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Contra Galileo: Riccioli’s “Coriolis-Force” Argument on the Earth’s Diurnal Rotation

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Abstract

In 1651 the Italian astronomer and physicist Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671) published his encyclopedic book, Almagestum novum, in which he presented seventy-seven arguments against the Copernican theory of the movement of the Earth, one of which foresaw an effect that physicists today attribute to the Coriolis force. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and Robert Hooke (1635–1703) investigated this argument, which raises significant questions about the nature of the opposition to the Copernican theory in the seventeenth century.

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Notes

  1. Galileo (Salviatti) leaves the possibility open that the trajectories of projectiles are relative to the line between their projector and target, even discussing whether the motion of a gun pointed at and following a flying bird might be transmitted to the bullet; see Galileo, Dialogue (ref. 1), pp. 178–179; 206–207.

References

  1. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems–Ptolemaic & Copernican [1632], translated by Stillman Drake, foreword by Albert Einstein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, Second Edition 1967), pp. 186-187; idem, Introduction by J.L. Heilbron (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), pp. 216-218.

  2. Ibid., p. 188; 218.

  3. Ibid., pp. 178-183; 206-212.

  4. Ibid., p. 182; 211.

  5. Ioanne Baptista Ricciolo [Giovanni Battista Riccioli], Almagestum novum astronomiam veterem novamque complectens observationibus aliorum, et propriis Nouisque Theorematibus, Problematibus, ac Tabulis promotam, in tres tomos distributam quorum argumentum Sequens pagina explicabit (Bononiæ: Ex Typographia Hæredis Victorij Benatij, 1651), title page, [drop-down menu] Pars posterior tomi primi at website <http://www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/pageview/140190>.

  6. Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687 (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 652.

  7. Albert Van Helden, “Galileo, telescopic astronomy, and the Copernican system,” in Rene Taton and Curtis Wilson, ed., Planetary astronomy from the Renaissqance to the rise of astrophysics. Part A. Tycho Brahe to Newton [The General History of Astronomy, Vol. 2] (Cambridge, New York, Port Chester, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 81-118, on p. 103.

  8. Ibid., p. 474, par. XVIII, website <…/141537>.

  9. Ibid., p. 425, col. 2, sec. VI, par. VIII, website <…/141485>.

  10. Ibid., pp. 426-427, sec. VIII, websites <…/141486> and <…/141487>. For a more detailed summary (but not a complete translation), see Edward Grant, “In Defense of the Earth’s Centrality and Immobility: Scholastic Reaction to Copernicanism in the Seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74, Part 4 (1984), 1-69, on 48-51.

  11. Ricciolo [Riccioli], Almagestum novum (ref. 5), p. 474, pars. XVII, XIX, website <…/141537>.

  12. Jerry B. Marion, Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems (New York and London: Academic Press, Second Edition 1970), pp. 343-356.

  13. Ricciolo [Riccioli], Almagestum novum (ref. 5), p. 474. par. XVII, website <…/141537>.

  14. Ibid., p. 473, par. X, website <…/141536>.

  15. For an example of such a calculation that Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608-1679) published in 1667, see Alexandre Koyré, “A Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton: De Motu Gravium Naturaliter Cadentium in Hypothesi Terrae Motae,” Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc. 45 (1955), 329-395, on 374.

  16. Marion, Classical Dynamics (ref. 12), p. 350.

  17. Robert Hooke, An Attempt To prove the Motion of the Earth by Observations (London: Printed by T.R. for John Martyn Printer to the Royal Society at the Bell in St. Pauls Church-yard, 1674); reprinted in Robert T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford. Vol. VIII. The Cutler Lectures of Robert Hooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930); reprinted (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968), pp. 1-28, on pp. 5-6; see also website <http://www.roberthooke.com>.

  18. Newton to Hooke, November 28, 1679, in H.W. Turnbull, F.R.S., ed., The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Vol. II. 1676-1687 (Cambridge: Published for The Royal Society at the University Press, 1960), pp. 300-303, on pp. 301-302; also somewhat inaccurately in W.W. Rouse Ball, An Essay on Newton’s ‘Principia’ (London and New York: MacMillan and Co., 1893), pp. 141-144, on pp. 142-143.

  19. Rouse Ball, Essay (ref. 18), pp. 145-150.

  20. J. L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 180.

  21. Quoted in Rouse Ball, Essay (ref. 18), p. 150.

  22. Edwin H. Hall, “Do Falling Bodies Move South?” The Physical Review 17 (1903), 179-190, on 182.

  23. Ibid., p. 189.

  24. Domenico Bertoloni Meli, “St Peter and the rotation of the earth: the problem of fall around 1800,” in P. M. Harman and Alan E. Shapiro, ed., The investigation of difficult things: Essays on Newton and the history of the exact sciences in honour of D.T. Whiteside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 421-447, on p. 430.

  25. Hall, “Falling Bodies” (ref. 22), pp. 183, 189.

  26. William F. Rigge, “Experimental Proofs of the Earth’s Rotation,” Popular Astronomy 21 (1913), 208-216, on 209-210.

  27. Hall, “Falling Bodies” (ref. 22), p. 189.

  28. Rigge, “Experimental Proofs” (ref. 26), pp. 209-210.

  29. Ibid., p. 210; Marion, Classical Dynamics (ref. 12), p. 350, footnote.

  30. Hall, “Falling Bodies” (ref. 22), p. 186.

  31. Ibid., pp. 186-188.

  32. Ibid., pp. 189-190.

  33. Florian Cajori, “The Unexplained Southerly Deviation of Falling Bodies,” Science 14 (November 29, 1901), 853-855.

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  34. Hall, “Falling Bodies” (ref. 22), pp. 188-189.

  35. Cajori, “Unexplained Southerly Deviation” (ref. 33), p. 854.

  36. Hall, “Falling Bodies” (ref. 22), pp. 188-189.

  37. Ricciolo [Riccioli], Almagestum novum (ref. 5), p. 477, pars. LXIV-LXX, website <…/141540>.

  38. Christopher M. Graney, “But Still, It Moves: Tides, Stellar Parallax, and Galileo’s Commitment to the Copernican Theory,” Physics in Perspective 10 (2008), 258-268; idem, “Seeds of a Tychonic Revolution: Telescopic Observations of the Stars by Galileo Galilei and Simon Marius,” ibid. 12 (2010), 4-24.

  39. Christopher M. Graney, “The Telescope Against Copernicus: Star Observations by Riccioli Supporting a Geocentric Universe,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 41 (2010), 453-467.

  40. Sir John F.W. Herschel, “[Treatise on] Light,” in The Encyclopedia of Mechanical Philosophy: Forming a Portion of the Encyclopedia Metropolitana (London: John Joseph Griffin and Company and Glasgow: Richard Griffin and Company, 1848), pp. 341-586 + Plates 1-14, on Plate 9 (Fig. 152, Art. 770).

  41. C. M. Graney and T. P. Grayson, “On the Telescopic Disks of Stars: A Review and Analysis of Stellar Observations from the Early Seventeenth through the Middle Nineteenth Centuries,” Annals of Science (in press).

  42. Graney, “Telescope Against Copernicus” (ref. 39), p. 461.

  43. Ricciolo [Riccioli], Almagestum novum (ref. 5), p. 477, par. LXX Responsio, website <…/141540>; pp. 460-463, chap. XXX, websites <…/141520>, <…/141523>, <…/141525>, and <…/141526>.

  44. Rienk Vermij, “Putting the Earth in Heaven. Philips Lansbergen, the Early Dutch Copernicans and the Mechanization of the World Picture,” in Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota, and Sophie Roux, ed., Mechanics and Cosmology in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2007), pp. 121-141.

  45. Ricciolo [Riccioli], Almagestum novum (ref. 5), pp. 460-463, chap. XXX, websites <…/141520>, <…/141523>, <…/141525>, and <…/141526>; p. 467, website <…/141530>.

  46. Grant, “In Defense of the Earth’s Centrality and Immobility” (ref. 10), p. 3.

  47. Albert Einstein, “Vorwort/Foreword,” in Galileo, Dialogue (ref. 1), pp. vi-xix, on pp. vi-vii, xvii-xviii; “Foreword,” pp. xxiii-xxix, on xxiii, xxviii.

  48. Christine Schofield, “The Tychonic and semi-Tychonic World Systems,” in Taton and Wilson, Planetary astronomy (ref. 7), pp. 35-44, especially pp. 41-44; Owen Gingerich, “Truth in Science: Proof, Persuasion, and the Galileo Affair,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 55 (June 2003), 80-87, especially 85-86; idem, God’s Universe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 91-95.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Roger H. Stuewer for his helpful and thoughtful editorial work on my paper, and Christina Graney for her vital assistance in translating Riccioli’s work from Latin.

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  1. Jefferson Community & Technical College, 1000 Community College Drive, Louisville, KY, 40272, USA

    Christopher M. Graney

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Correspondence to Christopher M. Graney.

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Christopher M. Graney teaches physics and astronomy at Jefferson Community & Technical College in Louisville, Kentucky, and runs the college’s observatory near Louisville.

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Graney, C.M. Contra Galileo: Riccioli’s “Coriolis-Force” Argument on the Earth’s Diurnal Rotation. Phys. Perspect. 13, 387–400 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-011-0058-5

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