Copernicus and Bologna

On 6 January 1497, paying nine grossetti for the privilege, a young Pole registered for an academic place at the University of Bologna, signing himself ‘Dominus Nicolaus Kopperlingk de Thorn’. After six years spent studying in Italy – in Bologna, Padua, Rome and Ferrara – Copernicus (as he came to be known) returned to Poland and devoted the rest of his life to developing a new model of the universe. He would become there the author of a book explaining that new conception – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) – one of the most important works in the history of humanity. Thanks to his book, this species of little creatures living on a marginal planet, of a peripheral star, in one of the billions of galaxies in the cosmos, realizes for the first time, with utter astonishment, that they are not the centre of the universe.

What role did the years spent at an Italian university have, in preparing Copernicus to make this fundamental step-change to our civilization?

I think that the answer is twofold. Copernicus discovered two treasures in Italy. First, he discovered the books that contained, as in a casket, the knowledge accumulated by humankind. He found Ptolemy’s Almagest and the Elements of Euclid, works that summarized the best of the great astronomical and mathematical knowledge of antiquity. He found Italian astronomers such as Domenico Maria Novara, with whom he became very close, who knew how to understand such texts and introduced them to him. He learned Greek and had access to the texts where he probably encountered the heliocentric ideas of Aristarchus; and to the Arabic manuscripts where he was able to study those attempts to retouch the Ptolemaic astronomical system that had been made for a millennium.

But this rich cultural legacy had been available for many centuries. It was available to Indian, Persian, Arabic and Byzantine astronomers, who all had recourse to it. Yet none of them knew how to use such a legacy to understand the crux of the matter: that we do not live at the centre of the universe. Copernicus must have had something else, something extra available to him that enabled this great leap. What was it?

The years that Copernicus spends in Italy include those in which the twenty-three-year-old Michelangelo sculpts his Pietà and Leonardo da Vinci tests his flying machines and paints his Last Supper. The new, luminous cultural fervour of that Italian humanism which ushers in the Renaissance was stirring in the Italian universities, and in courts such as that of Lorenzo de Medici, where voices were sounding that would have been unthinkable just a short time ago: ‘How beautiful youth is, how nonetheless fleeting! Let anyone seeking happiness enjoy it: tomorrow brings nothing but uncertainty …’ Research into ancient texts and the rediscovery of the knowledge of the past – the obsession of humanists – was being propelled by a burning desire to innovate a new future entirely different from the present.

Petrarch had begun the previous century by writing that: ‘The works of the past are like the flowers from which bees collect nectar to make honey.’ And the honey was really starting to flow in Italy at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The spirit of the time constituted a profound opening on to the radically new, as can be seen in the art of the period. It was nothing less than a faith in an alternative world, far different from the structured and hierarchical mental universe of the Middle Ages. Intellectual freedom, courage in pursuing and upholding individual ideas, rebellion against the grand, rigid systems of medieval thought: this spirit of innovation, this deep-seated revolt against given circumstances is the second great intellectual resource that Copernicus was about to partake of when he paid his nine grossetti to enroll at the University of Bologna. He doesn’t just find Euclid, Ptolemy and Aristotle in Italy: he also finds the idea that their great knowledge can be revolutionized.

I believe that this two-fold experience is what a great university can offer to all of us.

For me, my time at Bologna involved the discovery of extraordinary ideas and texts, such as the works of Einstein, or Paul Dirac’s seminal book The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, the fundamental work on the subject. I came across the latter because my professor of applied mathematics, Guido Fano, assigned to me a study of the application of group theory to quantum mechanics, an area of physics that I knew nothing about. And so I began to research it – experiencing a fascination with the subject that would continue for the rest of my life. This intellectual richness, discovered in Bologna, turned out to be utterly crucial for me.

But I also found something else in Bologna, when I studied there in the seventies: an encounter with that spirit of my generation, a generation that was intent on changing everything, that dreamed of inventing new ways of thinking, of living together and of loving. The university was occupied for several months by politically engaged students. I got involved with the friends of Radio Alice, the independent radio station that had become the voice of the student revolt. In the houses we were sharing, we nourished the adolescent dream of starting from zero, of remaking the world from scratch, of reshaping it into something different and more just. A naïve enough dream, no doubt, always destined to encounter the inertia of the quotidian; always likely to suffer great disappointment. But it was the same dream that Copernicus had encountered in Italy at the beginning of the Renaissance. The dream not only of Leonardo and of Einstein but also of Robespierre, Gandhi and Washington: absolute dreams that often catapult us against a wall, that are frequently misdirected – but without which we would have none of what is best in our world today.

What can the university offer us now? It can offer the same riches that Copernicus found: the accumulated knowledge of the past, together with the liberating idea that knowledge can be transformed and become transformative. This, I believe, is the true significance of a university. It is the treasure-house in which human knowledge is devotedly protected, it provides the lifeblood on which everything that we know in the world depends, and everything that we want to do. But it is also the place where dreams are nurtured: where we have the youthful courage to question that very knowledge, in order to go forward, in order to change the world.