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Telescopes and space missions

Telescopes and space missions

Copernicus’s revolutionary moment

01 Dec 2011

A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos
Dava Sobel
2011 Bloomsbury Publishing £14.99/$25.00hb 288pp

Statue of Copernicus
A life's legacy

In 1510 Nicolaus Copernicus conceived the project that would become the major work of his lifetime: working out the mathematical details of a heliocentric universe. By 1539 his project was substantially finished, but not only was he reluctant to publish it, he had evidently abandoned all hope of completing it successfully. Aside from his fear of rejection at the hands of biblical literalists and Aristotelians, he had encountered numerous difficulties with some of his mathematical models. In the case of the planet Mercury, the problems seemed intractable. They had, in fact, arisen from Copernicus’s axiomatic adoption of the idea that planets and other heavenly bodies must follow the uniform, circular motions of celestial spheres, which meant that his models retained geocentric residues that even his considerable ingenuity could not dispel. The complications were discouraging, and Copernicus evidently realized that something had gone terribly wrong, but he could not figure out what.

Into this depressing state of affairs stepped a young Lutheran mathematician and astrologer called Georg Joachim Rheticus. He had heard of Copernicus’s theory while on a visit to Nuremberg, Germany, and decided to travel to Frombork in north-east Poland to learn the details directly from its creator. In the course of this strange and improbable meeting, Rheticus – who was completely convinced of the correctness of the theory – persuaded Copernicus to complete the remaining details and have the book published. Though Rheticus was unable to help the older man resolve the problems with his models (the solution would come some 70 years later, when Johannes Kepler replaced circular models with elliptical orbits), his enthusiasm was evidently so infectious that Copernicus let him complete the preparations for the book’s publication. Without Rheticus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres might have completely disappeared.

When science writer Dava Sobel first heard about the meeting between Copernicus and Rheticus, and how it led to the publication of On the Revolutions, she imagined these events as a drama. Eventually, she wrote a play in two acts called And the Sun Stood Still that dramatizes the meeting, its context and Copernicus’s last days. As she explains in a foreword, however, her editor persuaded her to place this play between two narratives: one covering the life of the astronomer up to his meeting with Rheticus; and the second summarizing the circumstances of publication and its aftermath down to the present day.

Source material

The resulting book-play-book A More Perfect Heaven may or may not be a new genre, but the decision to mix fact and fiction magnifies the already inherent tensions of the story. Most notably, the narrative portions of the book acknowledge incomplete evidence, diverse interpretations, ambiguity and – in a word – uncertainty about the actual events. The dramatic part, however, requires Sobel to select from many possibilities and write in a way that is consistent with her selections.

Rheticus’s own biography suggested how Sobel should depict his initial meeting with Copernicus. When a young student, Valentin Otto, visited him in 1574, Rheticus remarked that he had been the same age as Otto when he first met Copernicus, and exclaimed “If it had not been for my journey, his work would never have seen the light of day” – so Sobel makes him a somewhat impetuous, excitable youth. Rheticus’s visit also coincided with an anti-Lutheran decree issued by Copernicus’s bishop in Frombork, so in the play Copernicus has to keep him hidden, with his close friend Tiedemann Giese aiding in the subterfuge.

More controversially, Sobel makes dramatic use of Copernicus’s relationship with his housekeeper, Anna. We do not know for certain whether she was Copernicus’ de facto wife – he consistently denied it – but Sobel leaves no doubt. Nor does she avoid Rheticus’s apparent homosexuality and alleged pederasty. In 1551 the father of a Leipzig student charged Rheticus with sodomy. The punishment for such a crime was “death by fire” so, rather than risk a trial, Rheticus fled Leipzig. After some months the university sentenced him in absentia to banishment for 101 years.

Scientific legacy

Historians may object to several details, but Sobel’s handling of these tensions is deft, light-handed and at times even humorous. Of all the decisions she makes, the most contentious for historians by far is her portrayal of Copernicus as a man totally unconcerned with astrology, even dismissive of it. The fact is that Copernicus was silent on the subject. Not a single astrological prognostication is attributable to him with certainty, whether in treatises with a different disciplinary focus, his correspondence or in comments related to his work as a medical doctor. Rheticus, by contrast, was adept at astrology, and promoted a sort of astrological interpretation of On the Revolutions in his own Narratio Prima (First Account) of 1540. Copernicus did not repudiate this interpretation, but Sobel nonetheless depicts him as disagreeing with Rheticus about astrology – albeit not in a way that would disrupt their collaboration.

The play is very short, and a performance would probably take less than an hour. I do not know whether anyone suggested that Sobel expand it, but had she wished, she could have done so by dramatizing other episodes in Copernicus’s life. His meeting in 1496 with his teacher in Bologna, the well-known astrologer Domenico Maria Novara, is a possibility, as are his decisions in 1510 to leave the retinue of his uncle, Bishop Lucas Watzenrode, and to embark on his heliocentric project.

As it stands, though, Sobel has given us accessible and readable accounts of Copernicus’s life that serve as book ends for one of the most fortuitous and fateful meetings of minds in the history of science. The play brings that meeting to life with wit and boldness. Adding the suggested preliminary scenes, however, would have made it into a full-length play, set up the dramatic encounter and denouement of the last two acts, and perhaps resolved in a more satisfactory way some of the tensions arising from Copernicus’s doubts and personal ordeals.

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