Complicating Copernicus

Uncentering the Earth

Copernicus and “The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres”

William T. Vollmann

Atlas Books: 296 pp., $22.95

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WHEN the 16th century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus contemplated the firmament from his aerie on Frauenberg’s Cathedral Hill, how did he imagine that the cosmos was operating? Were the planets carried around the heavens by vast crystalline spheres, receiving their impulse from a divine source, as the Greek philosophers and Catholic theologians held, or were they, as modern science holds, impelled by physical forces? Quantities of ink have been expended on this question by historians of science, who have variously interpreted the Copernican system as everything from the last gasp of medieval obscurantism to the shining dawn of modern scientific rationalism. More so than any other giant of the scientific revolution, Copernicus remains shrouded in mystery. We know his work through his epochal book, “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,” but of the man himself we have only fragments.

Unlike Galileo Galilei (whose life was laid bare in the long, drawn-out process that culminated in his trial) or Johannes Kepler (whose ecstatic personality leaps from the pages of his books and letters) or Isaac Newton (who wrote millions of words of bad theology and left thousands of pages of notebooks with his thoughts on everything from the nature of light to his moral turpitude), we have very little through which to interpret the private nature of the man to whom the word “revolution” has become indelibly affixed. Newton, Galileo and Kepler have all had their great biographers, while Copernicus has languished in the shadows of the literary imagination.

It is therefore with much expectation that one approaches William T. Vollmann’s “Uncentering the Earth,” the latest in Atlas Books’ “Great Discoveries” series. Each volume in this welcome excursion into popularizing the history of science takes a major scientific figure and offers an accessible account of his or her work for a general audience. Previous authors include Michio Kaku on Einstein and Barbara Goldsmith on Marie Curie. Copernicus was a natural subject for the project.

Vollmann begins, as all who write on Copernicus must, with the book itself. It is the raison d’etre of the Polish canon’s life -- or, at least, of our interest in him. At the outset, Vollmann tells us he will intersperse chapters of “exegesis” on early cosmological notions with chapters on related cultural, historical and scientific issues. It is an excellent plan. It is thuddingly realized.

Unlike his fellow scientific revolutionaries, Copernicus had but a single idea: The sun, not the Earth, is at the center of the cosmic system. To demonstrate the validity of this view, he worked for more than 40 years on what historians of science agree is one of the driest books ever written. “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” begins with a brief philosophical introduction to its thesis, then quickly settles down to a painfully long, technical explication of exactly how Copernicus believes the various celestial motions are achieved -- a scheme that necessitated assigning to each planet a combination of cycles and epicycles. After the first 20 pages, it ascends into geometric and astronomical arcana, and, like most technical works of the early 16th century, it is suffocatingly abstruse.

On Vollman’s opening page, he tells us that “Uncentering the Earth” is the result of “an autodidact’s exercise in explicating a subject slightly beyond my intellectual competence.” This is somewhat disingenuous. It is clear that he has done his homework and understands Copernicus’ book as well as anyone short of a professional historian could. On page after page, he lives up to his reputation as a writer of intense intellectual capacities. It is the “page after page” that is the problem.

What the work of Copernicus requires is not a line-by-line reading but a bit of distance. To make sense of his extraordinary achievement, one needs to zoom out, to see Copernicus within the frame of his age and get a feeling for the monumental transformation that the Western world was going through philosophically, theologically and culturally. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, Western Europeans moved from seeing themselves at the center of an angel-filled universe in which everything connects to God to seeing themselves in a vast materialist void. It remains one of the most radical epistemological shifts in human history, and one whose consequences we are still wrestling with (the creationist backlash being one example). Inexplicably, Vollmann -- a much lauded novelist and prose writer whose recent collection of World War II stories, “Europe Central,” won a National Book Award -- has chosen to burrow in and in so doing has produced a text almost as incomprehensible as the one it seeks to illuminate.

Vollmann’s chief aim seems to be to impress readers with how much he has grasped of Copernican esoterica: “Copernicus postulates a third Earthly movement westwards, from Aries to Pisces,” he writes. “This movement, called declination, seems necessary to explain the fact that the Earth does not maintain the same position with respect to the plane of the ecliptic.... Declinaton and orbital rotation are opposite in direction but almost equal, he opines.” It is as if Vollmann were a precocious child trying to demonstrate his brilliance. (By contrast, when he turns to the wider intellectual milieu in which Copernicus lived and worked, he offers -- rather than a nuanced view of the relationship between science and religion in the Renaissance -- an analysis that reads like canned history.) Though he addresses us throughout in a tone of intimate collegiality, there is an almost stubborn refusal to explain anything in plain English. When one is dealing with difficult and abstract concepts alien to modern minds, such as celestial deferents and equants, this is a fairly serious criticism. The whole point of the Great Discoveries series is to make such concepts accessible and extend the history of science to an audience beyond academe.

Previous authors have done precisely that. Especially noteworthy have been Sherwin Nuland’s “The Doctor’s Plague,” a piercing portrait of Ignac Semmelweis, the 19th century Viennese physician who discovered that women were dying in delivery wards of puerperal fever because doctors were not washing their hands or their instruments; George Johnson’s “Miss Leavitt’s Stars,” on Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who discovered the secret of Cepheid variable stars, which have been used ever since to measure the distances to other galaxies; and Kaku’s eminently readable “Einstein’s Cosmos.”

One of the interesting features of this series is that the editors have chosen to recruit novelists as well as nonfiction writers. Rebecca Goldstein’s “Incompleteness,” on the great logician Kurt Godel, demonstrates the wisdom of this decision. But it is notable that by far the two weakest volumes in the set have been written by literary lions. Like Vollmann’s book on Copernicus, David Foster Wallace’s book on infinity, “Everything and More,” seems designed primarily as a demonstration of the writer’s cleverness, a pyrotechnical exercise in which the major source of illumination is the author’s ego.

In the case of Vollmann, this is especially baffling, for surely it is his narrative and linguistic gifts that the editors had in mind when they invited him into the project. If you want to read about the technical details of Copernicus’ system, it would be hard to beat historian Owen Gingerich’s “The Eye of Heaven,” which has the advantage of the author’s half-century of scholarship on the subject. You might also turn to Fernand Hallyn’s luminous study of Copernican and Keplerian cosmology, “The Poetic Structure of the World,” which situates Copernicus’ system within the framework of High Renaissance aesthetics and demonstrates that, in the 16th century, questions of science, philosophy, theology and aesthetics were inextricably entwined. Those interested in Copernicus the man have John Banville’s fictionalized life, “Doctor Copernicus,” and Arthur Koestler’s rather jaundiced account in “The Sleepwalkers.” But both leave one wanting more. This seminal figure of Western history still awaits his great public expositor.