More Perfect Heaven



A More Perfect Heaven

Introduction

A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos offers a drama surrounding the events that led Copernicus to finally complete his research and publish his controversial results on the cosmos and man's place in it. Science history holdings will find this a powerful blend of biography and science analysis, considering the life of Copernicus and how he evolved and published his world-changing theory. Science history holdings and many a general library will find it lively and involving.

This popular account of the life and work of Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) sums up the current state of knowledge about this founder of the scientific revolution that saw belief in an Earth-centered universe replaced by that of a sun-centered solar system within a starry universe. Sobel, author of the popular Galileo's Daughter and Longitude, focuses on the social, religious, and political context of Copernicus's life. Copernicus was well educated and became a physician and canon in Varmia, Poland. As canon, he oversaw the buying and selling of farmland and urged standardization of coinage. He bravely stood up to the harassment of the Teutonic Knights. Sobel includes a two-act play that she wrote to dramatize the successful efforts of his young disciple Rheticus and his long-time friend and fellow canon Giese to convince Copernicus to publish his great work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Several chapters at the end of the book are devoted to the impact of Copernicus and to the contributions of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo to the broader acceptance of the sun-centered solar system.

Discussion

Sobel, author of the bestselling Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, brings something different to the bulging Copernicus canon. She wants to know why Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) waited till shortly before his death to publish the universe-expanding ideas that he had previously only quietly circulated among other scientists. Her conclusion: in the midst of Martin Luther's challenge to the Catholic Church, Copernicus, himself a Church canon, feared the Church's response to his radical notion that Earth revolved around the Sun. His thesis, of course, altered nothing less than the our view of our place in the cosmos. Daringly, Sobel embeds within a factual narrative a two-act play in which she imagines the relationship between the aging Copernicus and a young mathematician (and Lutheran) named Georg Joachim Rheticus, who Sobel says "convinced" the great astronomer "to publish his crazy idea." Delivered with her usual stylistic grace (and here, a touch of astrological whimsy), Sobel's gamble largely succeeds in bringing Copernicus and his intellectually and religiously tumultuous time alive.

The result of a Renaissance humanist-minded, who has been able to constructively criticize and call into question the philosophical ideas, scientific and religious thinkers of the classical and medieval, is certainly a phenomenon known as a disruptive scientific revolution that found in Copernicus a shy but great promoter and supporter Galilei his formidable. The scientific revolution, an event of extraordinary, has resulted in a slow but profound renewal of ideas and scientific and theological filisofiche ...