Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (15 page)

He stoops to pluck a stone from the lane and, hefting it, tries to
feel
its eastward motion. But he cannot, any more than a man on a ship can feel the vessel's forward motion by placing his hand to the deck. He and the stone are both moving with the same speed and in the same direction. He sighs, deciding that there is no way to demonstrate the proposition by the senses alone. If he were affixed to the orb of the stars and looked down upon the earth, the earth would appear to turn; even as he, affixed to the earth and looking up, sees the heavens turn.

Perhaps he could
make
an experience by "artful vexation of nature." An
experientia facta est
, to coin a phrase. A "fact."

Suddenly exuberant, Nicole hurls the stone high in the air. It comes down, not many leagues westward, but atop the awning of Schmuel the silversmith directly beside him. Schmuel rises from his bench cursing in his outlandish tongue and Nicole laughs and scampers off.

Fernand delivers the water clock to the university precincts the next day. The apprentices wrestle it from the cart to the courtyard that the Rector has chosen for the contrived experience. The carpenters' hammers compete with clockmakers' shouts as they position the device beside the ramp. Curious scholars have formed a circle around the group, laughing and pointing, until the Rector wonders aloud whether the regent masters are waiting to start the
lectiones ordinaria
. Half the regents are themselves in the gawking crowd, but scholars and masters quickly disperse.

Heytesbury arrives and views the large basin with awe. "Why, 'tis a
tunne-dish
, i'sooth!" he cries in his own outlandish tongue. "It must hold four
hogs' heads
!"

No one knows what he means and, when it is translated, one of the workmen bristles. "This ain't no slaughter-bucket, begging your pardon, sir! Hogs ain't in it." But the Englishman explains that a hog's head is a measure of volume used in his country and this both placates the men and amuses them with the queer notions of foreigners.

"Explain it to me again," Buridan asks his guest. As a physicist, he is unaccustomed to instruments and making measurements. "The weight of the water is a surrogate for the passage of time?"

"Yes, yes!" Heytesbury exclaims. "That is why master Fernand made the basin so great. Is that not right, my good man?" he cries to the horologist, who has learned to ignore the whirlwind. "As the water in a basin diminishes," he continues to his host, "so too does the weight pushing the water through the orifice; but with so large a reservoir of the water, the press does not sensibly diminish before it can be replenished. Hence, the water will issue forth with a uniform motion, and in equal increments of time we will obtain equal increments of water. As the rolling balls attain each of the distances marked on the inclined plane, we will accumulate the water in a flask, determine its weight, and so approximate the time. Hah! It is really quite pretty!"

Buridan nods. "But yes, I follow your reasoning, but it seems . . . distanced from the direct experience."

"No more than a rule distances the carpenter from the length of his wood."

Fernand shows them the five
faucettes
he has fixed to the basin and instructs them in their use. "First, turn the master faucet," he tells them. "That will start the flow of water down all five channels and begin filling all five flasks. When your ball reaches the first mark, close the first faucet; at the second mark, the second faucet; and so on." He instructs them soberly. Privately, he thinks them mad.

The Englishman tilts his head back. "And what are those contrivances perched atop your basin? Metal birds, what?"

Fernand stands taller. "But I am a master clockmaker, my sir, not a base metalworker. There must be bells and whistles to mark the times! It would shame me to give any less. As the water drains from the basin, the water in—you see that tall thin column? Yes. The water in that column will drop more rapidly, and a float dropping with it will, at the most minute intervals, cause the chirping of the bird." He doubts that anyone other than scholars would ever need such minute times, but the challenge has given him a curious satisfaction. And, who knows? Were he to offer such a feature on his clocks . . .

Heytesbury laughs in delight. "Well done, master clocksman!"

The man shakes his head. "But, my sir, if only you saw the true clocks I have made!" He tugs his forelock and turns again to admonishing the clumsiness of his apprentices.

Nicole and Albrecht arrive, the Saxon flourishing a metal rule—a mason's rod that he has "borrowed" from the nearby construction site. It is a "rule of thumb," with tics in the metal at intervals of one thumb's-length, or
uncias
. "Nicole and I thought to mark the ramp at equal intervals of one shoe—how do you say it?"

"Pied," says Buridan.

"Foot," says Heytesbury. "But be certain to make an especially heavy mark," the Englishman continues, "at the doubling points: one, two, four, eight, sixteen, and so forth. If the mathematics is true, our sphere will reach each of those marks at equal intervals. Oh, had Abbot Richard but lived to see this!" And he hurries off to give unsolicited advice to the workmen.

Will the ramp and basin never be done? The carpenters work their levels and hang their plumbs and hammer wedges into the ramp to ensure its evenness. Water is hauled in buckets from the well and poured into the basin. Some tent canvas is produced to shield the basin from debris that might clog the channels. There is always one more task wanting. Buridan feels at times like Achilles chasing his tortoise: coming incrementally ever nearer without ever quite attaining the end.

So, perhaps there is no last moment of activity; but there is a first moment at which all stands finished.

Georges the carpenter has added a touch of his own. The lever that releases the ball to roll down the rails will also turn the master faucet. Watered by silver, his earlier skepticism has flowered into delighted cynicism. He has suggested a number of improvements to the device, each at an additional cost.

Fernand insists on proving the water flow. "I know she's not a clock, rightly speaking," the man says, "but 'tis what we always do before I place my hallmark. A good clock, the water must flow equally at all times; so we will let the water flow through all five faucets for the same duration. Then you may weigh the flasks to ensure that the same weight of water has issued from each. If not, I have shims to adjust any that are off."

The "calibration" proof is performed and Fernand adjusts nozzles two and five and soon all is in balance. The clockmaker surveys his handiwork, much as God is said to have done after His six days' labor. "This has surely been the most peculiar instrument I have ever made!" Then from his workman's pouch he extracts a metal die and a sledgehammer and with these instruments strikes the mark of his guildhall into the basin.

Buridan has seen such marks in passing his whole life. Perhaps he has even seen them being struck. But he has never seen it done after reading Philoponus, and it is as if he has never seen it before in his life. He grabs the clockmaker's wrist and pries the die from the man's astonished grasp.

"The die is reverso," he says, studying its face.

"Surely!" Fernand snatches his precious hallmark from the Rector and returns it to his pouch. "Otherwise, the hallmark would be backward. We can't have that!"

"What if . . ."

What if
. . . Scholars have been accustomed to reasoning
secundo imaginationem
ever since the condemnation of certain propositions of Aristotle more than fifty years before. "What if you made one of these for each letter of the alphabet? Then you could strike any name or word you wish; and if you applied ink to the face, you could press it upon a page and write the same thing over and over, always the same!"

Buridan is a philosopher, not a mechanic, but he realizes that there would be practical difficulties—in casting dies, holding them aligned, and so on; but ingeniators delight in overcoming such difficulties. Bacon's explosive powder, perfected by a Freiburg
ingeniator
, Berthold "the Blackened," has recently been used in the Italian wars. Surely, printing with archetypes can be no more difficult!

When the day comes for their contrived experience, Buridan and his helpers discover that the young scholars of the university have devised a new amusement, in which they themselves slide down the rails. This has produced some splinters in a few arses, which amuses the Rector, and has warped the rails out of true, which does not. He postpones matters, summons Georges and his apprentices to repair the damage, and sets the corporation militia to stand watch over the device.

Having the day at leisure, he goes to fetch Nicole's newly repaired spectacles from Louis the optician, a gray-haired man with bulging eyes. They have been re-polished and affixed into a new frame of steel wire. Buridan asks the fee and the man waves him off.

"That notion of yours has already more than paid the fee," he says, presenting him with a pair of tubes, one sliding inside the other, the whole being nearly an arm's length. Buridan has quite forgotten, and the lensman reminds him. "You told me that looking through this new-fangled glass at a normal lens makes everything seem larger. So I ground me some new lenses and tried for myself. Took some while to get 'em right—they must be planar on one side, y'see. The lens glass being at the far end and the concave glass at the nearer . . ." And he goes on regarding focal lengths and apertures. "But it works just like ye said. Here, you look through the small end, what I call the ‘ocular.' That's right, my sir. Then you slide the tubes until everything is sharp."

Buridan laughs with delight when, peering through the window, he sees the goldsmith in the shop across the street polishing a ring that he has crafted.

"I call it a ‘look-glass," the gray lensman says. "I let people peek for a
denier
each. You can see the bells in the cathedral tower. There, in the distance between the goldsmith and the apothecary." The scene leaps into Buridan's eye, and he nearly jumps back in alarm.

"It's become popular," the lensman continues. "Four or five people come by each day to see, and some stay to purchase reading lentils, or they bring me their lenses to repair. Some of them tarry too long over the look-glass, though. There's a bawdy house down the street, and I think they hope for a glimpse through its windows. I need a sand-glass to call time on them."

Buridan verifies the presence of the bawdy house, but the windows are shuttered. He tells the optician that Fernand the clockmaker can devise a water clock that raises an alarum at remarkably short intervals and Louis resolves to acquire one. "Then it's the ‘alarum-clock' telling them their time is expired, and not me."

Buridan, fearing his own time is expired, returns the tube, but the optician will not have it. "But no, my sir. It is that you must have one, since it was of your suggestion."

The Rector thanks him and leaves the shop, but not before the optician calls him back for Nicole's glasses that he has left behind. On his way home, Buridan pauses at every street and aims the—the
spectum latique
? The
tele skopos
?—at every distant sight. Soon, he has acquired a train of citizens, both curious and amused at the Rector's strange activities.

One of the curious is Marcel Etienne, newly elected provost of the cathedral market. He thinks all scholars unworldly, but also knows the Rector a shrewd magistrate. He prays a glimpse through the tube and Buridan points him toward the church of Our Lady.

"I see nothing but a blur," the clothier complains and Buridan explains about
perspectiva
and focus. The complaint shifts. "But the image, she is greenish. Pfui! She cannot be real."

"That is but a consequence of metals in the glass." Or so Louis had told him. Buridan resolves to write a
tractatus
on the optics of dual lenses.

"Zut!" cries the provost. "Ernst the butcher places his thumb on the balance beam! That is an offence against the rules of the marketplace!" He takes his eye from the tube, looks at it, looks at Buridan. "How much do you want for it?"

"It is a gift to me," the Rector replies. "But Louis the optician can make another for you."

"But this is wonderful! I can police the market without showing myself." He turns to go, stops suddenly and looks about. Then he steps to the banks of the Seine and aims the device downstream, past the Grand Bridge and the floating mills, into the far distance. For a time he studies the horizon and the crowd that has followed him to the riverside strains to see what transfixes his attention.

Etienne closes the far-seer and slaps the tube absently against his palm. "I shall need two," he says to Buridan. "One for my own use; but yes, one also for the Constable of France. Think, my sir the Rector! With such a ‘look-glass,' the watchmen can mark the English fleet at many leagues distance, allowing the Constable to dispose his forces to best advantage. My thanks to you, Rector!" And with that, he presses the look-glass into Buridan's hands and dashes off for the glassmakers' district.

* * *

In his quarters once more, Buridan finds his houseguest bent over parchment, explaining some point of mathematics to Nicole Oresme. Buridan gives the bachelor his repaired glasses and shows the look-glass to Heytesbury.

"A marvelous device," the Englishman says after he has gazed in amazement out the window. "Bacon described just such an ‘optical tube' in his Great Work: ‘
And when we wish, things far off can be seen as near, and vice versa, so that at an incredible distance we might see grains of sand.' He learned of it from his master, Bishop Grosseteste, who wrote in De iride: ‘This part of perspectiva, when well understood, shows us how we may make things a very long distance off appear as if placed very close, and large near things appear very small, and how we may make small things placed at a distance appear any size we want, so that it may be possible for us to read the smallest letters at incredible distances, or to count sand, or seed, or any sort or minute objects
.' He even wrote that the Milky Way is composed of innumerable minute points of light, like grains of sand, if you can believe such a thing. Hah!." Heytesbury passes the tube on to Oresme. "But of what use is it? Seeing grains of sand from a great distance? Really!"