I was not surprised to read in A More Perfect Heaven about how Nicolaus Copernicus (or Niklas Koppernigk before he Latinized) “revolutionized the cosmos.” I already knew about that. He was the guy who first published something suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe, but that it went around the sun instead. What was new and impressive to me was that Copernicus was a church canon, a medical doctor, served as a bishop’s secretary and personal physician, and made his famous astronomical observations and worked out the rigorous mathematics that explained them in his spare time.
Throughout Sobel’s account of his career, Copernicus never fails to come across as a source of reasonable, tactful and intelligent calm in a storm of chaos. He managed to make himself an all-around smart guy, in the midst of the Protestant Reformation and counter-reformation, invasions of his homeland by the Teutonic knights, and all kinds of other unreasonableness, violence and bad behavior. And he seemed to recognize that he was an island of intelligence, because he didn’t have much desire to publish his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. He may have known that it would just have been declared heretical, and banned, and get him into all kinds of trouble.
Somehow, and that somehow has been lost to history, a mathematician and astrologer named Georg Joachim Rheticus convinced Copernicus to take him on as a student and eventually convinced him to publish his revolutionary new theories. About a third of A More Perfect Heaven is a play that Sobel wrote as an imagining of how Rheticus may have talked Copernicus into publishing, which is a pretty fascinating turning point in history. Copernicus suffered a stroke while On the Revolutions was being printed and didn’t live to witness the reactions, positive or negative, to his revolutionary work.
Of course now we take for granted that the earth goes around the sun and that others from Kepler and Galileo to Einstein and Heisenberg have built upon what Copernicus started to get us even closer to understanding the universe and how it works. It seems strange from this vantage point that Copernicus wasn’t inclined to shout about his brilliant work from the rooftops (remember, he didn’t just have a good idea, he did all the math to back it up), that he stayed pretty quiet about it and didn’t try to forcibly jar the world out of its ignorance. I’m pretty convinced that I’ll never exhibit the level of brilliance that Copernicus did (although I did make some pretty delicious cookies recently), but I hope to someday have the grace that he seemed to have when making his practical comments on matters domestic and universal.
A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now
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