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A More Perfect Heaven

How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos

Walker & Company, September 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1793-1, ISBN10: 0-8027-1793-4,
5.5 x 8.25 inches, 288 pages, Color insert and b&w images throughout,
Hardcover, $25.00

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See All Categories History World: Europe Science Astronomy

In the annals of science and civilization, nobody has advanced our understanding of the universe further than Nicolaus Copernicus. Born in Poland in 1473, and educated to be a canon in the Catholic church and a "healing physician" to his bishop, his private passion became studying the heavens. By 1514, the reclusive cleric has circulated an initial outline of his heliocentric theory—in which he defied common sense and received wisdom to plac ethe Sun, not the Earth, at the center of our universe, and set the Earth spinning among the other planets. Over the next two decades, Copernicus expanded his theory through hundreds of calculations and observation—all with his naked eye—while compiling a book-length manuscriptthat tantalized mathematicians and scientists throughout Europe. For fear of ridicule, he refused to publish it.

In 1539, a young German mathematician, Georg Joachim Rheticus, drawn by rumors of a celestial revolution to rival the religious upheaval of Martin Luther's Reformation, traveled to Poland to seek out Copernicus. Despite prohibitions against his presence in Copernicus's Catholic diocese, the Protestant youth spent two years collaborating with his mentor, then carried the finished work to a printer in Nuremberg for publication. This book—De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres)—forever changed humankind's place in the universe.

In her elegant, compelling style, Dava Sobel chronicles the conflicting personalities and extraordinary discoveries that shaped the Copernican Revolution. At the center of the book, her play, And the Sun Stood Still, imagines Rheticus's struggle to convince Copernicus to let his manuscript see the light of day. As she achieved with her bestsellers Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, Sobel expands the bounds of narration, giving us an unforgettable portrait of scientific achievements against a background of intense religious and social turmoil.

Praise

"The best bits are in the footnotes: every attentive reader knows that. Dava Sobel has built a career out of taking these marginal details and spinning them into pop-science bestsellers. Longitude (1995), the book that made her name, was about the man who invented the clock that made accurate navigation possible in the 18th century. Galileo’s Daughter (2000) was about, yes, Suor Maria Celeste. Now A More Perfect Heaven is about Copernicus—or, if he’s too much of a household name, Copernicus and his dealings with Rheticus, the young Lutheran scholar who, in 1539-41, persuaded him to publish his crazy idea that the Earth went round the Sun rather than vice-versa. But even Copernicus is an obscure figure, a footnote to his own theory. We know that Galileo got in trouble with the church; we know that Newton had an apple land on his head (well, maybe). But apart from his big revolutionary idea—which, in Sobel’s elegant formulation, 'initiated a cascade of diminishments', with Earth’s position becoming ever more insignificant in an ever vaster cosmos—who was Copernicus? In telling us, Sobel characteristically gives us the man in full, with the evolution of Copernicus’s cosmological speculations woven into the more down-to-earth concerns of the man who grew up Niklas Kopernigk in the Polish town of Torun."—Neville Hawcock, Financial Times

"The author elegantly fashions the life of Copernicus as a two-act play bracketed by historically documented narratives that cover the periods before and after the arrival of Georg Joachim Rheticus at Copernicus's Polish doorstep in 1539 . . . Sobel presents an illuminating piece of work, bringing to life the old man and the young man's days spent together and in particular Rheticus’s coming to terms, the bending of his mind, around Copernicus's theory, which was more radical than he understood. Readers are fit squarely in Rheticus's shoes via Sobel's neat act of transport, there to share his bafflement and resistance . . . A liquid entertainment of choice passages on the thoughts and deeds of Copernicus."—Kirkus Reviews

About the Author(s)

Dava Sobel

Dava Sobel is the acclaimed author of the New York Times and international bestsellers Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, and The Planets, and the coauthor of The Illustrated Longitude. She lives in East Hampton, New York.