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II B

B

Das sittlich wirklich Verwerfliche ist nämlich das Ausruhen auf dem Besitz, der Genuss des Reichtums mit seiner Konsequenz von Müßigkeit und Fleischeslust, vor allem von Ablenkung von dem Streben nach “heiligem” Leben. Und nur weil der Besitz die Gefahr dieses Ausruhens mit sich bringt, ist er bedenklich. Denn die “ewige Ruhe der Heiligen” liegt im Jenseits, auf Erden aber muss auch der Mensch, um seines Gnadenstandes sicher zu werden, “wirken die Werke dessen, der ihn gesandt hat, solange es Tag ist”. Nicht Muße und Genuss, sondern nur Handeln dient nach dem unzweideutig geoffenbarten Willen Gottes zur Mehrung seines Ruhms. Zeitvergeudung ist also die erste und prinzipiell schwerste aller Sünden. Die Zeitspanne des Lebens ist unendlich kurz und kostbar, um die eigene Berufung “festzumachen”. Zeitverlust durch Geselligkeit, “faules Gerede”, Luxus, selbst durch mehr als der Gesundheit nötigen Schlaf – 6 bis höchstens 8 Stunden – ist sittlich absolut verwerflich. Es heißt noch nicht wie bei Benjamin Franklin: “Zeit ist Geld”, aber der Satz gilt gewissermaßen im spirituellen Sinn: sie ist unendlich wertvoll, weil jede verlorene Stunde der Arbeit im Dienst des Ruhmes Gottes entzogen ist.

Morally the really despicable is resting on the possession itself, the benefits of wealth with its consequent idleness and meat desire, particularly from the diversion of striving for the “holy” life. And only because possession brings the danger of this resting with itself, it is precarious. While the “eternal peace of the holy” is in the the other world, on ground connection must be to humans, in order to become safe condition for its condition of grace. “Works the work it, which send it, so long as it is day”. Not leisure and benefit, but only acting serving after the unambiguously openly agreed on will of God for the increase of its fame. Sloth is thus first and worst, in principle, of all sins. The span of the life is infinitely short and precious, around is own desire “to fasten”. Time wasted by sociability, “putrid gossip”, luxury, even by more than the healthly minimum amount of sleep – 6 until at the most 8 hours – is morally absolutely despicable. It does not mean, as with Benjamin Franklin: “time is money”, but the sentence applies to a certain extent in the mirror-image ritual sense: it is infinitely valuable, because each lost hour is extracted from the work in the service of the fame of God.

Max Weber, Askese und kapitalistischer Geist, 1872

11th April, 1866

For astronomers there are wasted hours – the time between early afternoon, when the work of tending to human needs is done, and the work of tending to the spiritual. For there is one great cathedral to the astronomer – the vault of the heavens upward, into it, the astronomer falls. It is vaster than any gothic expanse, and more perfectly classical than any pantheon.

However, in the dull hours of the sun, there is the need to find sleep. He had not established his quarters, but the bed was made and the curtains were drawn. He had, just before sleeping, read the invitation from the observatory, and was sure when to be where. He read the map one last time, and with a facility that comes from an era where gentlemen still set their own hours, he slept. His eyes were heavily shut – the evening’s sky charts on the desk, and notes taken, and they danced before his eyes has he swiftly fell into abyssal slumber. Arthur Auwers could never remember his dreams, save in snatches, almost always to do with problems he had, problems his mind slaved away even in rest.

He awoke suddenly, sure that it was the right hour – to within two or three minutes. He washed his face in the small half bath next to the room, and dressed. Neatness did not count among those in his profession, though some were, of course, more dapper than others. His tie was slightly askew, his socks matched only in the abstract sense of being approximately the same colour, and his jacket was somewhat more worn than his trousers.

He went down to the front desk where the concierge and doorman both kept station, and checked for any new messages, finding two, he set them in his inside vest pocket, next to his watch, which he checked one last time, and found himself horrified that he had not given himself more than enough time. It was outside to the horse drawn carriage that he had contracted – which had only just pulled up, so he allowed himself to relax – and then through the streets of the open boulevards of this unfashionable end of Berlin, and out beyond the old, if old could really be said to apply to a city that was, until a century ago, a village with delusions of adequeacy.

Under his arm were notebooks and charts, and he tried, on the drive there, to make other notes, but the swaying and bumping were too much, over streets more cobbled than he was used to – back in the days when road and street were not quite as interchangeable as they are todoay. He snacked on a sausage he had set aside earlier, and was finally deposited at the busy Bell-Allianz-Platz, from which it was only a short walk to the observatory which had only been built around the time of his own birth.

At the time there were no trolly tracks, but gaslights there were, and horses in abudance. He gazed at the neo-classical buildings only a moment, enough to get him to snap back to his task, and then walk with a purposeful gate up to a domed building, which remided him of a combination of concert hall and church.

For it was both, the home of the music of the spheres and of his religion. The back stairs were few in number, and he rapped at the door impatiently. The gaslights were lit, in defiance of good procedure, and he could see many people gathered around a table, looking down, some with glasses or magnifiers, and all well dressed for an evening, of seeming, entertainment. It was at this moment that he remembered that the observatory was open for visitation and he went back around to the entrance near the dome itself, allowing his eyes to be reacquainted wit the dark. He looked up once, gathered some sense of solace from the fiery organe of Arcturus – the “bear watcher” in Bootes, the herdsman, and stepped up and rapped, this time once.

A solemn and drawn face looked through the glass of the door, and then opened it.

“Good, I was hoping you would be punctual, there are urgent matters to discuss.

“Urgent? The stars are almost always there, save for a nova from time to time.”

“The stars take no notice of us here on earth, would that I could say the same for earthly forces.”

The entered the building, and began chatting shop to fill a few moments – the height of the steps to make climbing easier, the ordering of plates for exposures, the problems of the clouds and growing soot.

But the word “urgent”, it stirred his blood. To be urgently needed, to feel the pressure of urgency. These were sweet to his ears. He was, he said to himself, a man in demand. A very fine place for a someone so young to be.

“You mentioned urgent.”

His interlocutor, Johann Galle, turned, stoped on the middle stair, and leaned against the stone wall, his back arching over the hand railing.

“This must remain absolutely private.”

“Of course. Of course. Yes. Yes.” Replied the somewhat younger man .

“The great Enke and the architect Schinkel went stark raving mad at the end, or at least that is the only theory I have. Foerster will meet you later with the details, and don’t let on you know. But don’t think that there is a rational explanation. There isn’t.”

“There is always a rational explanation.”

“There are infinitely many irrational numbers, and each one has a story.”

- - -

This was, of course, anathema to the young astronomer. It was not that he was irreligious, or could not be brought to believe in the mystical. He was a firm believer in dualism of matter into organic and inorganic forms, and a firm advocate of the powers of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But he was not a man to believe that somewhere the books did not balance, and that for each and every inconsistency to the human eye, there was not a means to accounting for it. He firmly believed that every erg of energy would be accounted for, so that Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation would be seen as perfect. It was merely a matter of tracking down each and every effect, and giving them appropriate mathematical embodiment.

So here was an eminent astronomer, in the temple of the craft, telling him that an even more eminent pair of great men had been mad, and that the director of this institution, now among the most famous in the world, was also irrational. It was not a way to win his faith, confidence, trust or credulity. And yet, he stared at the harden lines on the face, the serious set of the eye, and concluded, that even if it was not believable, it was believed. This, oddly, comforted him. He reminded himself to believe the observation, even if how it was recorded was in error.

Galle pealed himself up to standing upright and they resumed their ascent. They walked all the way up the stairs to the observatory room itself, and the older man set the dome turning.

There was a long silence.

There was a long silence as they listened to the movement of the gears and springs which rotated the dome, it was as smooth as a clock, and indeed it was a clock, one that faced the heavans, and turned with them, so that the telescope would stay fixed on its object.

The first looks through the opticks proved that they were of very high quality, and could certainly be used for decades to come. The new camera apparatus was, likewise, a marvel. But what impressed Galle, when he let Auwers have a turn at it, was the precise, almost virtuoso way his hands worked. He was like a bassoonist or other wind player, on the worlds deepest and longest contra-bassoon. The two had met several times before, and often corresponded. Galle knew that Auwers probably had studied this mechanism thoroughly, but, despite never having seen it, and despite the darkness, his movements between the various knobs and wheels was precise, only on occasion to squared off, as the mind calculated the distance between two points which were held in the brain, but not yet in the fingers.

As they adjusted the instrument for the night’s program, the conversation turned from compliments on the apparatus and the choice of objects, with an abrupt question from Galle:

“What do you know about observing Jupiter?”

“I know that it is a poor time to observe it right now, but then, we are too far north. For planetary sciene whe should ring the more equatorial mountains with observatories, so that the planets are over head more often, and nothing is missed. Every occultation of Io, every eclipse of Ganymede, every transit of Europa should be observed. Every close approach of Mars should be filled with observation, every phase of Venus checked for some glimpse of its surface. Knowledge must not escape us.”

Galle, who like must people who work in the dark had dispensed with subtle gestures of affirmation, but who made up for this by putting more force into his interjections of support, almost boomed the next word.

“Yes.” He then self consciously quieted down. “Yes, I knew we had the right man.”

“But I am not a member of the observatory staff.”

“That was intentional, I put in a good word with the academy, you must have your own freedom of action. The Jupiter Problem is all important.”

“You must explain.”

“You are an expert at old observations, and at correcting for errors made by others, the Jupiter problem dates back to Romero.”

“Yes, the first estimate of the speed of light. He was off, if we have better distancing to the planets, then we can make a better astronomical calculation of the velocity of light.”

“That’s not the problem that drove Encke mad. He spent hours up here catchjng every small bit of Jupiter that he could for the reverse reason.”

“You must explain.”

“Let us say we ran that in reverse – that we take the current speed of light and use it to calculate the distance to Jupiter. What would you do.”

“Set a program to observe the occultations of the Galilatian moons of Jupiter, both on the advance and retreat, find the discrepancy in time between calculated and actual values, the result must be the distance of the chords along the curve and therefore one may easily calculate the orbit. It is an undergraduate’s conceptual problem.”

“I would have expected no less from anyone who knew Neumann at Koenigsberg.”

“Yes, I learned more after being a student from the mathematical physics seminar that he conducted than as a student. His lectures are replete with great insights, that, like Fermat, he seems loathe to publish.”

“Did you meet Jacobi? I know I must have asked you this.”

“No. But I use his work in my own. What importance is this?”

“I’ve told you all you need to know. The rest you will understand in due time.”

Auwers puzzled only for a moment, and then it flooded into his brain with tremendous force. The light calculations must have been some kind of failure, and he, as the heliograph expert, would be the man to lead an observation of the transits of Venus, spaced 8 years apart. With better distance data in hand, the Jupiter observations could be corrected, and Encke vindicated. He had had the experience of having his work overshadowed once in his short life – his painstakingly compiled general catalog had been a foot note to Herschel’s – he knew what it was like to live in obsessive fear that one has done almost everything needed for a result, but not being able to finish it. It must have maddened the older men.

It was at this point that the flickering light of a candle coming up the stairs had the same effect as if it were a sound. Their movements stopped, their throats were paralyzed. It was Foerester, the head of the observatory, coming up the stairs and into the dome. His footsteps did not disturb the air.

The packed up the photographic plates for later development, and set to being diligent in their next observation. Auwers only glanced sidewise to see Foerester's torso almost float up into view.