This Dark Star: Thomas Digges, the Scientific Revolution, and the Infinite Universe

By Charles L. Ladner

This book is unique. It is the first and only biographical study of the life of Thomas Digges who was a 16th century astronomer and the first to stipulate an infinite universe with countless number of stars. Previously all astronomers believed that the stars were attached to a dome or shell surrounding the planets. Digges shattered that illusion by observing the stars through a telescope some thirty years before Galileo. As a Parliamentarian and man of affairs, he was responsible for the reconstruction of Dover Harbor, the largest public works project during the Elizabethan era, and he served as Muster-Master General for the British Expeditionary forces assisting the Dutch in their war of independence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669826477

Charles L. Ladner

Charles L. Ladner is a retired financial executive. He was the Chief Financial Officer of a major international energy company for 25 years, and a Director and Chair of one of one of America’s largest mutual fund complexes for 32 years. In addition he serves on the boards of several educational and charitable organizations. A graduate of Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies (Great Books), he also holds advanced degrees from Columbia (MBA), and Villanova (MA).

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Copyright © 2022 by Charles L. Ladner.

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Rev. date: 09/06/2022

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THIS DARK STAR

The title of this book is an expression frequently used by Thomas Digges to refer to the planet Earth. At one point, he uses it in a somewhat pensive manner when he refers to the planet Earth as this Dark Star wherein we live and locates it within the orbit of the Moon, which he will call the Globe of Mortality. He likely got these terms from the Italian poet Palingenius, whose works in translation were popular among Elizabethan schoolboys.

I use this term to title my book because, as much as anything, the scientific revolution, and its initial thrust, the Copernican heliocentric theory, is about rethinking the laws and order of the universe, displacing Earth from its position of prominence at the center and replacing it with the sun. In this new model, Earth becomes no different from any other planet. It is a dark body receiving its celestial visibility only as reflected light from the sun. Moreover, Earth is no longer the center of metaphysical existence, and it is no longer the celestial body superior to all others, as both Aristotelian philosophy and Christian scripture would have one believe. To the Renaissance mind, such a proposition was nearly inconceivable; it was a concept bordering on the heretical.

Thomas Digges, the subject of this book, was the initial popularizer of the Copernican theory in England, and he added to it the notion of an infinite universe, which further diminished the astronomical and theological stature of Earth, reducing it to celestial obscurity. After Copernicus and Digges, Earth is now rightly called this Dark Star.

CONTENTS

List of Exhibits

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1   The Scientific Revolution

Copernicus

Thomas Digges

Tycho Brahe

Johannes Kepler

Galileo Galilei

Isaac Newton

Chapter 2   Creative Destruction: Revolution or Liberation?

Chapter 3   London in the Elizabethan Era

Chapter 4   Leonard Digges

Wyatt’s Rebellion

A Prognostication of Right Good Effect

Invention of the Telescope

Chapter 5   Thomas Digges’s Early Years, 1546–1571

Effect of Wyatt’s Rebellion on Young Thomas Digges

Education of Thomas, Death of Leonard

Chapter 6   Thomas Digges’s Scholarly And Scientific Years, 1571–1574

Pantometria

The New Star—Stella Novus

Alae seu Scalae Mathematicae (On the Wings of Mathematics)

Chapter 7   Thomas Digges’s Greatest Work, A Perfit Description Of The Caelestiall Orbes, 1576

A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes

Verification by Direct Observation Using a Telescope

Thomas Digges’s Contributions to the New Paradigm

Chapter 8   The Curious Connection Between Thomas Digges’s Family And William Shakespeare

Chapter 9   Thomas Digges: Man Of Affairs, 1572–1586

The Empiricist

The Establishment’s Mathematician

Parliament

Chapter 10   Dover Harbor And War In The Low Countries, 1584–1595

Dover Harbor

The English Expeditionary Force in Support of the Protestant Rebellion in the Low Countries

A Consummate Empiricist

Appendix

England

America: Virginia

America: Maryland

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

LIST OF EXHIBITS

Exhibit I. The active periods in the lives of the key contributors to the early scientific revolution starting at age twenty, and indicating the published dates of their principal contributions.

Exhibit II. Thomas Digges’s model of the Copernican universe, 1576.

Exhibit III. Drawings of the moon from the first edition of Sidereus Nuncius, 1610, Galileo Galilei.

Exhibit IV. Timeline of Leonard and Thomas Digges.

Exhibit V. Digges’s line drawing: a triumph of communication.

Exhibit VI. The line of descent from Thomas Digges to Daniel Carroll, signer of the United States Constitution, member of the United States Congress, and commissioner for the design and construction of Washington, DC.

Exhibit VII. The line of descent from Thomas Digges to Archbishop John Carroll, the first primate of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.

Exhibit VIII. The line of descent from Thomas Digges to Benjamin Young, (brother of Notley Young original landowner of parts of Washington D.C.), the person through whom Diane Paul Ladner is descended from Thomas Digges.

Exhibit IX. A map showing tracts of land in Prince George’s County, Maryland, conveyed for the federal city, and ownership of the land on June 28 and 29, 1791: when the first trust deeds were signed. Land owned by descendants of Thomas Digges was known as Cerne Abbey Manor. It is the site of the United States Capitol. This map was researched and compiled by Priscilla W. McNeil, and Don. A. Hawkins, consultant. Courtesy of Thomas Jefferson McNeil.

PREFACE

My purpose in writing this book is to introduce the Elizabethan mathematician Thomas Digges to a wider audience—one that extends beyond the professionals in the fields of astronomy and the history of science. Digges was an important figure in advancing the developmental flow and the acceptance of the new sciences of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an evolution in the logic of science commonly referred to as the scientific revolution. He was the first Englishman, and among the few anywhere, to accept the heliocentric ideas of Nicholas Copernicus. He was the first to translate from Latin to English large portions of Copernicus’s great work, De Revolutionibus. He was the first to use a telescope for astronomical observation, thirty years before Galileo. And in a bold leap of creativity, he was the first to understand and publicize the concept of an infinite universe with innumerable stars randomly distributed through space and not tacked to a solid sphere.¹ He thus anticipated Giordano Bruno by about eight years.

Then drawing on his insights regarding the infinity of space populated by a countless number of stars, he asked the question, Why, then, is the sky dark at night and not fully illuminated by all these stars? This is a riddle known as Olbers’ Paradox, and its full solution still escapes astronomers.

Finally, unlike the better known scholars of his era, such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler, Digges wrote not in Latin, but like Galileo in his later works, he wrote in the vernacular, accessible to all classes and not just to the academic community. While this practice diminished the transmission of his findings within the Latin-speaking scientific community, it clearly served to popularize throughout England’s highly literate population the notion that not only did Earth move and rotate but also that the sun, and not Earth, lay at the center of the known universe—a proposition that by the early seventeenth century became common knowledge in England well before it spread to the wider population of the continent. This, I would propose, was critical to the success of the new sciences because it paved the way for easy and rapid acceptance of Newton’s theories of motion and gravity, which were the capstone of the scientific revolution.

Yet, despite these realities, it wasn’t until 1934 when Francis Johnson and Sanford Larkey (assisted by Edwin Hubble) published Thomas Digges and the Copernican System and the Idea of the Infinity of the Universe, in the Huntington Library Bulletin, that his work became known to the academic community. But even then, three landmark histories of the scientific revolution, written by Herbert Butterfield, A. R. Hall, and Alexandre Koyre, all published in the late 1950s, barely mention Digges.² Hall accords him a single sentence. Butterfield mentions him not at all, and while Koyre gives him several pages, he dismisses his accomplishments in favor of Giordano Bruno, who published eight years after Digges. However, in the 1990s and in the early years of this century, numerous journal articles and dissertations making generous mention of Thomas Digges have appeared. But, notwithstanding this recent attention to Digges and to his scientific accomplishments, there is yet to appear a book-length biographical study of Thomas Digges. This volume is the first and only such book to do so.

In this book, I put forward two interpretations of Thomas Digges’s work not commonly found in the literature. The first is an assertion that Digges arrived at his idea of an infinite universe by direct observation using a telescope, or more properly a telescope-like instrument that he called proportional glasses. I hold this position despite the fact that nowhere in his discussion of the infinite universe does he make any mention of his use of such an instrument. My position is grounded first in pure logic as explained in chapters 4 and 7; and, second, on the reference he makes in the beginning of his 1579 publication of a book named Stratioticos, wherein he lists upcoming books under the heading Books Begun by the Author Hereafter to Be Published, he includes the following:

Commentaries upon the Revolutions of Copernicus, by evident demonstrations grounded upon late Observations to ratify and confirm his Theories and Hypotheses . . .³

Although this book was never published, the intent is clear. Digges unequivocally states that he used direct observations to ratify and confirm Copernicus’s theories. This, it seems to me, is ample though indirect evidence that he relied on his proportional glasses to observe the stars and, coupled with the argument presented in chapters 4 and 7, should make a plausible case.

The second novel interpretation is the notion that Digges’s greatest contribution was the popularization of the heliocentric theory throughout all classes of English society, which he achieved first by writing in the vernacular and, second, and more critically, by creating a simple diagram of the universe that communicated his ideas with a clarity that compels assent. This is discussed in chapter 7.

Finally I should like to draw the reader’s attention to my placement of Thomas Digges among the luminaries commonly associated with the Scientific Revolution. This may be the first time anyone has been so presumptuous to elevate Digges stature in such way. However, in terms of influencing the eventual outcome of the Scientific Revolution (including the emergence of industrialization in England well in advance of the other European powers), I would maintain that Digges contribution, as spelled-out in this book, was on par with those of Copernicus, Keppler and Galileo; and certainly greater than Tycho Brahe who was little more than an astronomical bookkeeper so lacking in creative imagination that he could never get beyond Aristotle’s earth centered universe. Digges singular contribution was to liberate not just England’s intelligentsia, but more critically, it’s general population from the limitations of obsolete science; thus opening the doors of innovation which would become the wellspring of England’s political, military and industrial world leadership in the years to come.

INTRODUCTION

Recently, there have been rumors of a Polish cleric by the name of Copernicus who has proposed a new theory of the universe with the sun at the center and Earth and the planets revolving around it. Evidently, some people are giving credence to such foolishness. It is puzzling that, contrary to all current science, there still are well-informed people who are so easily diverted from the truth. But they cannot possibly be people of culture and education. They can be only those ignorant of the principles of physics and astronomy.

There is no mystery here. We have always known that Earth is at the center of the universe, for in the book of Genesis, we are given the order of creation and the placement of the waters, the earth, and the planets and stars. Moreover, science has confirmed (though it needs no confirmation) what God has revealed—namely, the exact timing and path of the lunar and planetary revolutions around Earth. This in the form of the most learned text of Claudius Ptolemy, commonly called Almagest.

But now, with the full recovery and translation of the works of Aristotle, we have even further proof from the science of physics to add to the Ptolemaic astronomy, a fully complementary body of evidence that not only makes our natural science perfect but also, even more critically, demonstrates the unity of all knowledge under God.

Like a jigsaw puzzle, everything fits perfectly. God’s plan is so ideal, so flawless, and so beautiful in contemplation that one is stunned almost to the level of spiritual ecstasy by its symmetry and perfection. Here, in summary form, are the main points.

• The world (Earth) is the center of the universe; it is spherical in shape.

• The universe comprises two vast spherical layers of space.

• The first layer, the terrestrial region, which included Earth, extends upward to the lunar orbit. It is characterized by change, corruption, transition, and flux.

• The second layer, the celestial region, is the province occupied by the moon, the planets, and the stars. It is a region without change and without corruption. It is the region of near perfection.

• The moon and the planets are each placed within individual crystalline spheres that rotate eternally around the world at fixed rates. All movement in the celestial region can be only in perfect circles. It is axiomatic that no movement within the celestial region can be in a straight line or elliptical form, because the movement of a heavenly body must be in conformity to its nature, which is eternal with no beginning or ending, as is a circle, which has neither a beginning nor an ending.

• The stars, which never move, are located on a spherical shell constituting the outer boundary of the celestial region.

• Beyond the stars is the sphere of the prime mover, and beyond that, as we Christian’s know, is the empyrean, the heavenly abode, the location of God and his angels.

• Within the terrestrial region, all matter is composed of varying mixtures of the four fundamental elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Everything that exists is a composition of these four elements.

• It is the fundamental property of these elements to move toward their natural place. Therefore, to the degree that the heavier elements (earth and water) are dominant in an object, it will move or fall to the center of the universe. Thus, the world is made of earth, the heaviest element, with the next heaviest element, water, tending to remain, in accordance with its nature, mostly in a concentric shell surrounding the earth. Next comes the air, whose natural place is surrounding the water, and, finally, the lightest element, fire, rises through the air.

• However, we know that matter within the terrestrial region, comprising mixtures of earth, water, air, and fire, is subject to change and corruption; while, on the other hand, in the celestial region, which is unchanging and incorruptible, the four elements do not exist. Rather, there is a fifth incorruptible and permanent element called aether, out of which the celestial spheres are composed.

• And so we can see the divine schematic of the entire universe as a beautiful hierarchy of being, rising from the changing and corruptible base of earth upward in uniform stages through the unchanging, incorruptible firmament, onward to the perfection of the heavenly abode beyond the stars.

All these things we know with certainty. How could this Copernicus be asserting anything different?

I f I were living in the mid-sixteenth century and writing a book on the current status of astronomy, this is about how I might have introduced the subject. What I have presented is largely the formulation outlined by Aristotle (384–322 BC) in the fourth century BC, only slightly modified later by scholars like Ptolemy of Alexandria in the