In my career, I’ve sat through numerous “introduction to orbital mechanics” lessons, and I’ve taught at least as many. Most begin with a brief history of orbital mechanics, referencing Aristotle’s crystalline spheres, the Ptolemaic model with its homocentric and eccentric circles and its convoluted epicycles, the Copernican geometric, heliocentric model, and culminating with Newtonian gravity. It paints a neat, convenient, convincing portrait of steadily advancing human understanding of the universe, its rhythms, and our place in it, and the presentation is something I’ve seen referenced or given so many times that it became one of those assumptions you don’t even think to question. Until, that is, I sat down and read Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.
We’ll talk more about the piece itself in an upcoming book review, but within a few pages I lowered my copy, looked at the wall (because my wife wasn’t sitting beside me while I was reading at that time), and said “wait, really? The Greeks really did think of everything.” You see, Copernicus, in the introduction to his book, expresses that the idea of the Earth in motion is not so revolutionary as it is depicted by his opponents and detractors because various Greek luminaries, contemporaries of the great thinkers like Plato, also proposed that the Earth is in motion (including the Pythagoreans, which probably did not help people to take the idea of a mobile Earth seriously). This should not have been so remarkable, save that I spent all this time not questioning the sequential depiction of progression from crystalline spheres to modern orbital mechanics. Which is a lesson in remembering to question everything.
More significantly, it is a lesson in the nonlinearity of history. Rather like the idea of the mighty oak expanding inevitably from the humble acorn, without consideration for the mighty oak that preceded that acorn’s existence, history is conventionally presented as a more-or-less linear process, a sequential story that, while characterized by certain fluctuations, trends generally towards “progress,” some present and future state elevated from the primitiveness and ignorance of the past, and a sense that that which preceded us is, even if surpassing us in certain respects, overall inferior. The more I read history, the more I realize that this is not the case. Partially, that is a matter of perspective, of learning to approach historical contexts within their own reference frames rather than through the preconceived notions and biased lenses of the present, but it is also a matter of realizing that, in significant, quantifiable, and relevant ways, the idea of an inevitable progression of history is an unfortunate myth.
That Greek thinkers in the fourth century BCE proposed a theory of the motion of celestial bodies comparable to Copernicus’s theory nearly two thousand years later is just one example upon which I came most recently, and the ancient Greeks of that period are easy to point to because they of their relatability to a modern, Western viewpoint; they are far from the only examples. As I’ve remarked upon many times since reading Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, the fact that we do not routinely walk past the ruins of civilizations that achieved heights obviously greater than our own has tainted our perception of history and lent it this aura of inevitability, of ultimate progress toward some unimaginable peak, which is unreflective of reality.
History is not a linear progression; no straight path led to this particular moment. It took a convoluted, torturous, meandering path, full of backtracking, sideways digressions, and seemingly meaningless tangents and dead-ends. Only in a simplified hindsight with blinders on can a straight, direct trajectory be perceived from one point to another. How many different mechanical contraptions were developed to replace the horse and carriage before successful automobiles first appeared? How many bizarre configurations of sails and hulls and masts were attempted before the familiar sailing vessels we know today became commonplace? Even simple innovations, like the stirrup, took centuries and unique circumstances to develop at numerous false starts and mistakes that history does not record.
This is why the pundits, prophets, and oracles are so often wrong (not always – as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day). They think that they can extrapolate from past events where the future is going, but that only works if history follows a linear path, which it does not. And as any student of calculus can tell you, solving nonlinear differential equations is far, far more complicated than solving the linear ones. What looks like the linear path might lead only to a dead end, or maybe it’s a necessary sideways digression before reaching whatever the next thing is, and there is no way of knowing until we have the benefit of hindsight. Are electric cars the inevitable linear progression after horse and carriage to internal combustion engine automobile? Or are they merely a dead-end, like the utterly impractical steam-powered cars designed in the seventeenth century that never went anywhere in more ways than one? The modern oracles seem to think they are, but I suspect that, fifty years from now, a full reckoning would reveal a messier, more nuanced map. That’s what makes history so interesting, and frankly, it’s what makes the future interesting, too.
IGC Publishing 