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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How the Secret Got Out, February 1, 2008
It is hard to overestimate the audacity of the explanations made by Nicolas Copernicus. That they became universally accepted is surprising. There was, of course, religious opposition to the idea that the Earth went around the Sun, and not vice versa; churchmen, including the popes and Luther, knew that Joshua commanded not the Earth but the Sun to stand still. Even more basic than religious teaching is the information given by our senses; you can see that Sun roll across the sky, and you can't feel yourself spinning around on the globe. Add to this that Copernicus's picture of the universe meant that we were not at the center of things, and you begin to realize how revolutionary his explanation was. It is probably a good idea, then, to know a bit about Copernicus himself, and in _Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began_ (Simon and Schuster), Jack Repcheck has depicted the Polish astronomer and mathematician as a complex figure devoted to religious fervor and to scientific rigor, but also to human urges which he tried to keep secret. He was also reluctant to put the entirety of his explanation into print, and it was only by good fortune of dealing with other astronomers that publication happened in Copernicus's lifetime.
Copernicus is not someone you would have picked to make an astronomical revolution. He did not have obvious ambition; he was a scholar, and he wanted to do his researches and to be left alone. His researches were not even professional; he was an astronomer by avocation. He was trained as a doctor (he was trusted as a healer), and had official duties as a canon in the Catholic church. His attack on the Earth-centered picture of the solar system was mathematical, and his complicated computations had the benefit of being simpler than those required for the geocentric model. Copernicus had the ideas, and the mathematics behind them, but he did not publish. He was busy with his canon's duties and did not have the scholastic's freedom to devote all his time to his studies or publications. He was worried that his theory might be wrong in places, or at best was incomplete, so he kept quiet about it. When his ideas leaked out, they brought him unwanted attention, so that his supervisor heard about the mistress he kept and ordered her out, and also he became associated with the Lutherans who were gaining numbers at the time. It was, indeed, a Lutheran who teamed up with Copernicus to see the treatise _On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres_ prepared for print. Copernicus was taking a risk in working with the young Lutheran professor, Geog Joachim Rheticus, who came from Wittenberg for the express purpose of partnering with him. Rheticus, indeed, was taking his own life in his hands in traveling into the Catholic realm.
It is interesting that though Copernicus had reasons for keeping his work and himself secluded away, he was not (as many assume) afraid of being labeled a heretic. Those fears would be realized for Galileo, who popularized the Copernican ideas. Indeed, there were officials in the church who approved of Copernicus's work and urged him to publish and offered to pay the expenses for publication, but they did not overcome his reticence. It took Rheticus to do that, lovingly shepherding Copernicus's great work into print. Copernicus saw the first copy on the very day of his death in 1543. His fears that it would be found imperfect were completely unfounded. Of course, like all correct scientific ideas, it had to be modified; he had, for instance, assumed that all planetary orbits were exactly circular. The modifications would come only many years after his death, as would his book's condemnation by the church, which only happened in 1613. Repcheck's smoothly written and appealing book concentrates not on the astronomy, but on the social forces of the times, and of course on the peculiar personality of the man who had the mathematics to show us our place in the universe, and only reluctantly at the very end of his life let us in on the secret.
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Serviceable Biography, January 7, 2008
When it comes right down to it, this isn't a bad book. As a biography it is quite serviceable, brief and easy to read. Mr. Repcheck covers what is known about Copernicus' life and gives good attention to those years near the end of his life when De Revolutionibus was finally published; mainly through the prodding and effort of others. He also makes effective use of the letters of Copernicus and some of his correspondents. Use of primary source material always adds to a biography.
On the other hand, this book isn't anything special. The title, Copernicus' Secret, seems to promise some intrigue that Mr. Repcheck never really seems to deliver. What he offers are some background stories that are fairly well known with workman-like prose that never really generates excitement. By the end of this book the secret, if there really is one, remains unrevealed.
Perhaps Repcheck's book is overshadowed by other books on Copernicus that read better: Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read and even Banville's novel Doctor Copernicus. Admittedly, as a basic biography, it works. It just feels like it should read better.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Satisfying Story of Scientific Discovery Reaching the Light of Day, October 4, 2008
Nicolaus Copernicus lived a life of two secrets, although neither hardly seemed to be very well hidden from those who knew him or traveled his professional circles. One secret concerned his theory, based on intense astronomical observation and mathematical reasoning, that earth rotates on its axis once every twenty-four hours and revolves around the sun (although he still viewed the sun, and not the earth, as the center of the universe). The second concerned his illicit affair with Anna Schilling, twenty years his junior but never his wife, even as he served as a cleric who had taken a vow of celibacy.
Why was Copernicus' heliocentric theory a secret? Because the religious state of affairs in 16th Century Europe, with its incessant power struggle between the Vatican and the Lutheran Reformation, created a highly toxic environment for scientific claims that ran counter to the long-held and Biblically consistent theories of Ptolemy (as Galileo would learn at first hand not too many years after Copernicus' death). Thus, despite certitude in his results, Copernicus was reluctant to publish or publicize his findings out of fear, perhaps as much for his job as a canon of the Cathedral Chapter of Warmia as for the opprobrium of the Catholic Church hierarcy.
In COPERNICUS' SECRET, Jack Repcheck uses the second secret, other biographical details, informed conjecture, and historical context to illuminate the conditions underlying the first one. For a biographical subject about whose life a remarkably limited written record exists, the author nevertheless constructs a workable profile of Copernicus the man, a profile that adds perspective on his astronomical work as well as the challenges of publishing those results.
The nature of the heliocentric secret requires Repcheck to trace its historical development, starting a century earlier with the work of Georg Peurback and his extraordinary protégé, the dominant figure of 15th Century astronomy, Johannes Muller, known to history as Regiomontanus. In the same manner that Regionmontanus exceeded the work of his mentor, Copernicus did likewise with his first mentor, Domenico Navara. History's habit of repeating itself was demonstrated yet again some forty years later when the twenty-four-year-old Georg Joachim Rheticus, a newly minted professor of astronomy, appeared unannounced at the door of sixty-six-year-old Copernicus' in the small town of Frombork. Most of the latter half of COPERNICUS' SECRET deals with Rheticus' effort to convince Copernicus to publish his work and to assist him in doing so.
Repcheck's story reveals a number of interesting historical facts that make his book highly worthwhile. For example, as a Lutheran, Rheticus literally risked his young life to spend almost three years working with the elderly Copernicus. Despite his immense efforts, Rheticus was not even mentioned or thanked in Copernicus' own introduction, while several other figures were so attributed. Perhaps most intriguing, the early reception to Copernicus' book focused almost solely on its utilitarian aspects in correcting calendars and projecting calendar dates (such as equinoxes or solstices). Little note appears to have been taken to his theory of the earth rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun, Astronomy had to pass through Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler to reach Galileo some ninety years after Copernicus' death before the heliocentric model of the solar system took real scientific hold.
COPERNICUS' SECRET draws a fascinating picture of an Enlightenment era during which reason battled to establish itself alongside faith. Although purposely light on the actual science and mathematics of Copernicus' work and the reasoning by which he overturned the Ptolemaic model, Repcheck offers an engaging look at the persistence and painstaking observation and analysis of the "lone scientist." The author also explores how youth took the reins from its mentors in successive generations, sometimes to enlarge that work as well as bring it to the light of day so it could be disseminated to intellectuals and others in the same field of study. In an era of scientific journals, conferences, and now the Internet, it is easy to forget the challenges of publication and communication that were so essential to even the greatest scientific minds of the European Renaissance.
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