The Individual and the Universe

Extract

For a number of years, cosmology has been a favourite science with the British public, and, with the development of radio astronomy and the recent launching of earth- satellites, the choice of a cosmologist to give the recent Reith Lectures was not surprising. Professor A. C. B. Lovell, who is well-known for the part he played in the development of the great Jodrell Bank radio telescope, took as his title ‘The individual and the universe’, and in his lectures he found three points of contact between cosmology and religion, each of which calls for comment.

The first occurred in his introductory lecture, which was devoted to the transition from the medieval geocentric and ordered cosmos to the infinite universe of the late seventeenth century. ‘In the three centuries since Galileo and Newton we have moved far, but the vital break with tradition belongs to their age, not ours.’ Now Professor Lovell shows that he appreciates that the revolution sparked off by the publication in 1543 of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus rapidly involved not only physical science as a whole, but also philosophy, religion, and in fact many of the features of man’s world picture. But it is on the religious aspect that he dwells. ‘The story’, he says, ‘is mainly one of persecution of the astronomers on religious grounds’, and in this way he produces a thoroughly distorted and unsatisfactory picture, for which he was rightly censured by Mr Arthur Koestler in a long letter to The Listener the following week.