hooke. Hooke's laboratory and library in the Royal Society were disbanded on the spot, and the experimental equipment left by Hooke was dispersed or destroyed. In fact, when the Royal Society moved its venue in 1710, the only portrait was lost during the move, and no one knows Hooke's true appearance to this day.

In the second year after Hooke's death, Newton restarted the debate between the wave theory and the particle theory of optics, and published his masterpiece "Optics" that year. This work brought together Newton's thirty years of research in Cambridge. From the perspective of particles, he clarified all aspects of reflection, refraction, lens imaging, eye action modes, spectrum, etc. He also drew nutrients from the wave theory and introduced the vibration, period and other theories in the wave theory into the particle theory, comprehensively improving and complementing it. the particle theory. Then he raised the problems that could not be explained by the wave theory one by one, and refuted Huygens's "On Light". At that time Huygens had died of illness nine years ago in The Hague, Netherlands. The wave theory lost its two pillars, Hooke and Huygens. Newton single-handedly reversed the conflict between the two major theories of optics. In the following century, the particle theory has firmly occupied the mainstream of optical research.

Influence:

Newton single-handedly overturned the disadvantages of the particle theory and suppressed the wave theory for a hundred years. As for the counterattack of the wave theory, we had to wait until the British physicist Thomas Young The leader just made a comeback. This debate continued for centuries. It was not until 1905, when Einstein proposed the wave-particle duality of light based on the light quantum phenomenon of the photoelectric effect, that the marathon debate came to an end.