The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus Book

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.Read More