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Summary
Summary
By 1514, the reclusive cleric Nicolaus Copernicus had written and hand-copied an initial outline of his heliocentric theory-in which he defied common sense and received wisdom to place the sun, not the earth, at the center of our universe, and set the earth spinning among the other planets. Over the next two decades, Copernicus expanded his theory through hundreds of observations, while compiling in secret a book-length manuscript that tantalized mathematicians and scientists throughout Europe. For fear of ridicule, he refused to publish.
In 1539, a young German mathematician, Georg Joachim Rheticus, drawn by rumors of a revolution to rival the religious upheaval of Martin Luther's Reformation, traveled to Poland to seek out Copernicus. Two years later, the Protestant youth took leave of his aging Catholic mentor and arranged to have Copernicus's manuscript published, in 1543, as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ( On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres )-the book that forever changed humankind's place in the universe.
In her elegant, compelling style, Dava Sobel chronicles, as nobody has, the conflicting personalities and extraordinary discoveries that shaped the Copernican Revolution. At the heart of the book is her play And the Sun Stood Still , imagining Rheticus's struggle to convince Copernicus to let his manuscript see the light of day. As she achieved with her bestsellers Longitude and Galileo's Daughter , Sobel expands the bounds of narration, giving us an unforgettable portrait of scientific achievement, and of the ever-present tensions between science and faith.
Author Notes
Dava Sobel was born in the Bronx, New York on June 15, 1947. She received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969. She is a former New York Times science reporter and has contributed articles to Audubon, Discover, Life, Harvard Magazine, and The New Yorker.
She has written several science related books including Letters to Father, The Planets, and A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time won the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love won the 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science and technology and a 2000 Christopher Award. She has co-authored six books with astronomer Frank Drake including Is Anyone Out There? She also co-authored with William J. H. Andrewes The Illustrated Longitude.
Because her work provides awareness of science and technology to the general public, she has received the Individual Public Service Award from the National Science Board in 2001, the Bradford Washburn Award in 2001,the Klumpke-Roberts Award in 2008, and the Eduard Rhein Foundation in Germany in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sobel, author of the bestselling Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, brings something different to the bulging Copernicus canon. She wants to know why Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) waited till shortly before his death to publish the universe-expanding ideas that he had previously only quietly circulated among other scientists. Her conclusion: in the midst of Martin Luther's challenge to the Catholic Church, Copernicus, himself a Church canon, feared the Church's response to his radical notion that Earth revolved around the Sun. His thesis, of course, altered nothing less than the our view of our place in the cosmos. Daringly, Sobel embeds within a factual narrative a two-act play in which she imagines the relationship between the aging Copernicus and a young mathematician (and Lutheran) named Georg Joachim Rheticus, who Sobel says "convinced" the great astronomer "to publish his crazy idea." Delivered with her usual stylistic grace (and here, a touch of astrological whimsy), Sobel's gamble largely succeeds in bringing Copernicus and his intellectually and religiously tumultuous time alive. B&w illus., maps. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
It is an interesting coincidence that revolutionary books of science, such as those by Newton and Darwin, had to be prodded into print by outsiders. Copernicus, whose earthshaking story is recounted by popular science biographer Sobel (Galileo's Daughter, 1999), had to be nudged, too. A business manager of Catholic Church property by day and an astronomer by night, Copernicus in 1539 received an unannounced stranger from Germany, one Rheticus (see Jack Repcheck's Copernicus' Secret, 2007). Rheticus stayed for two years, but little survives about what he did with or said to Copernicus, though the encounter resulted in Rheticus engineering the publication of De revolutionibus. The evidentiary gap inspired Sobel to insert into this biography a two-act play that dramatizes Rheticus cajoling Copernicus to go public with the heliocentric theory. However readers respond to Sobel's unorthodox addition, her account of Copernicus' life nicely balances personal details and such historical forces that knocked Copernicus around as the Reformation and the Teutonic Knights. Sobel's latest assiduously researched, humanistic biography may prove irresistible to history-of-science fans.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FEW scientists die secure in the knowledge that their greatest discoveries will outlive them, but some of those who missed out make you wince. Gregor Mendel and Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered, respectively, genes and DNA in the 1860s, yet both died obscure and unappreciated. Alfred Wegener's fundamental theory of plate tectonics drew scorn until the 1950s - two decades after he died. Last year, the biologist Ralph M. Steinman died just three days before winning a Nobel Prize. Nicolaus Copernicus escaped a similar fate - but only barely. He devised his theory of a sun-centered universe in about 1510, and then rebuffed all pleas to publish (beyond a frustratingly sketchy outline he distributed) for three decades after. Then, in 1539, an enigmatic Lutheran mathematician and aspiring astrologer named Rheticus showed up, unwanted, at Copernicus's door in Varmia, in modern Poland, after crossing illegally into Catholic territory. (It was the Reformation.) For months Rheticus begged Copernicus to make his full heliocentric doctrine public - and somehow prevailed. Copernicus sent a manuscript to the printers in 1542. No one knows how Rheticus succeeded, since virtually no evidence of their discussion survives. But rather than sigh over this lacuna, as most historians do, Dava Sobel came up with an odd but artful solution: She wrote a two-act play to dramatize the encounter, and sandwiched it between 150 pages of nonfiction narrative. "A More Perfect Heaven" is the amalgamated result. Structuring the book like this lets Sobel sidestep a common complaint about historical dramas - that readers don't know what's fact and what's artistic license. Like a long playbill précis, the narrative sandwich enables her to lay out the evidence, however meager, for some of the play's more startling moments. At times, you can almost see her imagination seize some small fact and spiral outward into a subplot about, say, Copernicus's concubine or Rheticus's young male lover. Theater turns out to be a good medium for probing the scientific controversies as well. Though contemporary hit plays like "Copenhagen" and "Photograph 51" have revived the genre, science drama traces its roots back at least to Galileo, who took up Copernicus's cause by writing dramatic dialogues. Galileo wrote dialogues for a simple reason: If you want to know how to analyze ideas and weigh evidence and refute objections - in short, how to persuade - then for most people dramatizations are superior to scientific papers. Sobel is especially successful at animating a crucial debate in the mid-1500s: How serious was Copernicus? In her telling, Rheticus, like most scholars, saw heliocentrism as a convenient mathematical tool for casting horoscopes and calculating the date of Easter, little more. Copernicus must convince the 25-year-old scholar that he does indeed want to rearrange the heavens - that the earth really moves. Sobel's playlet is satisfying because readers can feel Rheticus's anguish, and wonder if we too would have the courage to rearrange our worldviews. Minus Rheticus, Copernicus could have become another Pierre de Fermat or Pythagoras - someone who teased us with whiffs of big ideas, but died leaving more questions than answers about what he actually understood. Almost 500 years later, no one knows what argument or plea or even taunt made Copernicus face himself and say, I must publish. But Sobel supplies a plausible, and stirring, version of his transformation. And thankfully, her play hews true to the ending that makes Copernicus's life story so poignant: While waiting to see his manuscript, Copernicus suffered a stroke and began drifting in and out of consciousness for months. He held on just long enough to die, at peace, clutching the pages that made him immortal. Some thought Copernicus's heliocentrism was only a convenient tool for casting horoscopes. Sam Kean is the author of "The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements."
Choice Review
This popular account of the life and work of Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) sums up the current state of knowledge about this founder of the scientific revolution that saw belief in an Earth-centered universe replaced by that of a sun-centered solar system within a starry universe. Sobel, author of the popular Galileo's Daughter (CH, May'00, 37-5076) and Longitude (CH, Mar'96, 33-3880), focuses on the social, religious, and political context of Copernicus's life. Copernicus was well educated and became a physician and canon in Varmia, Poland. As canon, he oversaw the buying and selling of farmland and urged standardization of coinage. He bravely stood up to the harassment of the Teutonic Knights. Sobel includes a two-act play that she wrote to dramatize the successful efforts of his young disciple Rheticus and his long-time friend and fellow canon Giese to convince Copernicus to publish his great work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Several chapters at the end of the book are devoted to the impact of Copernicus and to the contributions of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo to the broader acceptance of the sun-centered solar system. Summing Up: Recommended. General, academic, and professional readers, all levels. M. Dickinson formerly, Maine Maritime Academy
Kirkus Review
Sobel (The Planets, 2005, etc.) offers another meaty-while-mellifluous story of science.The author elegantly fashions the life of Copernicus as a two-act play bracketed by historically documented narratives that cover the periods before and after the arrival of Georg Joachim Rheticus at Copernicus's Polish doorstep in 1539. Some 30 years earlier, Copernicus had roughed out a heliocentric theory of the universe and quietly distributed it to a number of mathematicians. Word of it reached the ears of Rheticus, a 25-year-old professor of mathematics at the university in Wittenberg. He arrived at Copernicus's house as an "unexpected guest" and an altogether problematical one: a Lutheran during a time of anti-heretical fervor. Sobel draws Copernicus as a devout Catholic, but not unsympathetic to the Lutherans; he reluctantly agreed to Rheticus staying on when the youth awakened in him the desire to finish his great work and get it published. Sobel presents an illuminating piece of work, bringing to life the old man and the young man's days spent together and in particular Rheticus' coming to terms, the bending of his mind, around Copernicus's theory, which was more radical than he understood. Readers are fit squarely in Rheticus' shoes via Sobel's neat act of transport, there to share his bafflement and resistance. The book closes with the tale of the fate ofOn the Revolutions; just as Copernicus had worried, it dismayed the hidebound and the "babblers, who claim to be judges of astronomy, although completely ignorant of the subject...such men are not above twisting some passage of Scripture to their purpose, to censure me."A liquid entertainment of choice passages on the thoughts and deeds of Copernicus.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Maps | p. xi |
| "To The Reader, Concerning This Work" | p. xiii |
| Part 1 Prelude | |
| Chapter 1 Moral Rustic, and Amorous Epistles | p. 3 |
| Chapter 2 The Brief Sketch | p. 17 |
| Chapter 3 Leases of Abandoned Farmsteads | p. 29 |
| Chapter 4 On the Method of Minting Money | p. 41 |
| Chapter 5 The Letter Against Werner | p. 52 |
| Chapter 6 The Bread Tariff | p. 66 |
| Part 2 Interplay | |
| "And the Sun Stood Still" Act I | p. 85 |
| "And the Sun Stood Still" Act II 131 | |
| Part 3 Aftermath | |
| Chapter 7 The First Account | p. 163 |
| Chapter 8 On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres | p. 179 |
| Chapter 9 The Basel Edition | p. 189 |
| Chapter 10 Epitome of Copernican Astronomy | p. 202 |
| Chapter 11 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, Ptolemaic and Copernictn | p. 214 |
| Chapter 12 An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus | p. 226 |
| Thanksgiving | p. 237 |
| Copernican Chronology | p. 239 |
| Notes on the Quotations | p. 247 |
| Bibliography | p. 257 |
| Illustration Credits | p. 263 |
| Index | p. 265 |
