The Galileo Conflict: Cosmology, Physics and Bible Hermeneutics (Ockham’s Razor)?

This was the first in the series of student contributions to a seminar titled "Which truths can we build upon? Physics and Theology in Discourse."

Galileo's conflict with the church is common knowledge since it is described in many books. It is also central to Bert Brecht's play The Live of Galilei, so I am not going into historical details.

The idea of a geocentric world is at least as old as Aristoteles 400 B.C. For people observing the daily sunrises and sunsets, the sun naturally moves around the earth. Although geocentrism was the consensus, heliocentric ideas were supported by Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century B.C. In the 2nd century A.C., Ptolemy in introducing circular orbits, advanced geocentrism considerably

Then, the students projected the two most important sentences of the seminar:

- Mathematics describes quantitatively and solves practical problems.

- Natural philosophy describes qualitatively looking at the fundamental relationships between all components rather than details.

These sentences indicate a paradigm shift that began earlier and intensified with Copernicus. He developed mathematical models that predicted the position of the planets.

Johannes Kepler's laws, published in 1609 in his work Astronomia Nova, were a breakthrough. The introduction of elliptical orbits made it possible to fully explain our helocentric planetary system with the knowledge available at the time, i.e., Tycho Brahe's measurements.

In Italy, Galileo Galilei, who advocated the heliocentric system, came under increasing pressure. His patron, Pope Urban VIII, encouraged him to publish on the Copernican system as long as he treated it as a hypothesis.

 
Galileo attempted this in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo), published in 1623, in which an enlightened Copernican argues with a traditional Ptolemaic.

Einstein commented, "Galileo's dialog, apart from its groundbreaking factual content, represents an almost mischievous attempt to ostensibly obey [Urban's] commandment, but de facto to disregard it."

Indeed, the dialog intended to reconcile the two world systems brought Galileo a new accusation from the Inquisition.


Max Planck once said, "From time immemorial, as long as there has been an observation of nature, its ultimate, highest goal has been to summarize the colorful diversity of physical phenomena into a unified system, possibly into a single formula." Where I would like to add: provided the mathematics is available.

So, in his admiration for the explanatory power of Maxwell's elegant equations, Ludwig Boltzmann prefaced his lecture on electrodynamics in 1893 with a modified quatrain from Goethe's Faust I:

War es ein Gott der diese Zeichen schrieb, Die mit geheimnisvoll verborg’nen Trieb Die Kräfte der Natur um mich enthüllen Und mir das Herz mit stiller Freud erfüllen?

Was it a god who wrote these characters, Which, in a mysteriously concealed way Reveal the forces of nature around me And fill my heart with quiet joy?

At the latest, from this point on, beauty or elegance criteria have played a role in assessing physical theories. However, there is no well-founded justification for this. Why can't a theory that describes a law of nature be "ugly"?

The Franciscan William Ockham was one of the most knowledgeable persons of his time. He distinguished clearly: Science is a matter of discovery, and theology is a matter of revelation and faith. He is best known to posterity for his razor.

 

Ockham's Razor demands that scientists accept the simplest possible theoretical explanation for existing data. This principle of parsimony is not a physical law but a rather dangerous practice when more complex theories may equally explain the data.

Both models can be calculated with sufficient accuracy.
Would you like to apply Ockham's Razor?

Still, the physics principle of least action points to a simple, efficient nature and its laws.

On the other hand, I find the effort of probability theory to "prove" Ockham's Razor far-fetched, "The accuracy of a theory is not improved by additional assumptions. They are bound to introduce uncertainties, increasing the probability that the whole theory is wrong."

Karl Popper argued we prefer simpler theories to more complex ones "because their empirical content is greater; and because they are better testable."

In physics, the following statement read in Wikipedia must hold: If multiple models of natural law make exactly the same testable predictions, they are equivalent, and there is no need for parsimony to choose a preferred one.

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