A More Perfect Heaven

by Dava Sobel

  The wide margins of the pages tell another story altogether—a chronicle of interactive education, in which the new astronomy passed from hand to hand and generation to generation. Some copies contain annotations in two or even three different hands, and in several cases whole series of nearly identical notes repeat in numerous volumes, demonstrating the influence of certain teachers.

  Among the most extensively and tellingly annotated copies is the one that belonged to Johannes Kepler, now held at the Universitätsbibliothek in Leipzig. It is a first edition, first owned by Jerome Schreiber of Nuremberg, who received it as a gift from the printer. Petreius’s personalized inscription can still be read on the title page (where someone has crossed out the words “of the Heavenly Spheres”). Presumably the two men knew each other through Johann Schöner, who tutored Schreiber in mathematics. Or through Rheticus, who was Schreiber’s classmate at Wittenberg and later his colleague on the faculty. Over the four years Schreiber owned the book, until his death at age thirty-two, he wrote copious notes in it. He corrected every typographical error stipulated on the errata leaf, as well as those in the remaining fifty folios beyond the scope of the errata leaf. These are the same changes that appear in Copernicus’s hand in the original manuscript. Copernicus must have conveyed his final edits too late for Petreius to include them, but still in time for Rheticus to share them with a small circle of friends. Gingerich found only nine copies of On the Revolutions so thoroughly set right.

  It was Schreiber, a true insider, who knowingly penned the name Andreas Osiander above the anonymous note to the reader.

  Schreiber also copied Rheticus’s marginal notes into his own copy, and mused alongside the text about questions he wished he could have asked Copernicus. On folio 96, for example, Copernicus waffled on whether the center of the universe lay within the Sun or at the empty center of the Earth’s orbit. He said he would take up the matter later, but then never got back to it. Schreiber noted here that Rheticus had decided the point, in the First Account, in favor of the Sun as center. On folio 143, next to Copernicus’s concession that his use of a small epicyclet resulted in an orbit with a noncircular shape, Schreiber jotted a single word, in Greek. Kepler, too, could read and write Greek, and so, when he purchased Schreiber’s copy in 1598 and came across the word at the end of Book III, chapter 25, he knew that it meant “ellipse.”

  “It is very remarkable,” writes Gingerich, fairly shouting in his quiet way, “that of all the possible copies of the book that he might have acquired, Kepler got one with the word ellipse written in the margin by a highlighted passage.”

  The binding, in calf with a gilt-decorated spine, reflects the book fashions of the eighteenth century—clearly the choice of a subsequent owner. That unidentified individual took pains, however, to preserve Kepler’s annotations, by instructing the bookbinder to fold in a few selected pages rather then trim them all by the five millimeters required for a neat new finish. Unfolded, those pages display Kepler’s principal comments, in the form of questions, concerning the true center of planetary motions and the need for Earth to vary its orbital speed in the same manner as the other planets.

  Kepler’s heavily annotated copy of On the Revolutions identified the author of the anonymous note to the reader, and also contained the word ellipse written as a marginal gloss in Greek.

  Referring to a lettered diagram, in which Copernicus had labeled the center of the Earth’s orbit as D, Kepler asked, “For is the orbit really such that D is the Sun, or of a temporary circle wherein D is other than the Sun?” The minuscule scale of Kepler’s writing suggests he leaned in close enough for his nose to almost touch the pen nib. “Does the Earth have a simple or double difference? Therefore are they [Venus and Mercury] nonetheless attached to the irregularities of the Earth? For the very reason, to be sure, that they are moved in other circles than the one eccentric to the Earth (that is, in concentrics and epicycles), they effect this present irregularity.”

  Gingerich points out that Kepler’s notes, though sparse, crop up at critical places, uncovering fundamental flaws in Copernicus’s theories. And although Kepler could be trusted to locate those points without help from anyone, nevertheless a trail was marked for him.

  If Isaac Newton owned a copy of On the Revolutions, it has not survived. In his student days, he undoubtedly consulted one of the three Trinity College first editions still held by that venerable library. After Newton established universal gravitation as the force that kept the planets in their orbits around the Sun, copies of Copernicus’s book came into the possession of many other giants in astronomy, such as comet namesake Edmond Halley, his successor as astronomer royal George Biddell Airy, computing pioneer Charles Babbage, and twentieth-century cosmologist Edwin Hubble, who was first to appreciate the infinite extent and continuing expansion of the universe.

  Now that Copernicus’s text no longer serves to describe the known paths of the planets, it is more highly valued than ever as an icon. The most recent copy of the book offered at auction—a clean, unannotated first edition—sold at Christie’s, New York, in June 2008 (to an undisclosed recipient) for $2,210,500.

  The First Account, according to Gingerich, is ten times rarer a find than On the Revolutions. While compiling the Annotated Census, he came across thirty-seven copies of Rheticus’s book, the majority of them in Germany. In 2004, the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology in Kansas City, Missouri, bought a copy of the First Account for $1.5 million. The library has since digitized the entire volume, enabling anyone with an Internet connection to page through it. First-edition copies of On the Revolutions are also available for perusal on several rare-book Web sites.

  Copernicus the man has gained iconic status as well. Statues of him proliferate, especially in Poland, where his image has frequently appeared on stamps, coins, and banknotes. His very bones became the goal of an archaeological dig begun in the summer of 2004 under the stone floor of the Frombork Cathedral, where searchers eventually unearthed the skull and several bones of a seventy-year-old man that seemed to answer his description. The skull was just a fragment—the cranium without the mandible—but its age and resting place near the altar of St. Wenceslaus (now called Holy Cross) provided strong clues. Police forensic artists, accustomed to portraiture based on partial descriptions, parlayed the chinless skull into a full face with a big, broken nose and jutting square jaw. After a perpetual Copernican youth fostered by the single image of him in his prime, the sudden weight of years distorted the astronomer’s looks beyond recognition. In the photo released to news services, the old man wore a fur-collared jacket in a red reminiscent of his portrait jerkin.

  Subsequent examination of the skull suggests that the dent over the right eye is an arterial depression typical of many skeletons—not a match for the scar depicted in Copernicus’s portrait. No one doubts, however, that the skull belonged to him.

  The scant bones underwent DNA analysis, for anticipated comparison with the latter-day descendants of Copernicus’s nieces. The most convincing piece of evidence emerged from a secondary trove of remains—the nine hairs that had worked their way into Copernicus’s oft-consulted copy of a 1518 calendar of eclipse predictions, held in Uppsala with the rest of the books the Swedish Army took from the Varmia library during the Thirty Years’ War.

  When Gingerich heard about the hairs found in the Calendarium Romanum Magnum, he imagined they might belong to him, given the number of times he had bent his own head over that same book to study Copernicus’s notations in it. But DNA testing of the four suitable hairs showed that two of them made convincing matches with a well-preserved molar in the Frombork skull. When the scientists reported their results in 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they said that certain genes seen in the remains were typical of blue-eyed individuals. The police photo had depicted Copernicus with brown eyes, the same color as in the Torun portrait, adjusted for age-related fading.

  Working from bone fragments, Po
lish forensic artists imagined the face of their famous countryman as a man of seventy years—Copernicus’s age at death.

  The second burial of Canon Nicolaus Copernicus took place in Frombork on May 22, 2010. Unlike the first funeral, the pageantry of this one drew a large crowd, and included a Mass led by the Primate of Poland, the country’s most highly honored bishop. Not since Copernicus’s Uncle Lukasz Watzenrode carried St. George’s head here in 1510 had this cathedral seen a more triumphant procession focused on funerary relics.

  A new black granite tombstone with a stylized golden Sun and planets now flanks the earlier memorial installed in the cathedral in 1735 (to replace a still earlier epitaph destroyed during wartime). Beyond such plaques, statues, and other public tributes, his fellow “mathematicians” continue to afford Copernicus their professional recognition. The first cartographers of the Moon named a large lunar crater for him in the 1600s, and Space Age explorers launched an orbiting astronomical observatory called Copernicus in 1972. For the 537th return of his birthday, on February 19, 2010, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced the naming of super-heavy atomic element number 112 “copernicium” (symbol Cn) in his honor.

  Every time the Kepler spacecraft, currently in orbit, detects a new exoplanet around a star beyond the Sun, another ripple of the Copernican Revolution reverberates through space. But the counterrevolution that sprang up in immediate reaction to Copernicus’s ideas also continues to make waves. State and local governments still claim the right to control what can be taught of scientific theories in classrooms and textbooks. A so-called museum in the southeastern United States compresses the Earth’s geological record from 4.5 billion to a biblical few thousand years, and pretends that dinosaurs coexisted with human beings.

  Copernicus strove to restore astronomy to a prior, purer simplicity—a geometric Garden of Eden. He sacrificed the Earth’s stability to that vision, and pushed the stars out of his way. To contemporaries who doubted the grandiose dimensions of the heliocentric design, Copernicus replied, “So vast, without any question, is the divine handiwork of the most excellent Almighty.”

  In the century after his death, the Inquisition struck that line from his text. Although Copernicus clearly meant to express confidence in the Omnipotent’s ability to transcend ordinary proportion, the censors saw the statement as an ungrounded confirmation for an Earth in motion.

  When the Earth moved despite the Church’s objections, Copernicus became symbolic of a new fall from grace. Because of him, humanity lost its place at the center of the universe. He had initiated a cascade of diminishments: The Earth is merely one of several planets in orbit around the Sun. The Sun is only one star among two hundred billion in the Milky Way—and relegated to a remote region far from the galactic center. The Milky Way is just one galaxy in a Local Group of neighbors, surrounded by countless other galaxy groups stretched across the universe. All the shining stars of all the galaxies are as nothing compared to the great volume of unseen dark matter that holds them in gravitational embraces. Even dark matter is dwarfed by the still more elusive entity, dark energy, that accounts for three quarters of a cosmos in which the very notion of a center no longer makes any sense.

  A small corner of today’s known universe, depicted in this Hubble telescope Deep Field image, is many times more vast than the once-shocking distance Copernicus allowed between Saturn and the stars. To use his word, the extent of his entire cosmos was “negligible” compared with the many millions of light years separating our Milky Way from the galaxies beyond.

  Thanksgiving

  It would be impossible to overstate the generosity of the historians, directors, and people of good cheer who have helped me relive the Copernican Revolution.

  Professors Owen Gingerich, André Goddu, Michael Shank, Noel Swerdlow, and the late Ernan McMullin lent their authority in history and astronomy, along with earnest encouragement. The first three also reviewed the draft chapters of this book to correct my mistakes.

  Directors Gerald Freedman, Langdon Brown, and Isaac Klein read and commented on numerous drafts of the play, always with constructive advice.

  In Poland, Janusz Gil, Tomasz Mazur, Krzysztof Ostrowski, and Jaroslaw Wlodarczyk variously welcomed, guided, mentored, interpreted, and read drafts for me. I am also grateful to Stanislaw Waltos for facilitating permission to view the Copernicus manuscript in Krakow.

  At Uppsala, Tore Frängsmyr opened the doors to Copernicus’s personal library.

  The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided grant support, with kind attention from Edward Hirsch and André Bernard at Guggenheim, Doron Weber at Sloan, Annie MacRae as the Sloan Project manager at Manhattan Theatre Club, and Paige Evans.

  The Naked Stage, the Manhattan Theatre Club, the New York State Writers Institute Authors Theatre, and the University and Teatr Lubuski of Zielona Gora (Poland) staged readings of the play in progress.

  Astrologer Elaine Peterson cast and interpreted horoscopes for Copernicus and Rheticus.

  Stalwart supporters including my agent, Michael Carlisle; my editor and publisher, George Gibson; my daughter, Zoe Klein; my brothers and sister-in-law, Stephen, Michael, and Pamela Sobel; my cousins Celia Michaels and Barry Gruber; my friends Diane Ackerman, Jane Allen, Will Andrewes, K. C. Cole, Doug Garner, Mary Giaquinto, Joanne Julian, M. G. Lord, Doug Offenhartz, Rita and Gary Reiswig, Lydia Salant, Margaret Thompson, and Alfonso Triggiani have all proved especially helpful, often just by being who they are.

  Copernican Chronology

  1466 Peace of Torun concludes the Thirteen Years’ War between the Prussian cities of Poland and the Knights of the Teutonic Order.

  1473 Copernicus born,

  February 19.

  1484 Copernicus’s father dies.

  1489 Copernicus’s uncle Lukasz Watzenrode elected Bishop of Varmia, February 19.

  1491 Copernicus enters Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

  1492 Ferdinand and Isabella expel the Spanish Jews.

  Columbus voyages to the New World.

  1496 Copernicus studies canon law in Bologna.

  1497 Copernicus appointed canon in Frauenburg.

  1500 Copernicus spends several months in Rome, gives lectures on math.

  1501 Copernicus and brother, Andreas, attend Varmia Chapter meeting in July.

  Copernicus enrolls as medical student at Padua in October.

  1502 University of Wittenberg founded.

  1503 Copernicus receives doctor of canon law degree at Ferrara, May 31; becomes bishop’s secretary and personal physician at Heilsberg in the fall.

  1504 Copernicus observes great conjunction in Cancer, notes that Mars is ahead of—and Saturn behind—predicted positions.

  1508 Copernicus conceives the geokinetic idea, probably begins work on his heliocentric model.

  1509 Copernicus publishes his Latin translation of the Greek letters of Theophylactus Simocatta in Krakow.

  1510 Copernicus leaves the bishop’s service, moves to Frauenburg, distributes his Brief Sketch as a pamphlet.

  1512 King Sigismund I marries Barbara Zapolya in Krakow, February 8.

  Uncle Lukasz dies in Torun, March 29, after attending the king’s wedding.

  1513 “Doctor Nicholas” purchases bricks and lime to build an observing platform.

  1514 Georg Joachim Iserin (later Rheticus) born, February 16.

  1515 Copernicus offers opinion on calendar reform to Pope Leo X.

  Full text of Ptolemy’s Almagest appears in print for the first time.

  1516 Copernicus begins three-year term as administrator, November 11.

  1517 Copernicus writes his Meditata on currency problems, August 15.

  Martin Luther posts his 95 Theses in Wittenberg.

  1518 Andreas dies in November.

  1519 Teutonic Order invades Braunsberg, December 31.

  1520 Grand Master Albrecht’s troops set fire to Frauenburg, January 23.

 
1521 War with Teutonic Knights ends; peace treaty signed, April 5.

  1522 Copernicus introduces currency reform based on his essay of 1517.

  Johannes Werner publishes a collection of astronomy papers in Nuremberg.

  1523 Bishop Fabian Luzjanski dies, January 30.

  Copernicus serves as interim bishop through October, even after Maurycy Ferber is elected Bishop of Varmia in mid-April.

  1524 Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces.

  Copernicus writes Letter Against Werner, June 3.

  1525 Treaty of Krakow dissolves Order of Teutonic Knights, establishes

  Duchy of Prussia under Duke Albrecht.

  1526 Duke Albrecht marries Princess Dorothea of Denmark, February 12.

  King Sigismund orders Protestant homes in Krakow burned; issues royal decree regarding new currency, July 17.

  Bishop Ferber banishes Lutherans from Varmia, September 22.

  1528 Rheticus’s father convicted of swindling and beheaded.

  1529 Johannes Dantiscus, Polish ambassador to Spain, becomes a canon of Varmia.

  1530 Canon Dantiscus, still in Spain, chosen as Bishop of Kulm.

  Confession of Augsburg establishes the articles of faith for Lutherans.

  1531 Copernicus, as guardian of the chapter’s counting table, writes his Bread Tariff.

  1532 Canon/Bishop-designate Dantiscus returns to Poland from Spain.

  Rheticus matriculates at Wittenberg using his mother’s name, de Porris.

  1533 Johannes Dantiscus installed as Bishop of Kulm, April 20.

  Pope Clement VII hears Copernicus’s theory described, summer.