The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus
by Owen Gingerich
Book Summary Information
Author: Owen GingerichEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2004-03-01
ISBN: 0802714153
Number of pages: 306
Publisher: Walker & Company
Book Reviews of The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus
Book Review: A Book You Should Read
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this book. It is a historical who-dun-it centered on the marginal notes made in the copies of De Revolutionibus On the Revolutions: Nicholas Copernicus Complete Works (Foundations of Natural History), the book by Nicholas Copernicus that started the Age of Science. In loose connection with the 500 year anniversary of Copernicus' birth in 1973, Dr. Gingerich set out on the "boring" task of compiling a list of all known copies of the first and second editions of the book. This task took almost 30 years, and in the process, Dr. Gingerich used the marginalia to reconstruct a lively history of the early participants (and opponents) in the Copernican revolution which spanned the lives of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei.
For me it was a slow read -- not because of technical detail but because it is such a fascinating story that I didn't want to go at my normal pace. I can hardly think of higher praise than this. I relish stories of people who worked at the true frontiers of science, as these men did.
Just one small carp. The footnote on p. 191 is a bit misleading. Commenting on a fresco "observing the eclipse at Christ's passion" he states "There couldn't have been an eclipse at that time. Jesus was crucified the day after Passover..." This is wrong on two counts. True, there was no solar eclipse (as the fresco indicates according to a communication with the author), but there was a lunar eclipse at the crucifixion (which Peter refers to in Acts 2:20). Second, the crucifixion was on the "day of preparation" for the Passover -- just preceding the Passover feast. See the Wikipedia article on the Crucifixion of Jesus citing the 1983 article by Humphreys and Waddington, and the dvd The Star of Bethlehem which also mentions the eclipse. The crucifixion was on Friday, April 3, 33 AD.
I recommend this book as bedside reading for anyone interested in a great who-dun-it.
HMSChallenger
Summary of The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus
In the spring of 1543, as the celebrated astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus lay on his deathbed, 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 posited that the sun, not Earth, was the center of the universe-is recognized as the greatest scientific work of the sixteenth century.Four and a half centuries later, astrophysicist Owen Gingerich embarked on an extraordinary quest: to see in person all extant copies of the first and second printings of De revolutionibus. He was inspired by two contradictory pieces of information: Arthur Koestler's claim, in his famous book The Sleepwalkers, that nobody had read Copernicus's famous book when it was published; and Gingerich's discovery, at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, of a first edition of De revolutionibus that had been richly annotated in the margins by Erasmus Reinhold, the leading teacher of astronomy in northern Europe in the 1540s-strongly suggesting that Koestler's statement about the book was wrong.
After three decades of investigation, and after traveling hundreds of thousands of miles-from Melbourne to Moscow, Boston to Beijing-to view more than 600 copies of De revolutionibus, Gingerich has written an utterly original book built from his experience and the remarkable insights gleaned from Copernicus's books. Eventually he found copies once owned by saints, heretics, and scalawags, by musicians, movie stars, medicine men, and bibliomaniacs. Most interesting were the copies owned and annotated by astronomers, which even today illuminate the long, reluctant process of accepting the sun-centered cosmos as a physically real description of the world, and the tensions among scientists and between science and the church. Part biography of a book and a man, part scientific exploration, part bibliographic quest, Gingerich's book will offer new appreciation of the history of science and cosmology.
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