An "Upstart Astrologer''

How Copernicus Sought Publicity

What is the most important book in the history of science? I cannot doubt that it is On the Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies by Copernicus, demonstrating that the Sun, not the Earth, was the centre of the solar system. This book overturned almost everything that people knew or imagined about the world and its surroundings. Yet the conventional scholarly view is that its publication was of little importance; that it was barely noticed when it first appeared in 1543 and for a long time afterwards. Arthur Koestler once gave it the derogatory epithet: ``the book nobody read.'' Now the astronomer Owen Gingerich has corrected this absurd impression. In a new book ironically entitled The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicholas Copernicus, he has demonstrated how the book was in fact very widely read.

But a far more interesting question is why was this so? There were no book fairs in the 16th century. Its success was surely due to the shrewdness of Copernicus himself. Knowing that his book would infuriate the Catholic Church, he wrote an obsequious dedication to Pope Paul III, even offering the Pope the right to suppress the book if he disapproved of it!

A risky offer, but it was just for show. Copernicus was a clever psychologist. He knew that Paul III was preoccupied with Papal and European politics and had no interest in science. He was unlikely to read the book or its dedication, and so it proved. He also must have known that he needed a publicity agent, not necessarily someone who favoured his Sun-centred solar system but perhaps someone who might be violently opposed to it. In those days, as in ours, there was no such thing as bad publicity. To attract hostile criticism, he deliberated mocked some beliefs of the Church.

``There will be babblers who claim to be judges of astronomy while completely ignorant of the subject and, badly distorting Scripture to their purpose, will dare to find fault with my undertaking and censure it. I disregard them and despise their criticism.'' In this he was ridiculing the story of Joshua stopping the Sun in its course. The book soon found its hostile publicity agent in the form of Martin Luther who, Copernicus probably knew, was easily provoked to rage. Luther was soon raging sufficiently to boost Copernicus's sales. The work, Luther declared on cue, was ``anti-Biblical and intolerable.'' Copernicus was just a ``an upstart astrologer who wants to be clever.'' How absurd to suppose that the Earth moved! ``This would be as if somebody were riding in a cart and imagined that he was standing still while the Earth and the trees were moving. This fool would overturn the whole science of astronomy.'' And thanks to Luther, Copernicus did just that, replacing it with an entirely new science of astronomy. But his success was due as much to his psychological skills as to his scientific reasoning.