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Overview
Nicolaus Copernicus gave the world perhaps the most important scientific insight of the modern age, the theory that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. He was also the first to proclaim that the earth rotates on its axis once every twenty-four hours. His theory was truly radical: during his lifetime nearly everyone believed that a perfectly still earth rested in the middle of the cosmos, where all the heavenly bodies revolved around it.
One of the transcendent geniuses of the early Renaissance, Copernicus was also a flawed and conflicted person. A cleric who lived during the tumultuous years of the early Reformation, he may have been sympathetic to the teachings of the Lutherans. Although he had taken a vow of celibacy, he kept at least one mistress. Supremely confident intellectually, he hesitated to disseminate his work among other scholars. It fact, he kept his astronomical work a secret, revealing it to only a few intimates, and the manuscript containing his revolutionary theory, which he refined for at least twenty years, remained "hidden among my things."
It is unlikely that Copernicus' masterwork would ever have been published if not for a young mathematics professor named Georg Joachim Rheticus. He had heard of Copernicus' ideas, and with his imagination on fire he journeyed hundreds of miles to a land where, as a Lutheran, he was forbidden to travel. Rheticus' meeting with Copernicus in a small cathedral town in northern Poland proved to be one of the most important encounters in history.
Copernicus' Secret recreates the life and world of the scientific genius whose work revolutionized astronomy and altered our understanding of our place in the world. It tells the surprising, little-known story behind the dawn of the scientific age.
Synopsis
Nicolaus Copernicus gave the world perhaps the most important scientific insight of the modern age, the theory that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. He was also the first to proclaim that the earth rotates on its axis once every twenty-four hours. His theory was truly radical: during his lifetime nearly everyone believed that a perfectly still earth rested in the middle of the cosmos, where all the heavenly bodies revolved around it.
One of the transcendent geniuses of the early Renaissance, Copernicus was also a flawed and conflicted person. A cleric who lived during the tumultuous years of the early Reformation, he may have been sympathetic to the teachings of the Lutherans. Although he had taken a vow of celibacy, he kept at least one mistress. Supremely confident intellectually, he hesitated to disseminate his work among other scholars. It fact, he kept his astronomical work a secret, revealing it to only a few intimates, and the manuscript containing his revolutionary theory, which he refined for at least twenty years, remained "hidden among my things."
It is unlikely that Copernicus' masterwork would ever have been published if not for a young mathematics professor named Georg Joachim Rheticus. He had heard of Copernicus' ideas, and with his imagination on fire he journeyed hundreds of miles to a land where, as a Lutheran, he was forbidden to travel. Rheticus' meeting with Copernicus in a small cathedral town in northern Poland proved to be one of the most important encounters in history.
Copernicus' Secret recreates the life and world of the scientific genius whose work revolutionized astronomy and altered our understanding of our place in the world. It tells the surprising, little-known story behind the dawn of the scientific age.
The New York Times - Owen Gingerich
Jack Repcheck's new biography, Copernicus' Secret, at last brings the astronomer to life in a way that past efforts have not quite achieved. He paints the sites in a particularly vivid fashion…and he gives a clear account of the political and administrative structures of the cathedral chapter where Copernicus was a senior figure…no other biography of which I am aware treats the life of this scientific giant more vividly than this one.
Editorials
Owen Gingerich
Jack Repcheck's new biography, Copernicus' Secret, at last brings the astronomer to life in a way that past efforts have not quite achieved. He paints the sites in a particularly vivid fashion…and he gives a clear account of the political and administrative structures of the cathedral chapter where Copernicus was a senior figure…no other biography of which I am aware treats the life of this scientific giant more vividly than this one.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
The founder of modern astronomy was, according to Repcheck (The Man Who Found Time), a science editor at Norton, an unlikely scientific revolutionary: an unambitious man who had lingered in university for 12 years and never sought fame or success. This far-ranging study explores why Nicholas Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Sphereswasn't published until 1543, when he was on his deathbed, three decades after he'd first circulated a draft. Repcheck reveals that in addition to Copernicus being a late bloomer, astronomy had to be squeezed into spare moments between ecclesiastical duties and other civic duties. Copernicus also had an eye for the ladies, especially his housekeeper, which drew repeated, usually unheeded admonitions from his church superiors. It took the arrival of the brilliant young Lutheran mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus, who risked his life to travel to Frombork on the Baltic to seek out the reclusive Copernicus, to spur him on to complete his masterpiece. Repcheck paints a vivid picture of the times, in which both Protestantism and intellectual inquiry posed threats to the Catholic worldview. The author also does an admirable job of shining a light on Copernicus's little-known immediate predecessors to show that, like the works of Einstein and Darwin, the scientist's theory didn't spring Athena-like from his brow. Maps. (Dec.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationPublishers Weekly
"Repcheck paints a vivid picture of the times, in which both Protestantism and intellectual inquiry posed threats to the Catholic worldview. The author also does an admirable job of shining a light on Copernicus's little-known immediate predecessors to show that, like the works of Einstein and Darwin, the scientist's theory didn't spring Athena-like from his brow"
NY Sun
"Excellent...[Repcheck] is especially good at setting Copernicus vividly in his time."
New York Times Book Review
"No other biography of which I am aware treats the life of this scientific giant more vividly than this one."
Library Journal
Repcheck, the author of a well-received popular biography of geologist James Hutton, The Man Who Found Time, is a skilled synthesizer of previously published scholarly and popular works. In this slender volume, he spins the tale of how a cleric of the Catholic Church developed a highly sophisticated theory of the architecture of the heavens. Much of the narrative, a distillation of earlier popular works about Copernicus, emphasizes the feet-of-clay aspects of the astronomer's life (1473-1543). Repcheck's descriptions of the political, cultural, and geographic landscapes in which Copernicus lived are fresh and spirited. The sections that distinguish his book from other recently published works (e.g., Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read; Dennis Danielson's The First Copernican; William T. Vollmann's Uncentering the Earth) are those in which Repcheck draws on his insights into the publishing process as a W.W. Norton science editor to describe the complexities of bringing De Revolutionibusinto print in 1543, from convincing the reclusive scholar to publish a work that would generate controversy to the printing of the manuscripts. Recommended for the popular science collections of public and college libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/07.]
—Sara Rutter