By Lawrence Goldstone.
The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus
By Owen Gingerich
Walker, 306 pages, $25
In 1959, a young astrophysicist named Owen Gingerich happened to read “The Sleepwalkers,” Arthur Koestler’s history of astronomy. Koestler had insisted that although Nicolaus Copernicus had become a scientific icon for being the first man to demonstrate that the Earth revolves around the sun, his famous 1543 work “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri Sex” (“Six Books on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres”) had been so dense and boring that his contemporaries couldn’t get through it. “The book nobody read,” Koestler called it.
In 1970, Gingerich, who was by then teaching the history of astronomy at Harvard University, saw a copy of “De Revolutionibus” that had been profusely annotated by a leading 16th Century astronomer and became curious to find out if Koestler might have been wrong. From that curiosity was spawned one of the most astonishing and obsessive feats of scientific gumshoeing ever undertaken.
For three decades, covering untold thousands of miles, Gingerich viewed every known copy of the first and second editions of Copernicus’ masterwork, 597 in all. In addition to the obvious rare book troves–Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the Library of Congress–he traveled to such exotic locations as Beijing, Vilnius, Guadalajara, Plock (in Poland), Tartu (in Estonia) and New Haven (in Connecticut).
In order to gain access to restricted volumes, Gingerich charmed Iron Curtain bureaucrats and cajoled Vatican librarians. To help with identification or to locate lost copies, he enlisted handwriting analysts, badgered rare-book dealers and co-opted other professors. He researched provenance, pored over marginalia, compared handwritings and extrapolated theory, then put his entire odyssey together in an utterly fascinating work, “The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus.”
The author could not have chosen a more enticing subject: Copernicus is a glorious study in contradictions. He began work on his theory because he was appalled at the cumbersome nature of Ptolemy’s Earth-centered model, then created a system every bit as cumbersome as the one it replaced. He decried the use of contrivances that Ptolemy employed to account for inconsistencies, then resorted to the same contrivances for the same reasons. To achieve perhaps the greatest milestone in the history of astronomy, he relied almost entirely on opportunistic, naked-eye observations of the heavens from a turret in a cathedral located in a town noted for mist and cloud cover. He developed a theory that was as direct a threat to Roman Catholic Church power and dogma as was ever promulgated, yet he only had the luxury to develop his ideas because of a guaranteed lifetime income from that same church. A pious Catholic during a time of great religious strife in Europe, he allowed himself to be persuaded by one Protestant to publish his theory, then allowed another Protestant to print it and a third to edit it. Even then, without a despicable piece of chicanery by the Protestant editor, “De Revolutionibus” might have been totally suppressed and Copernicus himself reduced to a scientific footnote. Without the author’s knowledge or permission, the editor inserted an unsigned preface declaring the theory to be only “hypothesis,” thus making it at least tentatively bearable to church fathers.
It becomes clear fairly early in the chase that Gingerich is going to prove that Koestler was grossly incorrect. He finds copy after heavily notated copy, many with scribbling in the very sections that Koestler claimed had been ignored. The fun is watching him link streams of thought by connecting one copy to another, or, in some cases, realizing that one copy contains notes in two distinct handwritings, and then uncovering the evidence to determine whose they were. His discovery from the comments in two editions that astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler, the man who perfected Copernican astronomy, had been introduced to heliocentric theory by his teacher, Michael Maestlin, with whom he then discussed his discovery that the “hypothesis” preface was bogus, is the kind of thing one generally encounters only in Sherlock Holmes.
Gingerich is an indefatigable researcher and serves up some beguiling esoterica. When he noticed that Kepler’s looping diagram of the movement of Mars was labeled panis quadragesmalis, he knew that the first word meant “bread” but could not find an English equivalent for the second, although it seemed to have something to do with “forty.” After an exhaustive search, he discovered that it meant “belonging to the period of Lent.” Unwilling to leave it at that, he checked further and found that what Kepler was alluding to in his diagram was a new treat that had just been invented as a Lenten favor for children: the pretzel.
“The Book Nobody Read” is actually two books, a bibliographic detective story and a history of science–and, oddly for a man who teaches the latter, that is where the professor sometimes falls short. He is so familiar with his subject that he often assumes previous knowledge that the average reader will lack. For example, on a number of occasions he refers to the Alfonsine Tables, which seem to have something to do with positions in the heavens, but he never offers a cogent, layman’s explanation of what they are. (In fact, the tables were listings of the positions of the planets on different days of the year, compiled in the 13th Century by about 50 astronomers for King Alfonso X of Castile. Copernicus and other early astronomers used these tables as a reference.)
Sometimes the explanations he does offer are unnecessarily dense, as with epicycles, one of the keys to the Ptolemaic and Copernican models. An epicycle is a circle whose center lies on the circumference of a larger circle. Ancient and medieval astronomers had noticed that planets such as Mars had a disquieting habit of occasionally seeming to move backward in the sky before turning around and moving forward again. The phenomenon was called retrograde motion, and neither Ptolemy nor Copernicus, whose orbits were perfect circles, could explain it. Eventually, each postulated–incorrectly–that the planets must be maintaining little orbits on epicycles while completing their larger orbits, much as the moon orbits the Earth. Unlike the moon, however, these planets were not orbiting anything except an arbitrary point. Once Kepler demonstrated that planetary orbits were not circles but ellipses, retrograde motion was explained, epicycles were discarded, and modern astronomy began. While Gingerich discusses epicycles at some length, only the most persistent reader will understand from his description why epicycles became necessary and why they later became so contentious.
There is, however, no denying the overall achievement. By the time he completed his pilgrimage in 2002, Gingerich had proved not only that Copernicus had been read, but that “De Revolutionibus” had ignited the most intense scientific debate in 300 years. Virtually every noted astronomer or scientific theorist had either owned or read a copy, and the author links the refinement of the theory from one generation to the next with dauntless scholarship and staggering perseverance. Although more-casual readers may find sections of “The Book Nobody Read” heavy sledding, bibliophiles or those interested in the history of science will savor every page.
