Jack Oughton De Revolutionibus - A Book

Nobody Read?

D
e Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On The Revolutions Of The Heavenly
Spheres) is the ultimate work of the multi-talented reclusive genius, Nicolaus
Copernicus. It is known as the writing that began the Copernican
Revolution, one of the most significant astronomical paradigm shifts in human
history, dislodging the millennia old geocentric hypothesis. It has also been argued
that this book was the catalyst for the Scientific Revolution of the 16th century. The
scientific revolution saw massive progress made in everything from biology to
chemistry, as the limiting shackles of millennia of religious dogma and persecution
began to loosen their grip on thought in Europe.

De Revolutionibus’ title page, Second Edition.

Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian born polymath, who immigrated to the UK in the
1940s. A driven man, he renounced his Jewish religious heritage, became an
outspoken critic of Communism, was Knighted in the 1970s, and as a lifelong
advocate of voluntary euthanasia; took his own life with his wife by a drug overdose
on March 3, 1983. He wrote many books and novels on subjects varying from social
philosophy, politics and science. In 1959 he wrote The Sleepwalkers: A History of
Man's Changing Vision of the Universe, a book concerned with the scientific history
of astronomy, focusing mainly on European contributions during the golden age of
the renaissance. In Part 3, The Timid Canon, he writes “The Book of the Revolutions
of the Heavenly Spheres was and is an all-time worst-seller." (Koestler, 1959)i

His argument is definitely convincing, anyone who has read (or tried to read) the
book would agree with Koestler’s statement of its “extreme un-readability”; it is a
formidable piece of literature. When given a copy myself I felt a distinct feeling that
I was being assailed by a wall of cold scholarly text and complex geometrical
diagramsii. The book's title page gives fair warning: "Let no one untrained in
geometry enter here”, clearly the old Pole either didn’t understand the principles
behind making a book aesthetically appealing or remotely readable to most people.
Or he probably didn’t care. Inspite of this, Copernicus was definitely no firebrand,
and although gifted, appeared averse to creating any sort of controversy. If not for
the enormous amount of encouragement and pressure to have it published by
Georg Joachim Rheticus, chances are that this great work would never have seen
the light of day. In some ways the book reflects how he lived, with the potential for
so much more. Some may go as far to say he wrote it in this dense style to
minimize the potential audience (and guaranteed social backlash). Copernicus
wrote the book in a disorganized fashion, without drawing specific conclusions and
making claims he didn’t follow through with later on in the text. Revolutionibus is
comprised of 6 smaller volumes, and overall they aren’t entirely cohesive; “It has,
so to speak, destroyed itself in the process”iii. Contrary to his claim, it appears that
Koestler has probably read Copernicus’ book, as in The Sleepwalkers he
systematically annihilates the entire premise for which the book is praised.

Koestler argues that Copernicus was actually the last of the Aristotelians. In Book
III, attempting to reconcile the heliocentric doctrine with observation, Copernicus’
system asserts that the earth does not revolve around the sun, but instead around a
separate point in space. The other planets move around in epicycles of epicycles,
centered on the abstract point of the earth’s orbit. Thus the centre of the universe
was in the vicinity of the sun and the earth was equally important in governing
planetary motions. In light of this, the fact that nobody seems aware that this is not
a heliocentric theory, and more a ‘vacuo-centric’ theory seems to lend weight to
Koestler’s argument. Thomas Kuhn, another expert on historical astronomy,
supports Koestler, and argues that Copernicus only transferred "Some properties to
the sun's many astronomical functions previously attributed to the earth."iv

Nicolaus Copernicus, circa late 1590s.

Koestler also finds examples of supposed experts on the topic, making mistakes
that reveal they weren’t completely familiar with the book. At the beginning of the
book, Copernicus claims to be able to reduce the number of epicycles in the system
to 34, but by the end there are nearly 50! The Astronomer Royal, Sir Harold Jones,
fell into this trap of stating that Copernicus had reduced the number to 34, many
other eminent scientific sources have repeated it, among them the authoritive (?)
textbook; A Short History of Science and Science Since 1500.

S
till, how can a book revolutionize science if nobody dares or bothers to read
it? This was the idea that Dr. Owen Gingerich, a former Research Professor of
Astronomy and the History of Science at the prestigious Harvard University ,
set out to explore. ." After finding an annotated copy previously owned by Erasmus
Reinhold, a prominent German astronomer and mathematician, who published
astronomical tables derived from the information in De Revolutionibus, Owen
decided to test Koestler’s assumption. His 30 year personal quest took him all
around the world, in his attempts to catalogue and examine all known copies of the
first two printings; “I guess I’ve seen about half a billion dollars worth of copies of
Copernicus’ book”v

Owen Gingerich

Proof of De Revolutionibus’ popularity amongst academics of the time comes from

the sheer volume of annotated copies of the books Gingerich came across. Many
famous men who actively shaped the Scientific Revolution, where found to have
richly annotated their own copies. Among them, Copernicus’s disciple Georg
Joachim Rheticus, the esteemed Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe and the infamous
Galileo Galilei. Gingerich wrote two books on the subject, the first being a scientific
census of his work; The Annotated Census. It lists and describes all of the 560 first
and second edition copies of De Revolutionibus that survive in North America,
Europe, Asia, and Australia, as well as several copies now lost to us. Each entry
meticulously includes the book’s current location and describes distinguishing
characteristics of its appearance, such as in the binding, shelf marks or sizevi. The
second book Gingerich wrote on this subject was The Book Nobody Read: Chasing
the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. This book reads more like a detective novel
on scholarly obsession, describing his adventures in hunting down elusive copies of
the De Revolutionibus, and the international travel of individual copies over timevii.
Examples of the novel’s content include an account of a trial in Washington where
Gingerich was an expert witness in the prosecution of a book thief, and the
discoveries of fake copies of the work proudly displayed in prominent museums.

I
n conclusion, I believe Koestler’s overconfident assertion that nobody read the
book is far from the truth. Though the book appears unreadable, the exhaustive
work of Gingerich has located and proven that people, including some of those
who helped shape the scientific revolution, at least read enough of it to take notes.
I speculate that although it was no best-seller due to its ‘technical’ nature, it WAS
read, but only by the intellectual elite, scholars who were most able to understand
and build upon it. In 1632 Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief
World Systems, which directly contradicted the old geocentric hypothesis in favor of
the Copernican system. This was the book that really instigated the Copernican
Revolution, but could not have been penned unless Galileo had at least some
understanding of what Copernicus had written.

Copernicus’ book reads differently, four centuries later, because the reader has
changed. The people who eagerly annotated their own copies at the time are
certainly not the readers of today. In the Renaissance, Nicolaus’ tome was essential
reading for anyone at the cutting edge of astronomy, or anyone who wished to be
seen as well read. Thick, scholarly Latin text was an essential part of the academic
tradition, and the style in which literature was written was so very different from
today’s more accessible mass marketed books. As experts in the field, modern
astronomical and historical scholars are likely to be best equipped and best
motivated to actually start, comprehend and finish the volume. And if someone who
dedicates their professional life to these fields cannot do it, I don’t believe that
many others outside of this scholastic background could, or would really want to
either (simple boredom may overcome the interested layman). Perhaps a more
...accurate title could have been The Book Nobody Read To The End, or The Book
Nobody Admits To Not Understanding.

I think that in the future, De Revolutionibus will probably remain as it is today, a

greatly revered work, universally acknowledged for its revolutionary ideas but,
pretty much incomprehensible to most. The geometry Copernicus uses may make
sense to the competent mathematician, but the writing style and book’s layout has
remained as dense and forbidding as ever.

Perhaps some altruistic, academic heavyweight in the far future will take the time to
translate and rewrite more legible version of the text. This could very well bring the
fascinating and enlightening mathematical ideas out of the thick, dull Latin prose
and make for a much more digestible read. Or, perhaps the book will remain as a
very boring, yet simultaneously fascinating scientific tome, forever on a pedestal to
be viewed and admired, but heavens forbid, never read or questioned!

We must always question assumptions.

Galileo Galilei, author of Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Systems.
i
Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959), Penguin Books, London
[1988 edition]
ii
Nicolaus Copernicus, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (Translation and Commentary by Edward Rosen) ,
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992
iii
Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959), Penguin Books, London
[1988 edition]
iv
Thomas Kuhn , The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957),
Harvard University Press
v
Robert Siegel, Chasing Copernicus: 'The Book Nobody Read' http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?
storyId=1746110 [accessed 03/03/08]
vi
Owen Gingerich, An annotated census of Copernicus' De revolutionibus (2002) Leiden : Brill, 2002
vii
Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read : Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (2004), New York : Walker,
2004