Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Great Discoveries Series) by William T. Vollmann

From the Publisher

The man and the idea that created modern science, as seen by one of today's most celebrated writers.

In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus lay on his deathbed, his just-published masterpiece On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in his hands. At that time, religious doctrine and common sense dictated that the earth ruled the universe, with the sun, moon, planets, and stars all rotating around it. By putting the sun at the center of that cosmology, his book fomented another kind of revolution—a scientific one—that would lead to a completely new view of the universe, and humanity's place in it.

As contemporary cosmologists explore the universe's vastness and the nearly insignificant role we play in it, the repercussions from Copernicus's radical step continue to resound. With the energetic prose and powerful intelligence for which he is known, William T. Vollmann provides an enlightening and readable explication not only of Copernicus's book but also of Copernicus's epoch, and the momentous clash between the two. 20 diagrams.

Publishers Weekly

Modern readers are less inclined than earlier ones to sit through Copernicus's juggling of Ptolemy's epicycles to discover how he arrived at his eureka moment that the Earth moves around the Sun. Fortunately, they don't have to, as Vollmann, whose Europe Central won this year's National Book Award for fiction, provides a highly personal and philosophical gloss of all six chapters of Copernicus's De revolutionibus (1543). Vollmann interrupts his exegeses with discussions of the contemporary mindset, the limits of observation at the time (we're told repeatedly how difficult it is to spot Mercury without a good pair of binoculars) and the scientist's quiet, provincial career. What seems most remarkable about Copernicus's book after reading Vollmann's version is how firmly his work is based on Ptolemy's. It's also striking how close he came to modern astronomical values, especially since he thought that arriving within 10 degrees of a true value would be an amazing achievement. Vollmann can't completely avoid technical explanations, but readers who want to understand the significance of Copernicus's book in both his own time and ours will find this the next best thing to reading it. 20 b&w illus. (Feb. 6) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Novelist Vollmann, the 2005 National Book Award winner for fiction (Europe Central), develops what is essentially an imaginative meditation on the life and work of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543). The writer reflects on Copernicus's achievement in pursuing and publishing a heliocentric view of the universe, a daring act that faced condemnation from the Roman Catholic Church and that would influence the next generation of astronomers. Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, is the gravitational center around which Vollmann's literary reflection revolves. Organized into interpretative chapters based on Copernicus's six books, Uncentering knits the knowledge and philosophy of 16th-century European scientists with strands of 21st-century cosmology. On the heels of Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus, which Vollmann cites, Uncentering is an interpretive exploration of how this world-changing knowledge was and is understood. Recommended for academic and large public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/05.]-Sara Rutter, Univ. of Hawaii at Manoa Lib., Honolulu Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Times may be tough for evolutionists, but consider: As recently as 400 years ago, folks were being burned at the stake for thinking that Earth revolved around Sol, and not the other way around. Indeed, remarks the hyper-prolific Vollmann, author of Europe Central, winner of the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction, "Copernicus . . . was not only lucky, but canny to have died when he published." The publication in question, The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, looks antique to us now. But, Vollmann argues, following other historians of science, Nicholas Copernicus' treatise-which he rightly reckoned would scandalize the godly-was and remains remarkable on a number of fronts. Most important, by positing and then proving that the solar system is heliotropic, Copernicus removed humankind from the center of the universe at a time, Jacques Barzun notes, "when men thought of themselves as miserable sinners fearful of an angry God." Revolutions, writes Vollmann, is neither empirical nor, strictly speaking, rational. It is based, he adds, on "what we would now consider a faulty premise." Yet it is remarkably coherent, and even if it took two more centuries to prove him experimentally, Copernicus turned out to be right on many points. Copernicus did die soon after publishing his book, condemned by Protestant and Catholic clergy alike; infamously, his follower, Giordano Bruno, was burned to death for his heterodoxical views, taking the place of his comparatively lucky master. Though peppered with intrigue and conflict and even a little human interest, Vollmann's close reading of Revolutions is not for the scientifically fainthearted, full of head-spinning sentences on the order of, "[I]t ismore than remarkable that the deferent radii which Copernicus calculated for the planets, which translate into the mean radii of their actual elliptical orbits, will be fairly accurate for Mercury and Saturn . . ."Stick with it, though, and there's much to learn about a book little studied today-but one that inarguably changed the world.

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