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Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Nicolaus Copernicus," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Nicolaus Copernicus in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Nicolaus Copernicus when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Nicolaus Copernicus, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
1543 saw the publication of one of the most significant scientific works ever written: "De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres)", in which Nicolaus Copernicus presented a radically different structure of the cosmos by placing the sun, and not the earth, at the centre of the universe.But did anyone take notice? - Harvard astrophysicist Owen Gingerich was intrigued by the bold claim made by Arthur Koestler in his bestselling "The Sleepwalkers" that sixteenth-century Europe paid little attention to the groundbreaking, but dense, masterpiece. Gingerich embarked on a thirty-year odyssey to examine every extant copy to prove Koestler wrong...Logging thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of miles Gingerich uncovered a treasure trove of material on the life of a book and the evolution of an idea. His quest led him to copies once owned by saints, heretics, and scallywags, by musicians and movie stars; some easily accessible, others almost lost to time, politics and the black market.Part biography of a book and a man, part bibliographic and bibliophilic quest, Gingerich's "The Book Nobody Read" is an utterly captivating piece of writing, a testament to the power both of books and the love of books. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

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.

COPERNICUS, THE PLANETS, REVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE
The novelist and all-rounder Arthur Koestler wrote a bestselling popular history of astronomy `The Sleepwalkers' (1959), in which he rated one of astronomy's key historic texts as a dull, unread technical treatise that failed to have the impact in the sixteenth century that might be supposed for all its subsequent fame. The book is `De revolutionibus orbium coelestium' (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) by the Polish Catholic Nicolas Copernicus. A good first or second edition now might fetch up to half a million dollars at auction. This book is the autobiographical account of Owen Gingerich, a Smithsonian professor of astronomy and history of science at Harvard, who determined to find out if this panning of a great work could be true, or at least, how true it was. His method was to locate and examine every known accessible copy of the great book, both first edition of 1543, and second edition of 1566. The annotations, marginalia, provenances, and surrounding documents would reveal the true story. Not too surprisingly, Koestler was radically wrong. But the main interest of the story is the sheer time and persistence over three decades and two continents, and the array of skills and resources required to complete a very good but still partial review of the individual volumes in libraries and collections both public and private.

As history of science and history of ideas this is a very interesting book, although it focuses on just one book. As it turns out, it also happens to be a very effective illustration of how real science is done, how the scientific community worked then, and how hard it is to overturn a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, even when the minds engaged are the most brilliant and most informed available. How little did they imagine how closely their marginal notes would be checked and cross-checked over four hundred years later. And again, although this is far from the intention of the book, it reveals a great deal about the much-supposed conflict between science and religion from the time of Copernicus and Galileo onwards. The revealing of the political and religious aspects of the progress of science is often at variance with the commonly told biased versions in the public domain. The actual behaviour of the Catholic church in very belatedly censoring the book only amounted to the crossing out of a few lines of the book, and then only lightly if the censor so desired (as was often the case), and this occurred only in Italy, not in Catholic France or Spain, and only two-thirds of the copies in Italy were actually censored! Just as interestingly, the actual production of the book, virtually the summation of the life work of the Copernicus, Catholic canon of the Frauenburg Cathedral, only happened with the skilful persuasion of his one and only student, the Protestant Georg Rheticus. Although his is not a well known name now, he had a large part to play in the production of the great book. It should be noted that the Protestant Reformation was not yet fully hardened into battle lines at this time though - the Council of Trent had not yet happened.

Some of the harder aspects of the book are apparent in that it assumes a fair amount of background knowledge (but luckily no real maths), in astronomy. I suppose the fact that it makes me inclined to work backwards and read Koestler's `Sleepwalkers' is a good thing! There are lots of observations on the fall of communism in the USSR and the removal of the Berlin wall - as history wrote itself, while Professor Gingerich followed his historical passion. An interesting companion view of the science-religion nexus of supposed conflict is found in the chapter on Galileo in `Six Modern Myths', by Philip Samson (2000), published by IVP. This takes the conflict myth as its starting point, so forming a very pertinent contrast and confirmation of the Copernican story. One of the unexpected bonuses of the book is the liberal sprinkling of interesting accounts of FBI interventions in chasing book thieves, and the good professor's court appearances and general services as a world authority on the book. An American Protestant professor of the 21st century, defending the property rights of the world's libraries in an astronomical text by a Catholic canon of the 16th century - now that's ecumenicism!

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.

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Product Description
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 an extraordinary book and its ideas. Prodded by Arthur Koestler’s claim that when it was first published nobody read Copernicus’s De revolutionibus—in which Copernicus first suggested that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe—renowned astro-historian Owen Gingerich embarked on a three-decade-long quest to see in person all 600 extant copies of the first and second editions of De revolutionibus, including those owned and annotated by Galileo and Kepler. Tracing the ownership of individual copies through the hands of saints, heretics, scalawags, and bibliomaniacs, Gingerich proves conclusively—four and a half centuries after its publication—that De revolutionibus was as inspirational as it was revolutionary. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (34)

Myths exposed in this history of science detective story.
Gingerich, astronomer and science historian, is perhaps the world's leading Copernicus scholar. This is the account of his extensive 35-year efforts to locate, examine, sometimes appraise, and ultimately catalogue all extant volumes of the first and second editions (1543 and 1566) of one of history's most important science texts, Nicholas Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.

Most notably, Gingerich dispatches a few myths about Copernicus' book, and myth number one has to do with the title of the present volume. It was widely expected that De revolutionibus was indeed "the book nobody read." That is, it seemed apparent that its potential readership would have been rather small (16th century mathematicians, astronomers, and perhaps a few additional polymaths/scholars). A few dozen--at most-- were projected as having been potential readers. Gingerich extrapolates from the scant evidence that each of the first 2 editions numbered 400-500 copies. This would mean that the famous book was largely unread, so went the pervasive thinking. But Gingerich's work revealed something rather different. A related myth instructed that religious opposition managed to quash De revolutionibus for at least a century. This turns out to be mostly untrue. The book had been read and circulated/exchanged/discussed by scientists, both amateur and professional, both Catholic and Protestant, throughout Europe for several decades before making Rome's `Index of Prohibited Books' ("until corrected") in 1616. Rome's censure: crossing out a few sentences and annotating that certain ideas were `hypothetical.' Many Catholic scholars were enthusiastic about the Copernican insights, and the volumes that were "corrected" in the prescribed manner were rather few, exceedingly few outside of Italy. Even in the libraries of Catholic monasteries few volumes were altered as Rome had prescribed. As to putative Protestant (Lutheran) opposition to the book and its astronomical theories, this is essentially `urban legend', a myth developed in Andrew Dickson White's 1894 book (Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom), but without any substantive evidence.

Portions of Gingerich's book read like a `who done it' mystery/adventure. Legends are critically examined, and often found wanting. Connections are revealed, history is exposed, questions remain. This is certainly a book that the student of science history must read.

A Book You Should Read
I love this book. It is a historical who-dun-itcentered on the marginal notes made in the copies of De Revolutionibus On the Revolutions: Nicholas Copernicus Complete Works (Foundations of Natural History), the book by Nicholas Copernicus that started the Age of Science. In loose connection with the 500 year anniversary of Copernicus' birth in 1973, Dr. Gingerich set out on the "boring" task of compiling a list of all known copies of the first and second editions of the book. This task took almost 30 years, and in the process, Dr. Gingerich used the marginalia to reconstruct a lively history of the early participants (and opponents) in the Copernican revolution which spanned the lives of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei.

For me it was a slow read -- not because of technical detail but because it is such a fascinating story that I didn't want to go at my normal pace. I can hardly think of higher praise than this. I relish stories of people who worked at the true frontiers of science, as these men did.

Just one small carp. The footnote on p. 191 is a bit misleading. Commenting on a fresco "observing the eclipse at Christ's passion" he states "There couldn't have been an eclipse at that time. Jesus was crucified the day after Passover..." This is wrong on two counts. True, there was no solar eclipse (as the fresco indicates according to a communication with the author), but there was a lunar eclipse at the crucifixion (which Peter refers to in Acts 2:20). Second, the crucifixion was on the "day of preparation" for the Passover -- just preceding the Passover feast. See the Wikipedia article on the Crucifixion of Jesus citing the 1983 article by Humphreys and Waddington, and the dvd The Star of Bethlehem which also mentions the eclipse. The crucifixion was on Friday, April 3, 33 AD.

I recommend this book as bedside reading for anyone interested in a great who-dun-it.

HMSChallenger

The Book That Nobody Could Stop
Of course, Copernicus' book On Revolutions is really the book no one admitted to reading, if your country was Roman Catholic. Gingrich performs a task that seems impossible: track down every surviving copy of Copernicus' great opus. We also get a quick look at the printing and bookbinding business, and the university system of the day. And we discover that astronomy was not even Copernicus' day job that he had a lot of other social and business responsibilities, something that I did not know. We find how it was incumbent upon other astronomers and scholars who read this work, discussed, and expanded it, which championed and smuggled it around, that increased it popularity. It interesting how some modern institutions is not exactly sure how many and where their copies are. A fun journey into what the Renaissance since was all about. And of course, Copernicus not aware of this trouble he caused because he died after the "galley proofs," but before publication.

Not much more than a collection of anecdotes
This book consists of a collection of anecdotes rather than a comprehensive view and of the very interesting question: How revolutionary ideas propagate in the scientific community, and through the history. The author managed to track almost all copies of the book, as if this was his main goal, but did not manage to organize the data into a nice or clear picture.

Following James ("The Bookworm") Bond adventures
This review title was not chosen to make fun of the author.Following the trail of this world-traveling antique book sleuth gives the reader an eye-opening account of the rare-books universe, and the various heroes and denizens who swim around there.It will be obvious fairly quickly that Owen Gingerich's book title is an irony, as it becomes very clear that many, many people read Copernicus's "De Revolutionibus" in the past centuries.His project, the Copernicus Census, aimed at nothing less than rounding up the traceable copies of Revolutionibus, verifying the various authenticities involved with each copy (and parts of copies), and looking for the owners and users of each copy from any ancient marginal notes.We average readers surely have no idea of the exhausting amount of labor required for such a project.One finishes "The Book Nobody Read" grateful that Mr. Copernicus did not publish thousands of copies!

Although some reviews (rightfully) commented about the number of "startling discoveries" the author made through the book, the reader must remember that the Census took a couple decades to put to bed.Clearly, the work of antiquarians must be eons of boredom and wasted travel, punctuated by a moment of "startle" from time to time.It is good to see that professionals in the, shall we say, humanities fields, sometimes have good technical knowledge as the author does.Anyone having tackled the actual version of Revolutionibus (English, of course), will understand that a good handle on mathematics is necessary to get through the Copernicuswork.

Much of the text involves similar kinds of story:travels to libraries and collections around the world, discussions with many persons (sometimes in foreign tongues), hours of eye-breaking reading, deadlines and promises to keep, comparisons of discoveries among colleagues.The author's style is smooth and "reassuring," making those similar stories easy to read and remember.The book begins and ends with a court case where the author was called as an expert antiquarian witness in a Revolutionibus fraud case.Nice device!Also, the reader will enjoy the appearance at various times of the colleague Dr. Rosen, a knowledgeable but stuffy foil.By all means read this one.
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The theoretical physicist shares his latest thoughts on the nature of space and time in this anthology of selections from Princeton University Press. Along with eminent colleagues, Hawking extends theoretical frontiers by speculating on the big questions of modern cosmology. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The history and origins of cosmology
Want understand what Stephen Hawking and his colleagues are talking about, but have no idea about the history of cosmology?Then this is the book you're looking for.

This collection of texts taken from writings by Plato, Copernicus, Galilei, Ptolomy, Einstein, Hubble and other theorists discus what the universe is made of, how it works and (ultimately) what our place is in the Grand Scheme of Things, offering good insight into how our knowledge of the universe has developed over the last 40 centuries from Babylonian times to the 20th Century.

As this book was originally published in 1957 and reprinted in 1965, the latest theories are not included.It is therefore not a book for mathematicians or physicists interested in learning the latest theories, but rather a book for those interested in a well-written, general introduction to the field of cosmology.

Great edutainment of the universe ...
July 7, 1999 I would like to take a minute to thank Audio Scholar for putting together this audio novel which consists of 4 essays on the theories of the Universe.I thoroughly enjoyed it as did my 17 month oldson who gets to listen to them to as his bedtime stories.One night hekept me up until 2am until I turned the tape back on!Normally he justgets to listen from 8 - 10pm. I would like to encourage Audio Scholar toproduce more of these types of edutainment audio programs on tape or CD. In many instances I wouldn't mind seeing the programs extend to 4 tapes orCD's. I love listening to scientific books on my way to work and also loveto share them with my 17 month old son as his bedtime stories. My budgetfor this type of audio edutainment is $1,000 a year and the more scienceand physics books abridged the better. I would love to see the followingsubjects abrigded to audio for distribution through Amazon.com.Maths,sciences, physics, astrophysics, geology, any and all space related topics,gravity, unified field theory, electromagnetics, electronics,microproccessor design, optics, micro-optics, electro-optics, light and thetheory there of, satellites, satellite orbital mechanics and relatedtheory. I do not have time in my busy daily schedule to read very much, butdo I have five hours a day to listen and learn. If you make it I willsupport it. Arnold D Veness ... Read more

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This book is the outgrowth of a book on the same subject published many years ago in England. ... Read more

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free.This is an OCR edition with typos.Excerpt from book:PART TWOTHE RECEPTION OF THE COPERNICAN THEORY.CHAPTER I. Opinions And Arguments In The Sixteenth Century. DURING the life-time of Copernicus, Roman Catholic churchmen had been interested in his work: Cardinal Schonberg wrote for full information, Widmanstadt reported on it to Pope Clement VII and Copernicus had dedicated his book to Pope Paul III.1 But after his death, the Church authorities apparently paid little heed to his theory until some fifty years later when Giordano Bruno forced it upon their ' attention in his philosophical teachings. Osiander's preface had probably blinded their eyes to its implications. The Protestant leaders were not quite so urbane in their attitude. While Copernicus was still alive, Luther is reported2 to have referred to this "new astrologer" who sought to prove that the earth and not the firmament swung around, saying: "The fool will overturn the whole science of astronomy. But as the / Holy Scriptures state, Joshua bade the sun stand still and not f the earth." Melancthon was more interested in this new idea, perhaps because of the influence of Rheticus, his colleague in the University of Wittenberg and Copernicus's great friend and supporter; but he too preferred not to dissent from the accepted opinion of the ages.3 Informally in a letter to a friend he'See before, p. 30."Luther: Tischreden; IV, 575; "Der Narr will die ganze Kunst Astron- omiae umkehren. Aber wie die heilige Schrift anzeigt, so heiss Josua die Sonne still stehen, und nicht das Erdreich."""Non est autem hominis bene instituti dissentire a consensu tot sae- culorum." Praefatio Philippi Melanthonis, 1531, in Sacro-Busto: Libel- lus de Spfurra (no date). - --.-Jimplies the absurdity of the new teaching,1 and in his Initia Doctrina Physics; he go... ... Read more

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Due to the very old age and scarcity of this book, many of the pages may be hard to read due to the blurring of the original text, possible missing pages, missing text and other issues beyond our control. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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The essays in Copernirus and his Successors deal both with the influences on Copernicus, including that of Greek and Arabic thinkers, and with his own life and attitudes. They also examine how he was seen by contemporaries and finally describe his relationship to other scientists, including Galileo, Brahe and Kepler.
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Represents the best in recent histories of the subject
Clear, careful scholarship makes this book a new authority that correctsthe biased work by the likes of Draper and White.Detailed chapters cover topics that are missed completely by other authors.It is also fun to read! ... Read more

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COULD RELIGIOUS FANATICS END SCIENCE? What if scientists were too afraid to publish their work because political and religious fanatics threatened them with death? What would it take for a scientist to risk execution and share his or her discovery with the world? In the early 1500s, a little known, highly inquisitive Polish Catholic astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, divined the shattering truth about our solar system: that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and not the other way around as had been believed for centuries. There was just one hitch: The discovery was a heresy punishable by death.For more than 25 years, Copernicus spurned all efforts to publicize his work. But then a young, gay, Lutheran math genius, Joachim Rheticus, began urgently contacting the aging astronomer and begging him to publish his findings. For two years, these two scientists labored over a final revision of Copernicus’s work. The result was On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, a scientific treatise that shook Europe to its core, and ushered in the era of modern astronomy. How science won out over superstition is the subject of this extraordinary book.The meticulous research and captivating narrative—at times serious, at others light and touched by humor—is based upon an intimate knowledge of these two great men. The result is a tribute to their monumental work and to the boundless power of discovery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An inspirational account of the history of the great astronomer Copernican
The Stranger Behind The Copernican Revolution by literary historian Ulrich Mache is an inspirational account of the history of the great astronomer Copernican who was the first to discover that it was actually the Earth which revolved around the sun as opposed to the age-old belief that the sun circled the Earth. As The Stranger Behind The Copernican Revolution enlightens the readers on the discoveries acknowledgment punishable by death, they will learn of the young mathematician Joachim Rheticus' search for the aging astronomer, eventually teaming up to spend another two years perfecting the documentation of Copernican's discoveries. The Stranger Behind The Copernican Revolution is very strongly recommended to all students of astronomical discovery and progression, as well as students of history and revolution in philosophy that advances in astronomy as a science has had.
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