How a medieval Oxford friar used light and color to find out what stars and planets are made of https://t.co/niRmhgi77l
— SPACE.com (@SPACEdotcom) November 23, 2025
Unsurprisingly, this caught my eye:
During the 1240s, Richard Fishacre, a Dominican friar at Oxford University, used his knowledge of light and colour to show that the stars and planets are made of the same elements found here on Earth. In so doing he challenged the scientific orthodoxy of his day and pre-empted the methods and discoveries of the 21st-century James Webb space telescope.
Following the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, medieval physics affirmed that the stars and planets were made from a special celestial element – the famous “fifth element” (quinta essentia) or “quintessence”1. Unlike the four elements found here on Earth (fire, water, earth and air), this “fifth element” is perfect and unchanging.
Fully transparent, it formed the basis of what were believed to be the nine concentric celestial “spheres” surrounding the Earth, as well as the various stars and planets attached to them. These, it was argued, were merely condensed versions of the “fifth element”, with each of the first seven spheres having its own planet, and the outermost eighth and ninth spheres containing the stars and heaven itself, respectively...
Colour, Fishacre noted, is typically associated with opaque bodies. These, however, are always composite, meaning made up of two or more of the four terrestrial elements. When we look up at the stars and planets, however, we see that the light they emit often has a faint colour. Mars appears red, and Venus yellow, for example. This suggests, of course, that they are composite and thus made “ex quattuor elementis” – “out of the four elements”.
In Fishacre’s opinion the surest proof that the stars and planets were not made of some special “fifth element” came from the Moon. It has a very definite colour, and, crucially, every so often it eclipses the Sun. Were it made from the transparent fifth element – even a highly condensed version of it – then surely the Sun’s light would pass through it, just as it does a pane of glass. This, however, is not the case.
The Moon, Fishacre reasoned, must therefore be made of the same elements found on Earth. And if this was true of the Moon, which is the lowest celestial body, then it must also be true of all the other stars and planets.
Oxford, you say?
[Y]our masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart...Mortify your intelligence, learn to weep over the wounds of the Lord, throw away your books.
Ahem, anyway...as Carl Sagan observed about Democritus' postulations on atoms, "his arguments are not those we use today, but they're elegant, and subtle, and derived from everyday experience, and his conclusions were fundamentally right." Ancient anti-intellectuals like Jorge and Ubertino can gnash their gums over reason and the search for knowledge, but I'll stick with the likes of Bacon and Kepler.
The latter dedicated his Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Secret of the Universe) in 1596 thus:
Do you require something important? Nothing is more precious, nothing more splendid than this in the brilliant temple of God.
Do you wish to know something secret? Nothing in the nature of things is or has been more closely concealed.
The only thing in which it does not satisfy everybody is that its usefulness is not clear to the unreflecting. Yet here we are concerned with the book of Nature, so greatly celebrated in sacred writings.
It is in this that Paul proposes to the Gentiles that they should contemplate God like the Sun in water or in a mirror. Why then as Christians should we take any less delight in its contemplation, since it is for us with true worship to honor God, to venerate him, to wonder at him? The more rightly we understand the nature and scope of what our God has founded, the more devoted the spirit in which that is done.
How many indeed are the hymns which were sung to the Creator, the true God, by the true worshiper of God, David, in which he draws arguments from the marvels of the heavens. "The Heavens are telling," says he, "the glory of God. I shall see thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the Moon and stars, which thou hast created. Great is our Lord, and great is his excellence, who numbers the multitude of the stars, and calls them all by name."
Elsewhere, full of the spirit, full of holy joy, he exclaims, and acclaims the very universe, "Praise the Lord, ye heavens, praise him ye Sun and Moon, etc." What voice has the heaven, what voice have the stars, to praise God as a man does?
Unless, when they supply men with cause to praise God, they themselves are said to praise God. And if we reveal this voice for the heavens and for the Nature of things in these pages, and make it clearer, no one should charge us with a vain deed or with undertaking useless toil.
And in 1619, he literally prayed in Harmonice Mundi (The Harmony of the World):
Thou who by the light of Nature movest in us the desire for the light of grace, so that by it thou mayest bring us over into the light of glory; I thank Thee, Creator Lord, because Thou hast made me delight in Thy handiwork, and I have exulted in the works of Thy hands. Lo, I have now brought to completion the work of my covenant, using all the power of the talents which Thou hast given me. I have made manifest the glory of Thy works to men who will read these demonstrations, as much as the deficiency of my mind has been able to grasp of its infinity. My intellect has been ready for the most accurate details of philosophy.
Indeed, relying on the prophetic capacities of our minds to be philosophical, to work for the progress of knowledge, is to be pious. Why else would G-d create this vast, rich Cosmos, gift us the ability to perceive its parts2, and the intelligence to interpret its laws?
Selah.
1 - "And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"
2 - Yea, verily, to name them, and even see a pale reflection of the divine wisdom in its monsters?
No comments:
Post a Comment