Judge Starling

The story concerns Galileo, Kepler, and two anagrams. I’ve heard this story many times before, but never in so intriguing a narrative as in This American Life.

On two occasions, Galileo (1564–1642) “announced” discoveries he had made with this telescope by mailing anagrams (scrambled texts) to Johannes Kepler (1571–1630).

The first one read SMAISMRMILMEPOETALEUMIBUNENUGTTAUIRAS. Since in Latin U and V are the same letter, the correct solution was supposed to be “Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi” (“I have observed the highest planet to be triplets.”) (The highest planet known at the time was Saturn, and what Galileo had actually seen are the rings of Saturn. Unfortunately, with his primitive telescope the rings looked like the moons, one on each side.)

Why, you may wonder, did Galileo announce his finding in such bizarre a fashion? Apparently, this wasn’t unusual at the time. Before the existence of scientific journals, short of publishing a very expensive book, the way of establishing priority was to write about the discovery to a famous scientist. Of course, you had to phrase your letter carefully so as not to actually reveal the discovery explicitly, lest the famous person would take credit for the work. This ingenious method of “publication” established priority, while at the same time communicating it to the person most likely to snatch the priority from you. If anyone else announced that Saturn had two blobs next to it, Galileo could unscramble the anagram and show that he’d seen them first. Kepler would serve as his expert witness.

Kepler unscrambled the anagram wrongly to “Salve, umbistineum geminatum Martia proles,” and interpreted this to mean “Mars has two moons.” The translation is very bad since it contains a declension, “umbistineum,” that does not even exist in Latin. This American Life tells us it means “Hail, double-knob children of Mars.”

Of course, Mars does have two moons, but neither Kepler nor Galileo had any way of knowing that. (Nobody did until 1877, when both these gentlemen were already dead.)

The second anagram that Galileo sent out to Kepler was “Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur oy,” meaning “These immature ones have already been read in vain by me,” with the “oy” being appended to the end of the sentence because Galileo couldn’t find a better way to fit them into the anagram.

His intended solution was: “Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum,” which translates to “The mother of love imitates the figures of Cynthia.” This sounds a bit obscure, but given that Cynthia is another name for the Moon, and that the mother of love is Venus, what this sentence proclaims is that Venus has phases like the Moon. This was a very dangerous thing to say, because the only explanation for Venus having phases like the moon was that Venus travels around the Sun, a scientific position that was heretical at the time. The phases of Venus could not be accounted by a geocentric model of the solar system that was the dogma of the Church.

Once again, Kepler tried his hand at the anagram and unscrambled it to “Macula rufa in Jove est gyratur mathem…” Kepler’s solution is again in very bad Latin, as it trails off in the middle of a word. Moreover, Kepler a few of the letters in Galileo’s anagram were left over. But if you ignore such minutiae, Kepler’s solutions says “There is a red spot in Jupiter, which rotates mathem[atically].”

Once again, Kepler was wrong and right at the same time. There is indeed a red spot on Jupiter, which rotates around as the planet rotates, but Kepler could not have known that as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was first seen much later in 1665 (when the two gentlemen were already dead).

I find this story terribly unsatisfying, and I have trouble believing it “as is.” The story simply defies logic and everything I know about probability and statistics. How likely can it be for Kepler to incorrectly unscramble an anagram, and yet to reach another unknown truth? And how likely is it for such an unlikely sequence of events to happen twice? I need another solution! Hope someone will provide it.