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Summary
Summary
Nicolaus Copernicus gave the world perhaps the most important scientific insight of the modern age, the theory that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. He was also the first to proclaim that the earth rotates on its axis once every twenty-four hours. His theory was truly radical: during his lifetime nearly everyone believed that a perfectly still earth rested in the middle of the cosmos, where all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. One of the transcendent geniuses of the early Renaissance, Copernicus was also a flawed and conflicted person. A cleric who lived during the tumultuous years of the early Reformation, he may have been sympathetic to the teachings of the Lutherans. Although he had taken a vow of celibacy, he kept at least one mistress. Supremely confident intellectually, he hesitated to disseminate his work among other scholars. It fact, he kept his astronomical work a secret, revealing it to only a few intimates, and the manuscript containing his revolutionary theory, which he refined for at least twenty years, remained "hidden among my things." It is unlikely that Copernicus' masterwork would ever have been published if not for a young mathematics professor named Georg Joachim Rheticus. He had heard of Copernicus' ideas, and with his imagination on fire he journeyed hundreds of miles to a land where, as a Lutheran, he was forbidden to travel. Rheticus' meeting with Copernicus in a small cathedral town in northern Poland proved to be one of the most important encounters in history. Copernicus' Secretrecreates the life and world of the scientific genius whose work revolutionized astronomy and altered our understanding of our place in the world. It tells the surprising, little-known story behind the dawn of the scientific age.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The founder of modern astronomy was, according to Repcheck (The Man Who Found Time), a science editor at Norton, an unlikely scientific revolutionary: an unambitious man who had lingered in university for 12 years and never sought fame or success. This far-ranging study explores why Nicholas Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres wasn't published until 1543, when he was on his deathbed, three decades after he'd first circulated a draft. Repcheck reveals that in addition to Copernicus being a late bloomer, astronomy had to be squeezed into spare moments between ecclesiastical duties and other civic duties. Copernicus also had an eye for the ladies, especially his housekeeper, which drew repeated, usually unheeded admonitions from his church superiors. It took the arrival of the brilliant young Lutheran mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus, who risked his life to travel to Frombork on the Baltic to seek out the reclusive Copernicus, to spur him on to complete his masterpiece. Repcheck paints a vivid picture of the times, in which both Protestantism and intellectual inquiry posed threats to the Catholic worldview. The author also does an admirable job of shining a light on Copernicus's little-known immediate predecessors to show that, like the works of Einstein and Darwin, the scientist's theory didn't spring Athena-like from his brow. Maps. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Nicolaus Copernicus did not recognize the stranger who knocked at his door in 1539. Within two years, however, the great Polish scientist was deeply in debt to the audacious Lutheran professor who defied ecclesiastical edicts to serve as his collaborator. That largely forgotten collaborator Georg Joachim Rheticus finally receives his due in this illuminating account of how he helped effect a revolution in worldviews. To be sure, Repcheck gives pride of place to Copernicus, depicted as a stunningly multifaceted man: a genius who pursued astronomy as an amateur using crude equipment, an exemplary cleric who infuriated superiors by entangling himself in romantic indiscretions, and a brave military leader who led local forces repelling Teutonic invaders. The very complexities of this full life, it becomes clear, retarded Copernicus' work on his theory of the heavens. Enter Rheticus. Intrigued by a fragmentary early outline of Copernicus' theory, this maverick scholar braved bad roads and hostile authorities to seek out the iconoclastic thinker. And with the arrival of this unsought ally, full of enthusiasm and armed with valuable volumes of mathematics, Copernicus finally completed the book that opened the way for Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. The history of science here reclaims a fascinating lost chapter.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
NICOLAUS COPERNICUS stands in sharp contrast to the later giants of the scientific revolution. For Kepler, Galileo or Newton, biographers can draw on copious correspondence. Kepler complains to his former teacher that his son never writes home from college. Galileo protests that he can't have his house arrest suspended to visit his doctor in Florence. Newton accuses John Locke of trying to entangle him with women. For Copernicus, fewer than 20 letters survive. Most seem to be on the business of the cathedral where he served as canon, medical doctor and legal officer. Personal details are virtually absent. We know that he spent six years as a graduate student in Italy, where he took out a loan, and that he made a couple of astronomical observations, but not much more. Most biographers have filled the gaps by focusing on what is known of Copernicus's professional life in the northernmost Catholic diocese in Poland: his defense of the territory against the marauding Teutonic knights, his pioneering treatise on currency reform, the hints of his building a private astronomical observing platform - he bought 800 bricks in 1513 - and above all, the technical aspects of his radical, sun-centered cosmology. And of course there is the story of the 25-year-old Lutheran professor from Wittenberg, Georg Joachim Rheticus, who showed up on his doorstep in 1539 and finally persuaded the aging canon to surrender a copy of his treatise "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" for publication. All this makes for a somber, shadowy tale of an earth-shaking cosmology created on the fringes of European civilization. Jack Repcheck's new biography, "Copernicus' Secret," at last brings the astronomer to life in a way that past efforts have not quite achieved. He paints the sites in a particularly vivid fashion, evoking, for example, provincial Frombork, where "the streets were narrow, the cottages small and nondescript, and the entire place smelled of fish." And he gives a clear account of the political and administrative structures of the cathedral chapter where Copernicus was a senior figure. He describes how the Teutonic knights originally moved into this Prussian area after the Crusades and how at the time of Copernicus their territory almost completely surrounded the Warmian diocese, which owed its loyalty to the Jagiellonian kings in Krakow. Copernicus owed his position to his uncle Lucas Watzenrode, a member of a patrician merchant family and bishop from 1489 to 1512. Once a canon, Copernicus was rarely in want of money. Repcheck concentrates on the last 12 years of the astronomer's life, when a story fraught with personal tensions moves to its climax. Will Copernicus's precious manuscript see the light of public scrutiny, or will it simply languish? Johannes Dantiscus, the erudite, scheming, social-climbing poet and diplomat who was elected bishop in 1537, is determined to stanch the inroads of the Protestant movement and to bring his errant canons fully into line. He is convinced that Copernicus is one of three canons living openly with a mistress. When the Protestant Rheticus arrives into the profoundly hostile Catholic territory, can he persuade Copernicus that he won't be hooted off the stage if and when his treatise is finally printed? Much of Repcheck's account derives from scattered cathedral correspondence, including Copernicus's own, long-known letters. The difference is the spin he puts on them. When in the 1850s the Polish scholar Jan Baranowski discovered Copernicus's letter to the previous bishop apologizing for lodging a woman overnight, he suppressed it, not wishing to taint his hero with the slightest whiff of scandal. And subsequent scholars, examining letters in which Copernicus later promised to dismiss his female housekeeper (and then postponed his action), took the astronomer at his word, assuming she was only a housekeeper and that was all there was to the story. But Repcheck, relying on additional third-party correspondence, concludes that she was indeed a mistress. Perhaps he is right. In any event, it does make Copernicus appear more human, more real. With dramatic flair Repcheck also tells the story of Rheticus's dangerous visit to Frombork, conveying how very genuine was the possibility that Rheticus might have been arrested or sent packing, and that the astronomer's life work might then simply have gathered dust on a cathedral library shelf. These are not, however, the central questions of the intellectual history of the astronomical revolution. Instead, we want to know where, when and why Copernicus's insight into a heliocentric cosmology took place. Was he significantly influenced by Islamic astronomy? How important were direct observations in formulating the new picture? Was Copernicus simply building a model, or did he believe in the physical reality of the heliocentric arrangement? Did he hesitate at all over the possible theological reaction to his removing the Earth from the center of the cosmos? Repcheck has little to say about these questions or about more technical astronomical issues. He never makes it clear whether Copernicus's "secret" is his mistress or his book. Still, no other biography of which I am aware treats the life of this scientific giant more vividly than this one. Repcheck puts a fresh spin on Copernicus's little-documented personal life. Owen Gingerich, an emeritus professor of astronomy and the history of science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is the author of "The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus."
Choice Review
Who in the modern world has not heard of Copernicus, and who subscribes any longer to the ancient geocentric view? The corpus of literature on Copernicus, his revolutionary work, and its impact on human thought is vast. Yet there are aspects of this scientific trailblazer that are not widely known. In this slender volume that reads like a novella, one learns about the circumstances that led to the publication of the classic in the history of science, which its author kept in great secrecy. It was as if this cleric did not want the world to know about his great discovery, any more than he would publicize that he had a mistress. It was thanks to an ardent admirer, mathematician Rheticus, that the book was published. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres came out in 1543 as Copernicus lay on his deathbed at age 70. Leaving aside the perhaps unmerited epithet of flaws to describe the hero, who was, if anything, only human, the book is fascinating reading, even to those who may be familiar with much of its contents. Its brief note of acknowledgment, which recalls the author's travels to research the book, is also beautifully written. Summing Up: Recommended. General libraries; lower-division undergraduate through professional collections. V. V. Raman emeritus, Rochester Institute of Technology
Kirkus Review
A fine biography of the obscure cleric who demonstrated that the earth was not the center of the universe. Copernicus (1473-1543) led a humdrum life, but science writer Repcheck (The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of Earth's Antiquity, 2003) does an exceptional job bringing to life his character, his era and the astronomical problem he solved. Aristotle's notion that heavenly bodies orbited the earth in perfect circles seemed reasonable to everyone except astronomers, whose calculations didn't work if they assumed he was right. Two centuries later, Ptolemy described a universe in which the earth sat slightly off-center and heavenly bodies orbited in one perfect circle inside a second perfect circle at varying speeds. Although absurdly complicated, this model enabled astronomers to calculate with reasonable accuracy; 1,500 years later, it was still in use. Born into a family of prosperous Germans who settled in Poland, Copernicus passed a leisurely youth, spending 12 years at four separate universities. He finally received a doctorate from the University of Ferrara in 1503. Despite his fascination with astronomy, he took the customary degree in canon law and returned to his local diocese in Poland, where he remained until his death 40 years later, observing the sky in his spare time. His On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, packed with equations and diagrams, was incomprehensible except to astronomers, who appreciated the mathematics that improved their predictions of eclipses, solstices and planetary movements. Upon its publication in 1543, few paid attention to its heretical picture of a universe in which the earth circles the sun. Only after the flamboyant Galileo began spreading the news some 70 years later did the Catholic Church add the book to its Index in 1616. Repcheck emphasizes that Copernicus was one of the first thinkers who looked at the world without preconceptions and set down what he observed. He deserves his place among the founders of modern science, and this lively, lucid account does him justice. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Norton science editor Repcheck takes us far beyond our textbook understanding of Copernicus, the man who taught us something important about our relationship to the sun. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Preface A flawed and complex man -- distant, obsequious, womanizing, but possessing a profoundly original and daring intellect -- started the scientific revolution. His name was Nicolaus Copernicus. He achieved this breakthrough when he published his seminal book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, the year that he died, aged seventy. The work provided the technical details for Copernicus's "heliocentric," or sun-centered, theory, the model of the universe that hypothesized that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun, and that the earth itself rotated once a day on its axis. Prior to the publication of Copernicus's book, the Judeo-Christian world believed that a perfectly still earth rested in the center of God's universe, and that all heavenly bodies -- the sun, the other planets, the moon, and even the distant stars -- revolved around it. This conviction was based on the teachings of Aristotle and the writings of Claudius Ptolemy. The Church had long embraced the paradigm because it conformed to scripture and placed humans at the center of God's firmament. Copernicus's revolutionary work not only presented an entirely different cosmology, but once accepted, it required a titanic shift in mind-set and belief. No longer the center of God's creation, the earth became just one of the other planets. By extension, the primary position of God's highest creation, humankind, was also diminished. There were many scholars before Copernicus who cast doubt on the earth-centered ("geocentric") model of the universe, in particular Aristarchas, a contemporary of Aristotle's. Yet, no one until Copernicus attempted to develop a comprehensive and complete system to supplant Ptolemy's. This was the key -- Copernicus provided all of the data and mathematics that any other serious student of the heavens would need to conduct inquiries using his heliocentric model of the universe. Though Copernicus's theory had several serious flaws (in particular, his staunchly held belief that all orbits must be perfectly circular), it was fundamentally correct and exhibited the essential characteristics of modern science -- it was based on unchanging principles, rigorous observation, and mathematical proof. His contribution was immense. It formed the foundation of future work by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and finally Albert Einstein. On the Revolutions, then, started the scientific journey that has led inexorably to our modern world. Copernicus's history-altering book came very close to never being published. After pouring his soul into the manuscript for at least two decades and essentially completing it, the astronomer made no move to finish it or submit it to a publisher, despite strenuous urgings from friends and colleagues in high places. He was not afraid of being declared a heretic, as many assume; rather, he was worried that parts of the theory distilled in the manuscript were simply wrong, or if not wrong, incomplete. Thus, he resolved to keep it a secret. Then, in the last years of his life, Copernicus became embroiled in two serious and distracting clashes that nearly resulted in the manuscript following Copernicus to his grave, consigned to a trunk among his belongings. One dispute was all too human and typical -- it involved a woman who was his mistress. The other was more serious and a product of the times -- Copernicus, a cleric in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, was tainted with the brush of the heretical Lutheran Reformation. That the manuscript was not buried with its author was the result of a genuinely remarkable turn of events. At the precise moment that Copernicus was most troubled, a young Lutheran mathematics professor from the University of Wittenberg, having made an arduous journey over hundreds of miles of muddy roads, arrived unannounced on his doorstep. Georg Joachim Rheticus, defying a law that banned Lutherans from Copernicus's region, was determined to find the famous but shadowy astronomer and discover whether or not the rumored revolutionary theory of the heavens was true. He was euphoric when he discovered that it was. Rheticus then stayed with Copernicus for most of the next two years to help him complete the manuscript and publish it. With turmoil swirling around them in the cathedral town of Frombork in northern Poland, the two gifted scientists found peace in each other's company. They worked together to put the final touches on the book that would introduce the heliocentric theory, beginning the era of scientific discovery that eventually led to modern science. But, as with everything involving Copernicus, nothing was simple, and even the straightforward act of publication became a complicated adventure. This book explores the life of Copernicus, particularly the eventful last twelve years of his life -- a dozen years that changed the course of western history. I have written this book for the lay reader who knows nothing of the events I describe, except perhaps for having heard of Copernicus and his theory that the earth revolves around the sun. The science I describe is at the simplest possible level. Those readers interested in digging deeper into the science will be directed to additional readings in the Notes and Select Sources and Suggested Additional Readings sections. The goal of this book is to provide a rich, accurate, and especially human account of the events that started the scientific revolution. Copyright (c) 2007 by Jack Repcheck Excerpted from Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began by Jack Repcheck All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. xiii |
| 1 Prelude to Future Troubles | p. 1 |
| 2 The Precursors | p. 11 |
| 3 Childhood | p. 26 |
| 4 Student Years | p. 39 |
| 5 Warmia | p. 51 |
| 6 Before the Storm | p. 68 |
| 7 The Death of the Bishop | p. 81 |
| 8 The Mistress and the Frombork Wenches | p. 89 |
| 9 The Taint of Heresy | p. 101 |
| 10 The Catalyst | p. 109 |
| 11 The Nuremberg Cabal | p. 122 |
| 12 The Meeting | p. 132 |
| 13 The First Summer | p. 140 |
| 14 Convincing Copernicus | p. 149 |
| 15 The Publication | p. 159 |
| 16 The Death of Copernicus | p. 170 |
| 17 Rheticus after Copernicus | p. 174 |
| 18 The Impact of On the Revolutions | p. 181 |
| Notes and Select Sources | p. 197 |
| Suggested Additional Readings | p. 215 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 217 |
| Index | p. 219 |
