65: 3. From Newtonian Physics to Canals: Projecting Life onto Mars. Matthew Shindell discusses how the shift from ancient cosmology to modern science was a slow process, with figures like Galileo and Newton developing new observations and physics. Enlightenme

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 8 November 2025

⏱️ 14 minutes

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3. From Newtonian Physics to Canals: Projecting Life onto Mars. Matthew Shindell discusses how the shift from ancient cosmology to modern science was a slow process, with figures like Galileo and Newton developing new observations and physics. Enlightenment thinkers, including Buffon and Laplace, began searching for a natural (rather than divine) origin for the solar system, establishing that the planets are related and obey universal laws. This led to speculation about life elsewhere. Astronomer William Herschel believed that all planets, especially the Earth-like Mars, were likely inhabited, as it was common Enlightenment belief that God would not create empty space. By the late 19th century, Richard Proctor and Giovanni Schiaparelli intensified focus on Mars. American astronomer Percival Lowell popularized the idea of Martian "canals" and interpreted Mars as a glimpse into Earth's eventual desert-like future. This vision influenced authors like H.G. Wells, who used the idea of alien Martian invaders in War of the Worlds as a satire of the British Empire's destructive colonial actions.
1960

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0:00.0	This is CBSI on the world.
0:02.4	I'm John Batchel with Matthew Shindell, the space historian curator at the Smithsonian National
0:11.8	Air and Space Museum, a really cool job, and the book is really cool.
0:16.3	For the Love of Mars, it's about human history and the Martian planet, projections, interpretations, and now
0:24.3	science. Matt Descartes died 1650. Christian Huygens, Giovanni Cassini, died 1712. Isaac Newton
0:34.4	died 1726. These men, Leonard Hewler of all physics, these men put together what we
0:43.8	understand to be science, following Galileo's groundbreaking martyrdom to what he saw through the
0:52.1	telescope. All of this is going on simultaneously with them inheriting the old world.
0:57.9	Were they seen as rebellious of the ancients when they provided these interpretations
1:04.3	of observation and mathematics?
1:07.9	I think yes and no, right?
1:10.0	Galileo didn't see himself necessarily as being rebellious. He thought he was still working within that same tradition, but trying to modernize it based on, you know, new observations, new mathematics. Now, I don't want to try to get too deep into what Galileo really thought he was doing, but at least this is the way that he would describe it in letters that he wrote to his patrons. And, you know, Galileo's observations of the moon certainly gave people a reason to think that there was something different going on in the heavens
1:45.6	than what they had, you know, inherited from Aristotle.
1:51.2	And there did seem to be the need for some new ways of thinking about the solar system.
2:00.0	But the truth is that, you know, there were multiple
2:04.4	models of the universe kind of circulating at that time, each kind of not seeming perfect,
2:12.2	right, not being the obvious choice for what was happening. You had the old Aristotelian model or the Ptolemaic model with the Earth at the center.
2:22.3	You then had Tycho Brahe's model where you had the Earth at the center,
2:28.3	but everything else but the moon orbiting around the sun.
2:32.8	And then finally, you had this Copernican model,
2:35.5	which was great mathematically, but it still didn't really line up perfectly with observation.
2:43.2	So, you know, we have this period during what we call the scientific revolution, where there's
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