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    And the Sun Stood Still
    And the Sun Stood Still
    And the Sun Stood Still
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    And the Sun Stood Still

    By Dava Sobel

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    About this ebook

    Using her deep knowledge, her skills as a storyteller, and her imagination, Dava Sobel illuminates one of history's most significant and far-reaching meetings. In the spring of 1539, a young German mathematician--Georg Joachim Rheticus--journeyed hundreds of miles to northern Poland to meet the legendary, elderly cleric and reluctant astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Some two decades earlier, Copernicus had floated the mind-boggling theory that the Sun, not the Earth, was stationary at the center of the universe, and he was rumored to have crafted a book that could prove it. Though exactly what happened between them can never be known, Rheticus shepherded Copernicus's great work into production and De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ultimately changed the course of human understanding.

    Dava Sobel imagines their dramatic encounter, and with wit and erudition gives them personality. Through clever and dramatic dialogue, she brings alive the months Rheticus and Copernicus spent together--the one a heretical Lutheran, the other a free-thinking Catholic--and in the process illuminates the historic tension between science and religion. An introduction by Dava Sobel will set the stage, putting the scenes in historical context, and an afterword will describe what happened after Copernicus's book was published detailing the impact it had on science and on civilization.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateMar 1, 2016
    ISBN9780802778024
    Author

    Dava Sobel

    Dava Sobel is the internationally renowned author of ‘Longitude’ and ‘Galileo’s Daughter’. She is also an award-winning former science reporter for the ‘New York Times’ and writes frequently about science for several magazines, including the ‘New Yorker’, ‘Audubon’, ‘Discover’, ‘Life’ and ‘Omni’. She is currently writing a book called ‘The Planets’ for Fourth Estate. She lives in East Hampton, New York.

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      Book preview

      And the Sun Stood Still - Dava Sobel

      BY THE SAME AUTHOR

      A More Perfect Heaven

      Longitude

      The Illustrated Longitude

      (with William J. H. Andrews)

      Galileo’s Daughter

      The Planets

      Letters to Father

      (translated and annotated)

      Contents

      Introduction

      ACT I

      SCENE i. BISHOP’S PALACE

      SCENE ii. OUTSIDE COPERNICUS’S HOUSE

      SCENE iii. INSIDE COPERNICUS’S HOUSE

      SCENE iv. BISHOP’S PALACE

      SCENE v. TOWER ROOM

      SCENE vi. INSIDE COPERNICUS’S HOUSE

      SCENE vii. BISHOP’S PALACE

      SCENE viii. INSIDE COPERNICUS’S HOUSE

      ACT II

      SCENE i. OUTSIDE COPERNICUS’S HOUSE

      SCENE ii. INSIDE COPERNICUS’S HOUSE

      SCENE iii. BISHOP’S PALACE

      SCENE iv. INSIDE COPERNICUS’S HOUSE

      SCENE v. TOWER ROOM

      SCENE vi. BISHOP’S PALACE

      SCENE vii. TOWER ROOM

      SCENE viii. INSIDE COPERNICUS’S HOUSE

      Afterword

      A Note on the Author

      Introduction

      Many moments in the life of the great astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, born Niklas Koppernigk in Torun, Poland, in 1473, lend themselves to drama—beginning with the early deaths of his parents, which left him an orphan by age ten. Later the deus-ex-machina intervention of his powerful uncle, a bishop of the Catholic Church, sent him far south to the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, then over the Alps to study law at Bologna, and finally to Padua, where he studied medicine so he could serve as the bishop’s personal physician. When he became a churchman himself—a canon of the cathedral at Frauenburg, the City of Our Lady—he undertook arduous and dangerous missions to patrol the landholdings of his diocese. More than once he defended an episcopal palace from marauding bands of Teutonic Knights. In 1522, he headed off a financial crisis by advising the Polish king on how to reform the currency.

      Surely one of the most dramatic moments by his own reckoning occurred sometime before 1510, when a phenomenal stroke of insight convinced him that the Sun, and not the Earth, stood at the center of the heavens. Although Copernicus wrote copiously about his heliocentric theory, he never described the events or thoughts that led him to his stunning conclusions: The Earth moves. It rotates daily on an axis and travels yearly around the Sun, among the other planets.

      Copernicus holds a lily of the valley, an early Renaissance symbol of a medical doctor (probably because of the flower’s association with the god Mercury, whose snake-entwined caduceus promoted healing), in this wood-block portrait by Tobias Stimmer.

      The rapidity of these presumed movements required a leap of faith, for Copernicus’s Earth did not merely turn; it spun at a thousand miles an hour, and hurtled through its orbit at many times that rate. Such concepts seemed so foolish, so unlikely, so counterintuitive, that Copernicus feared ridicule for even proposing them. Worse, he dreaded being branded as irreverent for upholding notions at odds with numerous passages of Holy Writ.

      Nevertheless the idea took hold of him, because only the motion of the Earth could account for the wanderings and relative positions of the other planets. He devoted three decades to the explication of his theory in a lengthy treatise, now known as On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. It was a big book—approximately four hundred folio pages in Copernicus’s small, neat hand—dense throughout with mathematical jargon, charts, tables, and geometrical diagrams. He made no effort to publish the manuscript, apparently lacking the courage to do so.

      Copernicus’s indecision grew into a true dilemma upon the arrival in 1539 of an uninvited visitor. Georg Joachim Rheticus, a twenty-five-year-old mathematical prodigy from Martin Luther’s Wittenberg, traveled more than five hundred miles to the northern Polish province of Varmia to seek out the aging Copernicus. His timing was terrible. The bishop of Varmia had recently passed a law banishing all Lutherans from the diocese. This same bishop (a successor to Copernicus’s uncle) further tested his powers by threatening to deprive some of Copernicus’s fellow canons of their sinecures, and also by pressuring Copernicus to drive away his loyal female housekeeper. The last thing Copernicus could reasonably do in this uneasy climate was to harbor a heretic. And yet he agreed to let Rheticus stay with him.

      HOROSCOPE FOR NICOLAUS COPERNICUS

      Astronomers and astrologers in Copernicus’s time shared the same pool of information about the positions of the heavenly bodies against the backdrop of the stars. Until the invention of the telescope in the seventeenth century, position finding and position predicting constituted the entirety of planetary science—and the basis for casting horoscopes.

      NATAL CHART FOR RHETICUS

      The dire prospects suggested in this horoscope for Georg Joachim Rheticus caused his student Nicholas Gugler, who drew the chart, to recalculate the professor’s birth time and date. The true date of February 16, written in the margin, disagrees with the more favorable date in the diagram, February 15.

      This is the moment I chose to dramatize in my play, And the Sun Stood Still. Rheticus’s visit is a well-documented historical fact, as is his role in the ultimate publication of Copernicus’s book

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