'Saying Sorry Through Ancient Astronomy' - Speech delivered at the First Annual JohnnieTalk - St. John's College, Annapolis

Delivered at the first 'JohnnieTalk' event

St. John's College, Annapolis - Sep 10, ‘18

Cameron Byerly

Preamble:

Good afternoon. My name is Cameron Byerly.

I am a senior here at St. John’s College, and I am grateful to be speaking here to you for our first Johnnietalk, particularly amidst such distinguished alumni of our home.

In my free time I create visual essays and other videos for a personal YouTube channel under the username ‘Space Feather’. My two most recent works are both visual presentations on two of George Orwell’s famous essays, unabridged. The first a filmed sequence on ‘How to make a Cup of Tea’ correctly, and the second an animated video on his post war experiences in occupied Germany, entitled ‘Revenge is Sour’.

Last year, I gave a Ted Talk at the TedXCincinnati event on my experiences on Semester at Sea and this College. When I was approached by Ted, I had been working on a video on Ptolemy for my YouTube channel, so I happily adapted the video into my first submission to Ted. It focused on the merits of the ancient astronomer and his lasting impact on contemporary thinking. The talk was eventually adapted into a larger reflection on learning, to suit a wider audience, and my beloved Ptolemy had to take a back seat in favor of a more general comparison between the exploration of places and the investigation of ideas. But now, with a new audience that has studied as I have, I am enormously grateful to St. John's College for reaching out and allowing me to finally deliver this passion project of mine on the great astronomer of antiquity.

Talk Proper:

I’ve always believed that we should try to teach children at a young age how to properly cope with making mistakes. We ought to make them comfortable with that feeling of inner disorientation we’ve all had, that moment we realize we’ve made a proper mess of things. And this should be a cultivated skill, an exercise as we grow older, because we can get stuck not admitting our fault to others, or even ourselves, to avoid that discomfort. Recognizing fault, after all, is the first step of improving.

What I propose we need is a role model for being wrong, a hero for those of us who have just realized we’re on the losing side of an argument. Quite a particular hero, I’d say, someone brilliant, hard-working, and humble, but still wrong.

Someone wrong for all the right reasons.

After a long search, I accidently found a perfect candidate that I’d like to nominate for this position, with my highest recommendation, someone I found safely tucked away in the second century, an ancient astronomer named Ptolemy: a brilliant natural philosopher who wrote a love letter to the stars to try and understand them.

Ptolemy was, to the common person, probably an answer to a multiple choice question in grade school, usually along the lines of ‘Who thought the sun and planets revolved around the Earth?’.

This oversimplification of his character is unfair, because Ptolemy is one of the most fascinating thinkers in Western history. After studying his seminal work, The Almagest, over several months, I’d like try to explain my deep love for this figure, with these frustratingly unknown facts on his achievements.

First, Ptolemy didn’t think we were the center of the universe because we’re important to the gods, as many believe. Rather, he used logic and existing science to build his model. Plato and Aristotle both had assumed this planetary model 500 years earlier, with far less rationale than Ptolemy. This understanding that the Earth didn’t move and that the stars and sun moved around us instead was enormously reasonable. Really, without a firm grasp of later physics, there was no sense in claiming that we were clinging to a planet spinning at a thousand miles an hour. Starlight travels hundreds of lightyears to reach us, yet to ask why is demanding a full explanation of light having a speed. Without this information, standing at his period in history, Ptolemy’s work is thoroughly airtight in terms of pure observation.

The most unknown fact of Ptolemy is that his work The Almagest is not a religious, or poetic work. It is a mathematical work, a product of geometry, that never fell back on prose or theology to prove itself. Before his math was published, the stars seemed chaotic and impossible to predict, but Ptolemy was the first to successfully mathematically explain the movements and speed of the planets in the sky with uncanny precision.

So let’s remove the idea that Ptolemy was simply incorrect, and therefore a fool. His mathematics are not caveman mathematics. This is terrifically difficult geometry, and in synthesizing hundreds of years of pre-existing star catalogues, he successfully calculated the solar year to within seven minutes error. The man’s a genius.

If you go outside tonight and stare at the stars, they all appear to be the same distance from us; and move perfectly aligned in a spinning globe around us every 24 hours, with the north star at its top.

This apparent sphere around us actually leads us to the most telling and intelligent aspect of Ptolemy’s work; that all planetary motions within it are perfectly circular. Now, today we understand the orbits of planets are actually ovals, or ellipses, moving around the sun, but Ptolemy recognized that by putting enough circles on top of other circles, they begin to work together like gears in a machine, and allow points on them to mimic the path of any oval. So like a grand, cosmic watchmaker, he proceeded to delicately place these circles until he had successfully created a perfect universe that spoke exclusively in the language of circles.

Ptolemy didn’t go to such complex lengths with his geometry because he liked circles, he did it because circles were once the way to express the infinite and perfect. In many ways they still are. When we think of the term ‘infinity’ today, the first image that comes to mind is usually the sideways 8, also known as the lemniscate. This is quite a recent shorthand though, and the ancient western thinkers understood the symbol of the infinite to be the circle. And why wouldn’t they? They knew the Earth and moon and sun were circular, and a circle is unbroken. It’s perfect, it’s the same reason a wedding ring today represents a bond forever, and all clocks move in a circle about their center. Ptolemy understood it as his responsibility as a human to understand how the heavens moved in the language of the infinite. Because everything down here on the ground must die, or end, every tree, man, and rock eventually wears down to nothing, but the stars above were forever, therefore they must move in perfect, infinite circles.

And he did it! This book still accurately predicts the motions of all the lights in the sky tonight, and every night.

Ptolemy did meticulous, difficult geometrical work to integrate the reasonable deductions of his time with his intelligence and hard work. His Almagest is a triumph, and it remains pure and undiluted by any rambling conjectures on what he thought the planets were, or how he felt about shooting stars, or the sun, or the planets as gods, or anything else that wasn’t proven by his math.

To me, Ptolemy is the perfect tragic role model, a wonderful mathematical nerd in the back of the classroom. And we... we the modern western world, have stolen his love letter and bully him for it, laughing at his conclusions. 1,300 years after his death, Ptolemy was dethroned as the preeminent Western astronomer by Copernicus, and later Kepler, who would introduce a formal model of the earth moving around the sun. And these two began this taunting of Ptolemy by calling his mistake a pagan mistake. Which it wasn’t.

We’ve forgotten and misunderstood Ptolemy, yet he remains a key step in mathematical and western history. He’s my hero.

If you take anything from this, remember that sometimes you can work your absolute hardest, and be as passionate, humble, and brilliant as possible, and still look foolish for a single unavoidable misstep… at least by those who don’t understand.

We should never be cruel to those people who make honest mistakes, in the hopes that we may foster an environment that values the means, rather than just the ends of our work.

In this world, on this spinning space rock that is no longer the center of the universe, it sometimes seems that being correct is the only thing that matters. But we must focus more on doing our best, on emulating the methods and dedication of Ptolemy.

So please, try going stargazing tonight, and remember that you can never guarantee your final decisions will be sound forever, but your method, your thinking, your work ethic, your class; these will last forever.

Thank You