The Moving Earth (review)

Stars illuminate the opening frames of writer/director Lars Becker-Larsen's The Moving Earth. As the credits fade the camera tilts down and the stars dissolve into a morning sky and panoramic establishing shot of a Frambork Poland. The film cuts to a long shot of old man in period garb passing a dimly lit window as the narration begins, "In 1543, on his death bead, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was given a book." Cut to a panning shot of, De revolutionibus oribum coelestium, framed against a black background. The sequence continues in montage - a portrait of Copernicus, the book opened to his illustrations of the solar system, a digital model of the planets orbiting the sun - and the narrator explains in a crisp British accent, "In his book Copernicus proposed that the sun was the center of the universe and that the earth was actually a planet in orbit around it. This was highly controversial, absolutely counter to the prevailing view of the world."

This opening sequence demonstrates the elements used throughout the documentary – location shots, archival graphics, computer animation, dramatic recreations and interviews with contemporary scientists and historians – employed in this narrative history of the clash between astronomy and religion during in Renaissance Europe. Beginning with Copernicus's death in 1543, the film depicts the scientific achievements of Tycho Brahe, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilee, Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley. Becker-Larsen's third film, The Moving Earth, won a Grand Prix at the 2009 International Science & Film Festival.

The Copernican solar system directly challenged the Catholic Church doctrine and works of Aristotle which were fundamental to the medieval worldview that the earth is the immutable center of the universe, and that the heavens are unchanging. Tycho Brahe, a Danish nobleman with his own island observatory, attempted to prove Copernicus correct using meticulous observations. In 1577 Tycho witnessed a comet in the "unchanging" heavens, disproving Aristotle's theory that crystalline spheres hold the planets in orbit. However, Denmark's new Lutheran ruler withdrew his patronage, forcing Tycho into exile. Meanwhile, Giordano Bruno, who dedicated his book on Copernicus to Tycho, was imprisoned for heresy by the Inquisition and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600. Tycho settled in Prague, where he met Johannes Kepler, who had fled religious turmoil in Austria where he struggled with aligning Plato's perfect shapes and musical scales with the planetary orbits.

After Tycho died in 1603, his records led Kepler to an "epoch making realization," of three laws of planetary motion – planets move in ellipses, planets move faster as they approach the sun, and planets further from the sun move slower. Galileo Galilee met with Kepler and showed him the telescope he had invented. Like Bruno, Galileo would raise the ire of the Inquisition, leading to his trial in 1633 and death nine years later under house arrest. Vatican Observatory director George Coyne is interviewed to discuss Galileo and explain his own role on a special council on appointed by Pope John Paul II, which led to a formal apology to Galileo in 1992. The film concludes by examining the professional relationship between Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley, who were inspired by the work of Galileo and Kepler. Thanks to Halley's persistence in motivating him, Newton completed the rigorous challenge of publishing his theory of gravitational rotation in 1687 in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which made him famous and provided the Western work with a coherent scientific picture of our solar system.

The Moving Earth can be read in part as a recovery of Tycho Brache from Carl Sagan, whose public television series Cosmos reached an estimated 400 million viewers in 1980. Episode III: "Harmony of the Worlds," Tycho is introduced reaching for a glass of wine, and described as a "flamboyant figure with a gold nose" who "maintained a circus-like entourage." Sagan quotes Kepler, who complained in his journal that Tycho mocked him and would not share data. Sagan's contends that...