The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus

Rating:
Summary: A REVOLUTIONARY BOOK
Review: Owen Gingerich's "The Book Nobody Read" is a revolutionary book about Copernicus's "De Revolutionibus" (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). Gingerich gives a fascinating and exquisitely-documented repudiation of Arthur Kostler's claim that Copernicus's contemporaries never read it. "De Revolutionibus" was revolutionary in 1543 because it proposed that the sun rather than the earth was the center of the solar system. In a 30 year quest, Gingerich traveled around the world examining 600 copies of "De Revolutionibus." He discovered books owned and annotated in the margins by Galileo, Kepler, and many other lesser known astronomers.

Gingerich uncovered many fascinating episodes that ultimately led to the acceptance of Copernicus's theory about a century after its publication. For example, an anonymous "Ad Lectorem" (to the reader) was written on the back of the title page to avoid objections from the Roman Catholic Church. The "Ad Lectorem," which Kepler later revealed was written by Osiander (who proofread the book), said that the cosmology in the book was merely hypothetical, and that "perhaps a philosopher will seek after truth but an astronomer will just take what is simplest, and neither will know anything certain unless it has been divinely revealed to him." Newton's theory of gravity and motion contributed to the acceptance of Copenicus's theory.

Gingerich's book provides compelling evidence in support of Thomas Kuhn's "The Structures of Scientific Revolutions." Kuhn proposed the revolutionary idea for 1962 that the history of science is not a logical and linear progression, but periods of slow progress followed by intellectually turbulent paradigm shifts exemplified by Copernicus.

Paul H. Carr
http://MirrorOfNature.org
AF Research Laboratory Emeritus
Bedford, MA 01731

Rating:
Summary: A superb biography of a book
Review: The period from Copernicus to Newton is certainly one of the richest and most important in the history of astronomy. Material covering this period is plentiful and one of the chief challenges for the casual historian of astronomy is culling through the options and deciding what to read.

Certainly biographies figure high on the priority list. Here the selections reflect the amount of material available about the lives of the principle players. Galileo and Newton have no shortage of books devoted to their lives and work. Biographies of Copernicus are rare because relatively little is known of his life. Kepler and Tycho fall somewhere in the middle.

The current work of by Owen Gingerich is a very different take. It is essentially the biography of a book: Copernicus' seminal De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.
Gingerich has been in a hunt for surviving copies of the 1st and 2nd editions of Copernicus' De Rev for over 30 years, and this book tells the story of his journey and its rewards, trials, dead-ends, who dunits, and frustrations. Gingerich has written of his trek before, in magazines and selected articles. Many of these pieces have been released in his two excellent compilations, The Great Copernicus Chase and The Eye of Heaven, but those few pieces were only tantalizing morsels. The full course meal is in the present volume, and it is a treat.

Gingerich's census of surviving copies of De Rev presents a unique window into the development of cosmology and the slow acceptance of the heliocentric view. Early scholarly readers were in the habit of annotating their copies, pointing out their agreements and dissents, occasional passages of scripture, comments of their teachers, etc. Since many of the books passed from owner to owner over the centuries, Gingerich found many copies that contained multiple layers of annotations, marginal notes, edits, censorings, etc.

What began as a simple census of extant copies soon turned into a scientific/historic detective story as Gingerich traced the various schools of thought, teacher/student relationships, and geographic migration of ideas through 16th to 18th century Europe. The result is a fascinating, personal account of the journey, detailing many of Gingerich's wrong turns and dead ends as well as the brilliant deductions and "aha" moments as he traveled the globe and interacted with the community of Copernicus scholars, rare book dealers, and often, the seamy underside of library theft and international looting during wartime.

The title, by the way, is lifted from Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers, a work which Gingerich read as a graduate student. Koestler referred to De Rev as "the book nobody read," and Gingerich was inspired to find out if that was really true. Except for the opening chapter on cosmology, De Rev is a murderously technical and geometrical treatise, and could only be understood by those well-trained in mathematics. But as Gingerich soon learned, it was far from ignored.

Gingerich's book has much to add to any history of the period. De Rev was owned by virtually all of the important figures in the history of astronomy. Tycho, Kepler, Galileo and Newton all figure prominently in the story, and Gingerich's clear prose and knack for story telling will give even the uninitiated reader a pleasurable introduction to one of the most fascinating periods in history. However, to the knowledgeable reader who is already familiar with the development of ideas in astronomy, this book will be hard to put down due to its unique spin on the period.

Gingerich has produced an instant classic in the history of astronomy with this book. It is a fascinating read and has already entered my personal top-ten list as a book that will be referred to again and again.