- Gingerich, Owen.
The Book Nobody Read.
New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
ISBN 0-14-303476-6.
-
There is something about astronomy which seems to invite
obsession. Otherwise, why would intelligent and seemingly rational
people expend vast amounts of time and effort to compile
catalogues of hundreds of thousands of stars, precisely measure
the positions of planets over periods of decades, travel to the
ends of the
Earth to observe
solar eclipses, get up before the crack of noon to
see a rare transit of
Mercury
or
Venus, or
burn up months of computer time finding
every planetary
transit in a quarter million year interval
around the present? Obsession it may be, but it's
also fascinating and fun, and astronomy has profited
enormously from the labours of those so obsessed,
whether on a mountain top in the dead of winter, or
carrying out lengthy calculations when tables of logarithms
were the only computational tool available.
This book chronicles one man's magnificent thirty-year
obsession. Spurred by Arthur Koestler's
The Sleepwalkers,
which portrayed Copernicus as a villain and his
magnum opus
De revolutionibus
“the book that nobody read”—“an all time worst seller”, followed by the
discovery of an obviously carefully read and heavily annotated
first edition in the library of the
Royal Observatory in
Edinburgh, Scotland, the author, an astrophysicist and Harvard
professor of the history of science, found himself inexorably
drawn into a quest to track down and examine every extant copy
of the first (Nuremberg, 1543) and second (Basel, 1566) editions
of De revolutionibus to see whether and where
readers had annotated them and so determine how widely the book,
of which about a thousand copies were printed in these
editions—typical for scientific works at the time—was read.
Unlike today, when we've been educated that writing in a book is
desecration, readers in the 16th and 17th centuries often made
extensive annotations to their books, even assigning students
and apprentices the task of copying annotations by other learned
readers into their copies.
Along the way Gingerich found himself driving down an abandoned
autobahn in the no man's land between East and West Germany,
testifying in the criminal trial of a book rustler,
discovering the theft of copies which librarians were
unaware were missing, tracking down the provenance of
pages in “sophisticated” (in the original sense of the word)
copies assembled from two or more incomplete originals,
attending the auction at Sotheby's of a first edition with
a dubious last leaf which sold for US$750,000 (the author, no
impecunious naïf in the rare book game, owns two copies of
the second edition himself), and discovering the
fate of many less celebrated books from that era (toilet
paper). De revolutionibus has survived the
vicissitudes of the centuries quite well—out of about 1000
original copies of the first and second editions, approximately
six hundred exemplars remain.
Aside from the adventures of the Great Copernicus Chase, there
is a great deal of information about Copernicus and the
revolution he discovered and sparked which dispels many
widely-believed bogus notions such as:
- Copernicus was a hero of secular science
against religious fundamentalism. Wrong!
Copernicus was a deeply religious doctor of church law,
canon of the Roman Catholic Varmian Cathedral in Poland. He
dedicated the book to Pope Paul III.
- Prior to Copernicus, astronomers relying on Ptolemy's
geocentric system kept adding epicycles on epicycles
to try to approximate the orbits of the planets.
Wrong!
This makes for a great story, but there is no evidence
whatsoever for “epicycles on epicycles”. The authoritative
planetary ephemerides in use in the age of Copernicus were
calculated using the original Ptolemaic system without
additional refinements, and there are no known examples of
systems with additional epicycles.
- Copernicus banished epicycles from astronomy.
Wrong!
The Copernican system, in fact, included thirty-four
epicycles! Because Copernicus believed that all planetary
motion was based on circles, just like Ptolemy he required
epicycles to approximate motion which wasn't known to be
actually elliptical prior to Kepler. In fact, the Copernican
system was no more accurate in predicting planetary positions
than that of Ptolemy, and ephemerides computed from it were
no better.
- The Roman Catholic Church was appalled by Copernicus's
suggestion that the Earth was not the centre of the cosmos and
immediately banned his book.
Wrong!
The first edition of De
revolutionibus was published in 1543. It wasn't
until 1616, more than seventy years later, that
the book was placed on the Index Librorum
Prohibitorum, and in 1620 it was permitted as
long as ten specific modifications were made. Outside
Italy, few copies even in Catholic countries were
censored according to these instructions. In Spain,
usually thought of as a hotbed of the Inquisition, the
book was never placed on the Index at
all. Galileo's personal copy has the forbidden passages
marked in boxes and lined through, permitting the
original text to be read. There is no evidence of any
copy having been destroyed on the orders of the Church,
and the Vatican library has three copies of both the first
and second editions.
Obviously, if you're as interested as I in eccentric topics like
positional astronomy, rare books, the evolution of modern
science, and the surprisingly rapid and efficient diffusion of knowledge more than
five centuries before the Internet, this is a book you're
probably going to read if you haven't already. The only flaw is
that the colour plates (at least in the UK paperback edition I read) are terribly
reproduced—they all look like nobody bothered to focus the copy
camera when the separations were made; plates 4b, 6, and 7a
through 7f, which show annotations in various copies, are
completely useless because they're so fuzzy the annotations can
barely be read, if at all.
November 2005 