Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

This year is very important in both physics and astronomy. Four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei improved the magnifying power of the existing telescopes by ten times, and started looking at the the sky. He did this using the glass technology available from the Murano Island in Venice. Even these days, Murano is well known for its crystal products.

At that time, he worked for the army's intelligence unit, and earned a life-time income. He then became a professor at the University of Padua. While there, he became interested in proving the earth was moving around the sun.

Galilei of course got this heliocentric concept from Copernicus, but not many people know that Copernicus was a student in Italy. He even got his degree from the University of Padua.

Copernicus was born in Torun, Poland. His parents came from Krakow and were rich, but they died when he was very young. His maternal uncle took care of him, and financed his education.

Copernicus studied at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He was under a strong family pressure to become a Catholic priest. He indeed rose to the rank of canon in the church hierarchy, but his real interest was in astronomy.

Copernicus then went to Italy and studied medicine and law in Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara. During his time in Italy, astrology was a required subject for medical science. Copernicus studied the ideas of Cicero and Plato on the structure of the universe while studying medicine in Padua.

He went back to Poland in 1503 to work for his uncle who was an influential man in Heilsberg, and then settled down at the town of Frombork in 1510. He died there in 1943.

While in Frombork for 33 years, Copernicus was a politician, general, medical doctor, economist, and a canonical lawyer, But his main interest was his heliocentric view of the universe. Unlike Galileo Galilei, he was very careful about what he said. His style was to say as much as possible but not to upset others, particularly the church.

I became interested in his style of writing when the chairman of my department in 1979 told me my papers are very difficult to read, because they are written in the way Copernicus tried to avoid inquisition. He said this out of frustration, but I was highly flattered. What he said was true. Indeed, my papers were all modified to satisfy the referees. Those referees are not as powerful as the pope, but all of them have the herod complex. I cannot complain too much about them because I also have my herod complex.

In 1994, I made my first trip to Warsaw, and the first place place was the statue of Copernicus near the campus of the University of Warsaw and the Church of Holy Cross. I was also fascinated to see Chopin's heart entombed on the wall of this church.

I used to think Krakow is the place to study about Copernicus. I went there several times and brought back many photos from there. See

• photos from Krakow.

but the Copernicus statue at the campus of Jagiellonian University is embarrassingly small. Indeed, it was not until I started making this webapge that I found out his operational base was the town of Frombork on the Vistula Lagoon.

I have never been to Frombark, but I visited another important city on the Vistula Lagoon. On the northeastern corner of this Lagoon, there is the Russian city of Kaliningrad, which before 1945, was the East Prussian city of Koeningsberg. In 2005, I went to the Russian city of Kaliningrad to see how Immanuel Kant was able to formulate his philosophy based on the geographical of his area including of course the Lagoon. Kant was of course Einstein's philosopher. I brought back

• many photos from Kaliningrad.

In addition, Hermann Minkowski and Arnold Sommerfeld studied at the Univ. of Koenigsberg. Sommerfeld was also a great teacher. His doctoral and post-doctoral students include Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Peter Debye, Hans Bethe, and just about everybody in that generation. Indeed, Arnold Sommerfeld was the one who translated the wisdom of Koenigsberg into modern physics. If we include Copernicus, the Koenigsberg wisdom came from the Holy Lagoon of Vistula. I should visit the Lagoon from the Poland side and get the full blessing.

Look at the map of the Lagoon. It geography is strikingly similar to that of Venice with its own lagoon. It was Galilei's research base. I visited Galilei's house in Padua last summer in order to get his blessing. Padua is a major city in Venice's hinterland. This greater Venice area is called "Veneto" and has a very rich history. It is exciting to compare the geography/history of this area with that of the Vistula Lagoon is exciting, but let me stop here. I have been to the Venice/Veneto area several times and maintain the webpage entitled

• Galileo, Padua, and Italian Architecture.

The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia serves as one of the important scientific resources for Amerians. This year, the Institute is hosting an exhibition on Galileo and Medcici. Philadelphia is about 200 km from my house. I was going to go to the exhibition before making this webpage, but I was too busy. What Americans will learn from the exhibit is that Galileo had a strong backing from the powerful Medici family when he was advocating his heliocentric view of the worl. I knew this before, and here is my webpage on this subject,

• Galileo's Florence.

The Medici clan in Florence was very generous to Renaissance artists, and the entire city of Florence is an art museum these days. The Medici family also had a foresight in science. They invited Galileo Galilei to their city and provided all necessary supports. The Medici Clan at that time also had a very strong power against the papal authority. This is the reason why Galileo was able to put up the fight that changed the world. What Galileo did in the past is well known.

The question is whether Galileo is a relevant issue these days. We are now in the Lorentzian world. Maxwell's equations are Lorentz-covariant. High-energy particles from cosmic rays or accelerators all obey Einstein's equation for formula for energy and momentum. However, the transition from the Galilei system to the Lorentz-covariant system is not completely understood.

We routinely say that the Lorentz transformation becomes a Galilei transformation in the low-speed limit. However, this kinematical transformation was carried out systematically by Inonu and Wigner in 1953. They formulated the mathematical procedure called "Group Contraction" to deal with this problem. We can obtain the Galilean group by contracting the Lorentz group. I am fortunate enough to have a copy of a review article Erdal Inonu wrote in 1998. Here is

Erdal's father,Ismet Inonu, who was the president of from 1938 to 1950. During World War II, he kept Turkey out of the war. When his party lost in the general election, Inonu carried out the first peaceful transition of power in Turkey. He remained active in Turkish politics until his death in 1973.

While his father was the president, Erdal Inonu went to Caltech to get his PhD degree. He then went to Princeton to work with Eugene Wigner. At that time, many of Wigner's papers were written in German, and Erdal Inonu was able to make Wigner happy. In 1953, Inonu and Wigner published their history-making paper on group contractions.

• Inonu's review paper of 1997.

Whenever I go to Turkey these days, I bring with me my photo with Erdal Wigner and Nokolaj Gromov, and show it to the people whenever appropriate to get VIP treatment. When I dined at the Hotel Marmara restaurant in 2008, I showed my Inonu photo to my waiter. He called all of his colleagues to come to have this photo.

What did I do to make Erdal Inonu happy? In 1939, Wigner published his paper on the little groups of the Lorentz group which dictate the internal space-time symmetry of elementary particles. From 1985 to 1990, I worked with Wigner to combine his 1939 paper and his 1953 paper with Inonu on group contractions. Wigner was very sharp in 1985, but he was showing a sign of his age toward 1990. I was fortunate enough to publish the paper on

• Space-time Geometry of Relativistic Particles.

In spite of what I said above, the most important issue is how to move quantum mechanics from the Galilean world to the Lorentz-covariant system. Here we have to deal with waves. For running waves, we know how to do, and we have Feynman diagrams. However, for standing waves, we have to worry about boundary conditions. Do you know how to Lorentz-transform boundary conditions while space and time variables are linearly mixed? This has been my lifetime job since 1965, while the rest of the world did not know. I took the Copernicus approach in carrying out my research.

• My latest story on Standing Waves.

Y.S. Kim (2009,6.15)

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