Gingerich.final 10/6/03 7:07 PM Page 44 The Copernicus Quest How an astrophysicist with a “collecting gene” became the world’s authority on a revolutionary, allegedly unread book by Christopher Reed

wen gingerich, ph.d. ’62, takes a seat revoluty-own-ibus” is a good approximation of its proper pro- on his “rocket cart”—a dolly with a steer- nunciation, says Gingerich. Its title page reminds him of an op- ing stick in front, a straight-backed chair tometrist’s chart: amidship, and a big fire-extinguisher NICOLAUS CO mounted at back. Donning a crash helmet PERNICUS OF TORUN and an aviator’s scarf for the trip, he reaches about the revolutions of behind him and turns on the extinguisher, the Heavenly Spheres in Six Books. which releases a propulsive jet of carbon dioxide. The cart begins to move across the floor of the Science Copernicus argued against the conventional wisdom, promul- Center lecture hall. Gingerich picks up speed until he is accelerat- gated by Claudius Ptolemy in Alexandria around a.d. 150, that ing furiously with a look of terror on his face toward a side door, the earth was fixed at the middle of the universe. He proposed which flies open just in time and out he goes. Assistants in the instead that what could be observed of planetary motion could wings drop “a big sack full of pipes,” he explains, which make a be explained if the sun was immovable in the middle, with the huge clatter o≠ stage. Gingerich is demonstrating Newton’s third earth and other planets going around it, the modern understand- Olaw, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. ing of the solar system. Of course, students in his Core curriculum course, “The Astro- But what about Holy Writ, in particular the passage from nomical Perspective”—the longest-running course under the Joshua in which he commands same management at Harvard—love his teaching methods. What they don’t know is that Gingerich is deep into a pattern of com- pulsive behavior that has him jetting around the world, from Uppsala to Melbourne, Moscow to Beijing, hundreds of thou- sands of miles in search of “the book that nobody read.”

Gingerich retired from teaching at the end of 1999 and took his farewell ride on the rocket cart at a reunion of former teaching fellows the next spring. But he is still obsessed by the book, as he has been for more than 30 years. It is the revolution- ary work of Polish astronomer and cleric , De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex, literally “Six Books on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.” Copernicus died soon after the book came o≠ the press in 1543, but his magnum opus went on essentially to ignite the scientific revolution. It is usually referred to in the short form, De revolutionibus, and “Day

Opposite: Copernicus looks over the shoulder of Gingerich, who has spent decades chasing the great one’s work and has now chronicled the hunt in a sprightly book. Right: The hunter’s passport, along with evidence, discovered in his office, of a fondness for gastropods.

Portrait and photographs of shells by Jim Harrison. Photomontage by Bartek Malysa Gingerich.final 10/6/03 7:08 PM Page 45 Gingerich.final 10/10/03 1:31 PM Page 46

Ravetz rendezvoused in York, England. They were both on the committee to plan the Copernican Quinquecentennial in 1973, the five-hundredth anniversary of the great one’s birth. They tried to make a list of likely readers of De revolutionibus. , Copernicus’s only disciple, surely would have been one. So would Erasmus Reinhold, the top mathe- matical astronomer in Europe in the middle of the sixteenth century and the professor at Wittenberg. Proof- reader Osiander was by definition a reader. Kepler; , Kepler’s teacher at the University of Tübingen; and , the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer and instrument builder made the list. But it was a short list, nine names. Gingerich and Ravetz abandoned the e≠ort and turned to admiring York’s cathedral. Then Gingerich went to Edinburgh. At the Royal Observa- tory, among a fabulous collec- tion of rare astronomy books kept in two enormous steel cup- boards, he came upon a first edi- tion of De revolutionibus that was thoroughly annotated in the margins from beginning to end. (The margins of books of the pe- riod are wide, Gingerich be- lieves, partly to provide space for annotations, which were typically in ink.) Not only had this copy of the Top: Wilhelm Schickard anno- book been read, it had been read closely. By whom? Could tated his copy of the first edition it have been one of the nine men on the list made earlier? and drew a triquetrum, an instru- ment Copernicus describes. Uni- That would be too great a coincidence; there had to be at versity of Basel Library. Right: least 100 extant copies of the first edition, Gingerich rea- the sun to stand still and the Lord listens Thomas Digges, the first Coperni- soned (wrongly). But on the blind-stamped, pigskin bind- and the sun does stand still in the middle can in England, wrote on the title ing, he found the date 1543 and the initials ER. Erasmus page of his copy of the second of the sky for almost an entire day? An edition, “The common opinion Reinhold? anonymous notice on the back of Coper- errs.” University of Geneva “I seized a pencil and paper to make a rubbing of the dim nicus’s title page, addressed “To the Read- Library. Left: In a minuscule impression,” Gingerich recalls, “and to my dismay found hand, Michael Maestlin, a teacher ers Concerning the Hypotheses in this of Kepler’s, wrote in his first not two, but three, initials: E.R.S.” Poof went his hypothesis, Book,” soothingly explains, says Gin- edition, concerning its anony- he thought, but no. After a little study back in Cambridge, gerich, that “the ideas are merely hypo- mous advice to readers, “Now I he soon discovered that E, R, and S were just the right ini- thetical constructions for predicting the am certain that this letter is by tials for Erasmus Reinholdus Salveldiensis, “for in the six- Andreas Osiander.” Municipal Li- positions of planets and should not be as- brary, Schaffhausen, Switzerland. teenth century a man’s birthplace—in this case Saal- sumed true or even probable.” This advice feld—was a part of his formal designation.” Gingerich to readers was probably written by Andreas Osiander, a theolo- obtained samples of Reinhold’s handwriting, and indeed the anno- gian who finished the proofreading of Copernicus’s book at the tations in the book were in his hand. Gingerich was to become press in Nuremberg. The disclaimer may have done the trick, for adept not only at reading Renaissance Latin annotations, but at the withheld its condemnation of identifying the handwriting of a host of early modern astronomers. for many decades. It was left to the German astronomer Johannes Reinhold marked numerous errors throughout. Curiously, he Kepler to publish, in 1596, what Gingerich calls “an unabashedly had little to say, in the margins, about the hot-stu≠ heliocentric heliocentric treatise.” was also a believer in a sun- proposition advanced in the early, cosmological chapters, but centered universe and came to famous confrontation with the commented enthusiastically on the dense and technical sec- Catholic church on its home ground by declaring such things as ondary matter in the rest of Copernicus’s 400-page tome. If one “the Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” copy of the book could yield such insights into the way a six- The novelist Arthur Koestler, in his 1959 best-selling history of teenth-century astronomer reacted to “the most revolutionary early astronomy, The Sleepwalkers, called Copernicus’s De revolution- scientific advance in more than a millennium,” Gingerich asked ibus, despite its earth-moving significance in the history of sci- himself, what would more copies of the book reveal? ence, “the book that nobody read” and “an all time worst seller.” He set out on a quest that he describes as a “dogged, adventur- Was Koestler right? How could one know? On a Saturday ous, almost quixotic 30-year pursuit.” The Edinburgh find “inau- evening in October 1970, Gingerich and historian of science Jerry gurated my obsession to survey every surviving copy of Coperni-

46 November - December 2003 Photographs courtesy of Gingerich.final 10/8/03 3:27 PM Page 47

The marginalia in Copernicus’s book have much to say about how knowledge spread. They give evidence of what Gingerich calls the “invisible college.” cus’s book.” After 10 years, Gingerich knew that Koestler was ture of science are more perceptive than anything I might have dead wrong. After 30, he could extensively document the book’s discovered by computing stellar atmospheres.” impact on sixteenth-century scholars. The marginalia have much About his Copernican derailment, Gingerich now tells all. In to say about how knowledge spread. They give evidence of what January, Walker and Company will publish The Book Nobody Read: Gingerich calls the “invisible college,” a network of tutorial and Chasing the Masterpiece of Nicolaus Copernicus. Gingerich the racon- mentor relationships among astronomers that transcended insti- teur has produced a lively amalgam of scholarly detective story, tutional boundaries. His 400-page reference work, An Annotated Renaissance science history, academic memoir, and confessional. Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, published in 2002, meticu- This reader of the manuscript, with not a jot of previous interest lously describes each of the 276 copies of the first edition and 325 in Copernicus, found the book an unexpected delight and was of the second, a reprint of 1566, that he had examined. Since the sorry to come to the end of it. Gingerich could dine out on these census appeared, one more copy of the first edition has surfaced stories for another three decades. and five more of the second. He begins chapter one in court, where he a∞rms to tell the Now a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astro- truth. He is appearing as an expert witness to testify in the trial physical Observatory in Cambridge and research professor of as- of a former seminary student accused of nicking a copy of De rev- tronomy and of the history of science at Harvard, Gingerich in the olutionibus. Because Gingerich has seen every known copy of the 1960s was a young astrophysicist publishing research papers with book, he is able to identify this one as the stolen copy of the titles such as “Eleven-digit regular sexagesimals and their recip- Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Guilty as charged. Note to the rocals” and beavering away with the observatory’s computer on deceitful: if you mean to steal, forge, or in any way interfere with studies of solar spectra: “I was calculating the temperature and an old book, pick a di≠erent title. pressure in the outermost layers of the sun’s atmosphere, maybe In explicating his guess about how many copies of the book the outer 100 kilometers.” In 1971, with three others, he produced were printed, he devotes much of a chapter to exploring how an a paper on that research, “The Harvard-Smithsonian Reference early print shop worked and making a calculation, for starters, of Atmosphere.” “We included so many detailed tables of what was how many copies the printer, Johannes (please turn to page 102) going on that nobody bothered to update the work. The study hung around for a long time and has had more than 500 literature citations,” says Gingerich. “That was the last of the astrophysical papers I published.” In the decade before he became fully entangled in Copernicus, Gingerich “entered the magic circle of Jo- hannes Kepler,” the man Clockwise from right: This second who “forged the Coperni- edition’s annotator in multicolor was Herwart von Hohenburg, a can system as we know chancellor of with an it” and is the hero of interest in astronomy. National Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers. Library of Russia, Moscow. The Gingerich began lining title page of the copy that launched Gingerich’s odyssey: the out papers about Kepler: first edition, annotated by Eras- “Kepler as a Copernican” mus Reinhold, at the Royal Ob- (1971), “ servatory, Edinburgh. Joachim Rheticus presented this first edi- and the Rudolphine Ta- tion to Canon Georg Donder of bles” (1971), “Johannes the Frauenburg Cathedral, where Kepler and the new as- Copernicus had been a canon. tronomy” (1972). Kepler’s Uppsala University Library. quadricentennial came in 1971, two years before the Copernican quinque- centennial, which would greatly absorb Gin- gerich’s time. “I some- times say, with consider- able truth,” he says, “that my career in astrophysics was derailed by anniver- saries.” Later he adds, “I think the insights I have been bringing to the na- Gingerich.final 10/8/03 3:27 PM Page 102

THE COPERNICUS QUEST throughout his book. While telling of dergraduate days, as a summer helper to (continued from page 47) Copernicus’s reluctance to publish his Harlow Shapley, “who was then probably manuscript, for instance, he writes that the most famous astronomer in America,” Petreius, could have printed in the time al- one of the master’s fears was that his says Gingerich, he noticed a lot of old lotted. Bottom line: print runs of 400 to ideas about the mobility of the earth books on the shelves relating to French 500 copies of the first edition, 500 to 550 would lead to his being hissed o≠ the astronomer and comet hunter Charles of the second. If those estimates are cor- stage, and Gingerich o≠ers this etymo- Messier’s Catalog of Nebulae and Star Clusters. rect, more than half the copies printed logical aside: “That is precisely how he “Many amateur astronomers were collec- have survived. expressed it in the dedication that he tors of the nebulae and clusters in the He takes us to a 2001 Sotheby’s auction eventually wrote to Pope Paul III. Coper- sense of trying to find and see them all,” in New York City where one of only about nicus uses the word explodendum, which he observes. In a bookseller’s catalog, he means being hissed or noticed a volume of the Mémoires de l’A- clapped o≠ the stage. cadémie Royale des Sciences for 1771, realized The Oxford English Dic- that that was the volume in which tionary confirms that Messier had published the first install- this is also the origi- ment of his catalog, and bought it, his nal but now obsolete first rare astronomy book, for $11. He now meaning of the Eng- specializes in ephemerides, books that lish word explode, give day-by-day positions of the planets. which did not pick “For a lover of numbers,” he writes, “these up the modern defini- old volumes with their columns of digits tion of ‘to blow up have a compelling beauty, but this is es- Gingerich has packed his book with details, the preoccupation and passion of collectors. sentially an eccentric’s view.” He does not have the world’s

ERIC LONG/SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION largest collection of six- At Yale’s Beinecke Library, Gingerich exam- teenth- and seventeenth-cen- ines what he calls, because of its annotations tury ephemerides, but only by Johannes Praetorius, the most important first edition in the United States. At right, the second largest. The Bib- Copernicus’s library, University of Uppsala. liothèque Nationale in Paris has the first. 20 copies of De revolutionibus remaining in Gingerich also collects private hands is on the block. “The auc- seashells—gastropods, sin- tion had been under way barely half an gle-shelled mollusks—and in

hour when lot 34 flashed on the screen,” COURTESY OWEN GINGERICH AND CHARLES EAMES this he is joined by his wife, he writes. “I set my stop watch. Did the with a loud noise’ until around 1700. Miriam, who has been his companion as bidding start at $100,000 or $200,000? I Shakespeare never used the word despite well on many book-hunting field trips. was too excited to remember, but the auc- its theatrical connotation, but his con- They have shells of about 1,500 species and tioneers say it was $150,000. I was later temporary Kepler did….” harbor a particular interest in the Fusinus sorry that I hadn’t registered for one of genus: spindle shells. There are roughly the numbered bidding paddles so that I Gingerich has packed his book with 150 species of spindle shell, and they have could have made the first o≠er, even details, the preoccupation and passion of about 75. They’re “working on” the genus though I would have had to mortgage the collectors. “I just assume there is such a and may someday make a scholarly contri- house to back it up.” The hammer price is thing as a collecting gene,” he says. If so, bution to its meager taxonomic literature. $675,000; with Sotheby’s fee on top of he has it and it shapes his work. It also The Gingerichs might also be said to that, the anonymous telephone bidder is shapes his three-room suite of o∞ces at collect the stamps of passport o∞cials. out about $750,000. Brace yourselves, the observatory, jammed with books, pic- They did an immense amount of traveling book collectors: Gingerich writes that tures, and the occasional seashell. Gin- for Copernicus, but also absorbed an es- there are several of you impatiently wait- gerich began collecting as a boy—rocks. pecially heavy barrage of stamps in the ing to spend a million dollars on a prob- He moved on to postage stamps of the summer of 2002 when they spent six lem-free first edition Copernicus in an United States and Canada. Thence to rare weeks in Africa on two tours, with the original sixteenth-century binding, astronomy books, “a lovely vice.” professor lecturing on the history of sci- preferably a copy with a known prove- He began reading booksellers’ catalogs ence and on astronomy. (A total eclipse of nance and clear title. long before he had enough money to buy the sun was on one program; Gingerich Gingerich is agreeably digressive anything. At the Observatory in his un- has seen 12.) The couple are just back

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from Polynesia, where he lectured on took a teaching position at Goshen Col- mandment for Mennonites was “Thou Captain Cook and the transits of Venus. lege in Indiana. Owen went directly to shalt not think about evolution.” But he Goshen College and never graduated has been asked by the Mennonite pub- Gingerich is a mennonite. That a∞li- from high school. “Maybe,” he says, “if The lishing house to write a book on evolu- ation led to his first trip across the Book Nobody Read makes me famous, the tion for their constituency, and he hopes sea—and to Poland, no less, Copernicus’s Newton, Kansas, high school will award to write it, as well as a biography of Har- haunts—when he was barely 16. A year me an honorary degree.” low Shapley. “I know exactly how I’m after World War II, the United Nations Gingerich is a trustee of the John Tem- going to start the evolution book,” he Relief and Rehabilitation Administration pleton Foundation, an organization with says, “with the six-fingered dwarfism of sent thousands of horses to eastern Eu- roughly a $1-billion endowment that is the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsyl- rope. The Brethren, one of the traditional much concerned with the interface of sci- vania. This is a genetic defect that pro- peace churches, had a “Heifers for Relief” ence and religion. He travels widely to duces six fingers on both hands, among a project, and cut a deal with the United speak on that topic. He has given a lecture whole set of other obnoxious debilita- Nations. If the UN would provide ships in about 40 di≠erent venues entitled “Let tions. There are about 70 known cases, for the heifers, they would round up cow- There Be Light: Modern Cosmogony and and every case can be traced back ge- boys to escort the horses. Gingerich’s fa- Biblical Creation.” “I call this my pro- nealogically through both the mother and ther, at that time a history professor at a Christian, anti-creationism lecture,” he the father to an Amish couple that came small Mennonite college in Kansas, was says. He spoke at a conference on “Science to America in 1750.” Where is the God in the supervisor of the trip and the main re- and Religion: Are They Compatible?” in that story? “You have to understand not cruiter of the cowboys. The SS Stephen R. Atlanta in 2001, jointly sponsored by the that God is reaching in and creating the Mallory left Newport News in June 1946, publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer and the mutations, but that the universe is set up with 847 horses on board, destined for Council for Secular Humanism. “I said I so that it will work this way. It has inter- farm duty in Poland, and 32 cowboys. Gin- was plainly Daniel in the lion’s den as esting theological ramifications, and I gerich keeps his Merchant Marine sea- their token theist. There was a nervous would try to outline what some of those man’s card in a drawer of his desk. laugh that rippled across the audience are for the theologians to think about.” He was born in Washington, Iowa, in when I said that, so I socked it to ’em.” 1930, and his family moved to central Throughout most of the twentieth cen- Christopher Reed is executive editor of this Kansas when he was 11. In 1947 his father tury, Gingerich says, the eleventh com- magazine.

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