Sobel talks about A More Perfect Heaven

Just as the solar-system-changing work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres by Nicolaus Copernicus took more than 30 years to get from its first writing to actual publication, Dava Sobel’s new book about Copernicus, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos has been in the works for a while.

“I’ve been dreaming of writing a play about Copernicus for a long time,” Sobel said during a talk at Town Hall Seattle Wednesday. “Actually since 1973. That was the 500th anniversary year of his birth. I remember reading an article in Sky & Telescope—I still have the issue with his picture on the cover—and it told this wonderful story about how Copernicus had come up with this idea of reordering the heavens.”

Sobel related that Copernicus had laid out the basics of his heliocentric model of the solar system, written about it to other scientists, and said that he was at work on a big book that would explain everything. Decades went by, however, and the book never appeared.

“Toward the end of his life a young genius arrived and talked him into publishing,” Sobel said. “I remember thinking, ‘That must have been some conversation.’”

The “young genius” was German mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus, who had come to Poland to study under Copernicus, and Sobel’s imagined conversations between the two form the basis of her play around which A More Perfect Heaven is written.

Religious politics of the time made the pairing especially unlikely. Copernicus, in addition to being an astronomer, math whiz, doctor, lawyer, economist, and diplomat, was a cleric in the Catholic Church—his uncle was the local bishop. Feeling the pinch of the burgeoning Protestant Reformation, the local diocese had evicted all Lutherans from the area. Rheticus was as Lutheran as they come, a student of Philipp Melanchthon and a professor at Martin Luther’s University of Wittenberg. His study with Copernicus had to be a covert operation.

Rheticus turned up on Copernicus’s doorstep in May of 1539. On the Revolutions finally hit print in 1543. Copernicus died shortly thereafter. He never knew the praise it received or the controversy it stirred up.

“They printed that book which changed the way people thought about the structure of the universe at a time when people thought you couldn’t discover things about astronomy of that magnitude,” Sobel said. “The only way you could know those kinds of things was by divine revelation. That book got Galileo in trouble.”

Interestingly, Sobel noted that On the Revolutions was never actually banned. The church could hardly burn it after using it to make the calendar more accurate and preventing Easter from slipping into summer. The book instead was listed on the Index of Forbidden Books as “suspended until corrected.” Recent studies of still-existing copies have found that few owners wrote those corrections into their volumes.

Sobel said the play within the book has received mixed reactions from readers.

“There have been some reviews that really liked the idea,” she said. “Some people have found the play the best part of the book. Others have said, ‘The book is really good. What is that nonsense doing in the middle?’”

Wednesday’s reading featured a staged performace of parts of the play by two outstanding Seattle actors, Hans Altweis and Darragh Kennan. The reading was well received by the audience, as Sobel said it has been on the few occasions they’ve done such a performance.

“When people can experience the play as you have tonight you can see what how it might add to an appreciation for Copernicus,” she said.

It’s difficult to overstate his impact. As Sobel read from the conclusion of A More Perfect Heaven:
“Every time the Kepler spacecraft currently in orbit detects a new exoplanet around a star beyond the Sun, another ripple of the Copernican Revolution reverberates through space.”