Smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenuguttaurias

Familiar with this word? It is not in daily use. In case it helps, it might be one or maybe two words – its creator was  unsure and wrote it two different ways.

It is in fact a very important word. It is neither doggerel nor cantrip but the announcement of a major scientific discovery. Smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenuguttaurias changed the world.

The creator of Smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenuguttaurias was Galileo, here seen in the Robusti portrait of around 1606. Galileo penned the word a few years after this in the momentous summer of 1610, after the publication of his Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuntius). His word spread to Prague, where it was received by Johanned Kepler. It also reached England, where Thomas Harriot was, like Galileo, looking at the sky through an improved telescope.

Kepler was not an observational astronomer – his sight was too poor, the effect of childhood smallpox – but Harriot was, and produced lunar maps much finer than Galileo’s. As JL Heilbron observes, ‘As a mathematician both pure and applied Harriot was Galileo's superior. If he had published his discoveries and theories instead of leaving them scattered through 10,000 pages of manuscript, he would have driven Galileo crazy, for he anticipated much of Galileo's mechanics... and explored the heavens almost as fruitfully as Galileo did.’

But Harriot was not a cryptographer. Kepler might have had more of a chance. He had, after all, been making sense of the voluminous observations of Tycho Brahe that were eventually to explain the orbits of the planets. Did he have any chance with Galileo’s code? Do we?

Maybe it would have been fair to start with an easier one. Here is another important announcement made by Galileo: Haec immature a me iam frustra leguntur oy.

In case your Latin is not up to it,  a literal translation might be I am now bringing these immature things together in vain, oy.

Clear? For those who know their Latin anagrams, it is in truth just possible to unravel this one, although nobody did. Kepler tried at least eight times to work out the anagram, but not one of his attempts got anywhere near the answer. Galileo only revealed the solution at the demand of the Holy Roman Emperor.

His answer was Cynthia figures aemulatur mater amorem, in English translation The mother of love emulates the shape of Cynthia.

Once we remember that The mother of love is a poetic way of talking about the planet Venus and that Cynthia was a name attached to the Moon, we realise, with a sigh, that Galileo was announcing that he had seen phases of Venus, which are similar to those of the Moon, through his telescope.

The Latin puzzle, then, concealed a prize. Detecting the phases of Venus demonstrated by observation what ancient astronomers had suspected, that Venus and Mercury, the so-called inferior planets, orbited the Sun.

That discovery went some way towards resolving the central question with which all astronomers of Galileo’s time were concerned – was the Earth in motion too?

Copernicus had claimed that the Earth was a planet also in orbit around the Sun. Others had said this before him, and Copernicus presented his argument as an appeal to ancient witnesses, but the evidence in favour faced twin opponents, firstly common sense –the Earth does not feel as if it is moving under our feet – and secondly authority, that of Aristotle and much of the astronomical tradition. The phases of Venus were indicative, but they did not prove the case.

 

 

 

What about Smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenuguttaurias? It is a harder puzzle. Harriot made many attempts and they are still there in his British Library papers. He divided the word in different ways, always without success. This kind of anagram-play was part of the intelligent culture of the time - Nicolaus Reusnerus’ popular Anagrammatographia of 1602 contains 682 pages of them in nine books and the English William Cheeke wrote Anagrammata et chron-anagrammata regia in1613. Kepler thought that it contained new insights into Mars, but that was the wrong planet altogether. Galileo was in fact talking about Saturn, and was using his crazy word to tell the world Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi.

Let’s see if we can pick a meaning out of the answer, if not the clue. Saturn was the most distant planet known to Galileo's world – the discovery of Uranus belongs to the somewhat less convoluted time of William Herschel – so the highest (altissimum) planet is Saturn. Ok. Observavi is merely I have observed, observo being a Latin verb that behaves pleasingly like amo, the first verb one learns. What about tergeminum? It means three-formed.

I have seen Saturn three-formed. What is Galileo talking about?

He has observed the planet’s rings.

So we get to the end of the mystery . Obscurely, almost occultly, Galileo is announcing that he has observed what remains one of the great, most beautiful sights in all astronomy.

Why did Galileo work like this? Why not tell people clearly what he had seen?

In part, I think, because it was the style of the day. The manipulation of letters and numbers to reveal a hidden truth was linked to older habits of religious word manipulations that claimed to reveal a higher knowledge of the universe. Galileo may have been using this tradition and also mocking it. Solving anagrams was a passtime of polite society. 'For Ladies,' one English author suggets, 'neither bringing them any great payne nor any great losse unlesse it be of idle time.' It was a bit of fun.

But also because he could. Galileo did not work alone, but he was skilled at ensuring that shared discoveries became his own announcements. Smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenuguttaurias represents a way of controlling the dissemination of information. Only Galileo could provide the key. This was not particularly about fear - at the time of these pronouncements, Galileo was not facing much enmity save jealousy. He had not certainly identified his discoveries with the Copernican system. So he was hiding what he found because that way it remained his.

And it has to be said - the strategy worked. Smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenuguttaurias, the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter have ensured for Galileo a scientific immortality.

Comments

[Niko Holmen]

I have to say, while looking through hundreds of blogs daily, the theme of this blog is different (for all the proper reasons). If you do not mind me asking, what's the name of this theme or would it be a especially designed affair? It's significantly better compared to the themes I use for some of my blogs.

[sac chanel]

Me encanta tu artículo. Se me puede ayudar un montón de información útil. Esperamos ver más palabras en él. Creo que le gustaría ver.