Read A More Perfect Heaven Online
Authors: Dava Sobel
Adamczewsi, Jan.
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———.
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———.
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———.
The Search for Nicolaus Copernicus’s Tomb
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An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ “De Revolutionibus” (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566)
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———.
The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus
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———.
The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler
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Copernicus and the Scientific Revolution
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Complete Works of Nicolaus Copernicus
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———.
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On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
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———. Johannes Kepler’s
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1
Medieval scholar Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187) compiled this edition from several Arabic translations of the original (lost) Greek text. Gerard is said to have completed the work at Toledo in 1175, but its publication waited half a century after the invention of movable type, to be issued in Venice in 1515.
2
Copernicus’s realization that bad money drives good money out of circulation often goes by the name Gresham’s Law, in honor of Sir Thomas Gresham (c. 1519–1579), a financial adviser to English royalty who made the same wise observation. The concept was also put forward by medieval philosopher Nicole Oresme and mentioned by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes in his comedy
The Frogs.
3
Against all odds, the entire handwritten, original manuscript of
On the Revolutions
survives to this day—a bound stack of yellowed paper two hundred sheets thick—in ultrasafe keeping at the Library of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
4
Theodoric of Reden, Copernicus’s fellow canon in Varmia, then served as the chapter’s representative to the papal court at Rome.
5
While working together in Frauenburg, Rheticus and Copernicus observed a comet that they judged to be supralunar, just as Tycho later demonstrated to the world. Rheticus wrote to his friend Paul Eber about their discovery, and Eber in turn reported it to Melanchthon in a surviving letter of April 15, 1541.
Dava Sobel is the acclaimed author of the
New York Times
and international bestsellers
Longitude
,
Galileo’s Daughter
, and
The Planets
, and the coauthor of
The Illustrated Longitude
. She lives in East Hampton, New York.