The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus - Hardcover

Gingerich, Owen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802714153 ISBN 13: 9780802714152

Publisher: Walker Books, 2004

Synopsis

In the spring of 1543 as the celebrated astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, lay on his death bed, his fellow clerics brought him a long-awaited package: the final printed pages of the book he had worked on for many years: De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). Though Copernicus would not live to hear of its extraordinary impact, his book, which first suggested that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe, is today recognized as one of the most influential scientific works of all time―thanks in part to astrophysicist Owen Gingerich.

Four and a half centuries after its initial publication, Gingerich embarked on an epic quest to see in person all extant copies of the first and second editions of De revolutionibus. He was inspired by two contradictory pieces of information: Arthur Koestler's claim, in his bookThe Sleepwalkers, that nobody had read Copernicus's book when it was published; and Gingerich's discovery, in Edinburgh, of a first edition richly annotated in the margins by the leading teacher of astronomy in Europe in the 1540s. If one copy had been so quickly appreciated, Gingerich reasoned, perhaps others were as well―and perhaps they could throw new light on a hinge point in the history of astronomy.

After three decades of investigation, and after traveling hundreds of thousands of miles across the globe―from Melbourne to Moscow, Boston to Beijing―Gingerich has written an utterly original book built on his experience and the remarkable insights gleaned from examining some 600 copies of De revolutionibus. He found the books owned and annotated by Galileo, Kepler and many other lesser-known astronomers whom he brings back to life, which illuminate the long, reluctant process of accepting the Sun-centered cosmos and highlight the historic tensions between science and the Catholic Church. He traced the ownership of individual copies through the hands of saints, heretics, scalawags, and bibliomaniacs. He was called as the expert witness in the theft of one copy, witnessed the dramatic auction of another, and proves conclusively that De revolutionibus was as inspirational as it was revolutionary.

Part biography of a book, part scientific exploration, part bibliographic detective story, The Book Nobody Read recolors the history of cosmology and offers new appreciation of the enduring power of an extraordinary book and its ideas.

About this title

About the Author:

Owen Gingerich is senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, research professor of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University, and a leading authority on Johannes Kepler and Nicolaus Copernicus. He has been vice president of the American Philosophical Society and chairman of the U.S. National Committee of the International Astronomical Union. He and his wife, Miriam, live in Cambridge, Massachusetts; avid travelers (he has successfully observed twelve total solar eclipses), they collect rare books and shells.

From The Washington Post:

Owen Gingerich is senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and research professor of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard. From his new book -- an account of his decades-long quest to examine every copy in existence of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus, the world-shaking, heavens-altering demonstration that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa -- we also learn that he knows Latin, French and German, and probably some Polish since he spends a fair amount of time in Cracow and Warsaw. He's constantly winging his way off on some all-expenses-paid trip to England, Scotland, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Russia or Egypt. He purchases rare 16th-century books at auction -- and then discovers even rarer ones bound in with the already choice item. In fact, no matter where he goes, Gingerich is always making some dramatic textual discovery, proving or disproving provenances, deciphering fuzzy handwriting, destroying other scholars' theories. Throughout The Book That Nobody Read he leaves us in no doubt that when it comes to the history of Renaissance astronomy, Prof. Owen Gingerich is the man.

Which he probably is. But The Book Nobody Read will irritate at least some readers by its pervasive self-congratulatory tone. In real life Gingerich may be a second Francis of Assisi, but in these pages he presents himself, willy-nilly, as yet another of those pampered and indulged Harvard hotshots. At times he even sounds like the supercilious detective Philo Vance (who, as Ogden Nash observed, needs a "kick in the pance"): "Because I was then in my spare time computing planetary positions from ancient Babylonian times to the present, I figured I could easily help him test his hypothesis." Right. This lordly manner crops up in asides, footnotes and personal details: "I assumed that everyone knew what offsetting was. . . . Very quickly I realized that Umiastowski had inserted eight Tychonic leaves to make his first edition complete; in fact, the leaves were not from a first edition at all but from a second. . . . Eventually, I had an opportunity to mention this" -- that a Russian-held copy of a certain book was stolen from East Germany -- "to the head of the Library of Congress, a specialist in Russian studies, who allowed that the experts had always suspected this, but my report was the first actual evidence."

The Book That Nobody Read takes up a somewhat rarefied topic. It's not quite a précis of Renaissance astronomical theory, nor is it a potted biography of Copernicus and his readers, among them such notables as Kepler, Tycho Brahe and Galileo. At heart it's nothing less than a scholarly memoir of Gingerich's encounters with more than 600 first and second editions of De Revolutionibus and his attempts to understand how the book had been understood during the 16th century. Arthur Koestler had claimed that nobody actually read Copernicus, essentially because his treatise was so mathematically arcane. To prove or disprove this assertion, Gingerich examines all the extant copies and shows, through detective work going back to the early 1970s, that De Revolutionibus was actually widely available to the scientific community, that copies were heavily annotated, and that they passed from teacher to disciple all around Europe.

Such a story will naturally appeal to those who enjoy "books about books" or the kind of memoir that traces the personal drama behind some scientific or literary breakthrough. The progenitor of this sort of biographical study is The Quest for Corvo, in which A.J.A. Symons describes the course of his investigations as he tries to unearth details about the secret life of a minor late-19th-century author (one best known for his skillful invective and a single good novel, Hadrian VII). More recently, James Watson's The Double Helix chronicled the back-stage give-and-take behind the discovery of the structure of DNA. But such books only work if the result is either immensely quirky and charming (Symons) or replete with drama and revelations (Watson). The Book Nobody Read misses because Gingerich's personality isn't particularly winning and what he has to say is at once highly bibliographical and the point proven less than earth-shattering.

Though Gingerich writes clearly enough when relating his visits to libraries, museums and universities, he is likely to leave the unmathematical at a loss when he defines an astronomical detail: "Second, [Ptolemy] had to figure out a way to make the epicycle move around the eccentric (deferent) circle more slowly on the side where the loops didn't come as close to the Earth, and here he invented a very ingenious device called the equant." Admittedly, numbers and formulae are always going to distress the casual reader (like musical examples in the brilliant books of Charles Rosen or untranslated Latin or Greek in works of classical scholarship). But if you think you can just skip over the equant, guess again: "My Copernican census eventually helped to establish that the majority of sixteenth-century astronomers thought eliminating the equant was Copernicus' big achievement, because it satisfied the ancient aesthetic principle that eternal celestial motions should be uniform and circular or compounded of uniform and circular parts."

Indeed, it comes as something of a shock that many readers at first took Copernicus's heliocentric arrangement of our part of the cosmos as simply a better, simpler way to calculate planetary positions. Demonstrating that it was also literally, and not just heuristically, true required further evidence, largely provided by Kepler and his proof of the elliptical nature of planetary orbits.

In the end, Gingerich's census of Copernicus's great work cannot fail to leave one impressed by the man's energy -- he totes his camera and flood lights everywhere -- and by his historical acumen. Scholars, of course, don't need to be anything but smart -- even as books really just need to be enchanting.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0802714153
• ISBN 13: 9780802714152
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 306