The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus

by Owen Gingerich

Book Overview

Part biography of a book, part scientific exploration, part bibliographic detective story, The Book Nobody Read recolors the history of cosmology and offers a new appreciation of the enduring power of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802714153
• ISBN13: 9780802714152
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Walker Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

The Book Everyone Read

If I wish to determine who has read my publications or US patents, I can go to on-line sources of information. I can quickly get an idea of the influence of my work through the citations in subsequent publications. However, even citations do not necessarily assure that a work has been read. In order to find the influence of Copernicus' famous book, the author has spent decades tracking down the six hundred surviving copies of "De Revolutionibus" in the libraries of the world. He has used the marginal writings in these books to connect the books with their owners and groups of sixteenth century astronomers and mathematicians. Yes, Copernicus' book was read and analyzed by scientists throughout the western world. Gingerich's book may be of more interest to library scientists than to astronomers. However, I did find the chapter on the geocentric Ptolemaic system vs. the Copernican heliocentric system fascinating. The author dispels the myth that the Ptolemaic system needed an unmanageable number of epicycles to match calculations with observations.. He shows that the two systems yielded equivalent predictions using about the same order of complexity. As a physicist, I would argue that you can work in any coordinate system that you choose, even one in which the Earth is stationary. However, the Copernican system did simplify the calculations and more importantly does more closely express the physical reality of the solar system. The work of Copernicus paved the way for Kepler's laws including the discovery of the elliptical nature of planetary orbits. Both the geocentric and heliocentric models were based upon the theory that the orbits of celestial bodies were fundamentally circular. This was a good first approximation for matching the precision of the existing observations. It was another century and a half after Copernicus that Newton formulated a theoretical basis for explaining planetary mechanics.

First Class Detective Story

First Class Detective Story The author chronicles his 30 year search for fate of the original copies of the Copernicus's revolutionary text. This makes for a first rate detective story. The book is as hard to put down as any good mystery. Gingerich shows that the history of astronomy is interwoven with the entire history of mankind. See Also: The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus and God's Universe Highly recommended.

An introduction to bibliophilia

The story of Copernicus and his description of the heliocentric universe forms the background of this fascinating book. The scientific revolution began with Copernicus. Owen Gingerich is an astrophysicist and historian of science who began his whimsical quest in 1970 as part of the preparation for the 500th anniversary of Copernicus birth in 1973. International scholarly celebrations were planned and Gingerich was on the committee to prepare them. The question arose whether many owners of the book had actually read all the way through this massive and rather tedious tome. Gingerich happened to be visiting Scotland at the time and decided to look at a copy of "De revolutionibus," known to be in the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. To his surprise, the copy was heavily annotated all the way through. It had been very carefully read by someone. The reader had even corrected a number of errors in the text. Gingerich searched for evidence of the reader's name. Finally, he discovered the initials ER stamped on the cover. With a shock, he realized that these might be the initials of Erasmus Reinhold, the leading mathematical astronomer of the generation after Copernicus. Gingerich eventually found samples of Reinhold's writing and confirmed his hypothesis. For the next 30 years, he searched for other copies of the great work and recorded the annotations placed in the margins by owners during the Renaissance. He became an expert on Copernicus and the sociology of science in the 15th and following centuries. He also became an expert on paper-making, printing and binding. This resulted in several detective stories as book thieves and forgers were uncovered and prosecuted. I found the details of the book-making science nearly as interesting as the main story and have ordered books on early printing and paper making. This is a book for those interested in history and in astronomy. Occasionally the details get to be slow going but these spots are few and the story moves along well. If you are interested in the history of the Renaissance, this will fill in places missing in most political histories. It is excellent writing and excellent history.

A fascinating mix of history, science, and bibliomania

It's remarkable that a complicated science book published more than 460 years ago could come alive in the pages of a new book, but that's the case in The Book Nobody Read-the story of astronomer Owen Gingerich's 30-year quest to see in person every existing copy of Nicolaus Copernicus's revolutionary 1543 book De revolutionibus, which for the first time suggested that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the universe. Gingerich found copies originally owned by Galileo, Kepler, and a host of important figures in the 16th century, many of them annotated-and in those annotations he found fascinating information about the debate between scientists and the Catholic Church over the true state of the universe, and about how knowledge spread in the 16th century. Along the way he shows us how he found the books (all over the world, from Beijing and Melbourne to Europe, Scandinavia, and America); takes us to the trial of a man accused of stealing a copy (Gingerich was the expert witness for the prosecution) and to a dramatic auction of another copy (he often consults to auction houses); offers intriguing details on how Copernicus's massive book was printed and speculates on how many copies would have been printed; and perhaps most interestingly, weaves into his story those of 16th- and 17th-century scientific intellectuals whose insights are cornerstones of our knowledge today.Book jackets often overstate a book's significance, but the last paragraph of this jacket description seems very accurate: "Part biography of a book, part scientific exploration, part bibliographic detective story, The Book Nobody Read recolors the history of cosmology and offers new appreciation of the enduring power of an extraordinary book and its ideas." This is one of the smartest books I've read in a long time.