Christmas Trilogy 2012 Part III: What to do if your mother’s a witch.

Johannes Kepler certainly lived in interesting times in the sense of the old Chinese curse.  Born 27^th December 1571 he lived through the most intensive phase of the Counter-Reformation being forced, as a Protestant living and working in Catholic territory, to abandoned his home and livelihood more than once. Trained as a Luther priest he served three Catholic Holy Roman Kaisers as mathematicus and the supreme commander of the Catholic forces in the thirty years war as an astrologus. Always walking along a knife-edge. The last twelve years of his life were dominated by that most devastating of European wars. He played a very central role in one of the greatest upheavals in the history of astronomy as well as redefining the science of physical optics. He lost his first wife and several of his children to sickness and was chronically and oft acutely ill all of his life. Paid at best on an irregular basis by his various employers he was often in desperate need of money. He also lived during the highpoint of the European witch craze in which tens of thousands of innocent people, mostly women, were persecuted, tortured and murdered and must experience how his own mother was tried for practicing witchcraft. All in all if a Hollywood scriptwriter were to write a screenplay outlining the life of Johannes Kepler it would probably be turned down by the producers as too fantastic.

I think of all the misfortunes that Kepler battled with in his life probably the most extraordinary was the accusation of witchcraft against his mother. Beginning in 1615 as a spat between neighbours this affair hung over the heads of the entire Kepler family until its final resolution in October of 1621. Initially Ursula Reinbold a neighbour and ex-friend of Kepler’s mother, Katharina, accused the old lady of having poisoned her with a magic potion following a business dispute. In the atmosphere of the witch craze an accusation of witchcraft formed the basis of a very potent smear campaign.  Later in the same year a cousin of Reinbold’s and the local magistrate, a friend of the family, whilst drunk, tried to force Katharina at sword point to admit that she was a witch. Following this episode Katharina brought a civil suit for slander against the Reinbold family. From this point on the situation spiralled out of control. Einhorn, the magistrate aware that he could be in serious trouble because of his sword swinging drunken escapade successfully blocked the civil process from coming to trial over the next four years whilst simultaneously constructing a spurious case against Katharina based on rumour and hearsay. Einhorn was aided in his efforts by the fact that Katharina was, according to Kepler’s own description, anything but a pleasant woman, meaning that there were plenty of people more than prepared to speak ill of her and also by the fact that she made the strategic mistake of trying to bribe the magistrate at one point in the proceedings.

In December 1616 Kepler tried to defuse the situation by obtaining permission from the Duke of Württemberg, who because Kepler had received a state grant to finance his education whilst still a youth remained his lifelong liege lord, to remove his mother out of the firing line in Württemberg and take her to his home in Linz. If Katharina had been content to stay with her famous son in Austria then she would probably have remained unmolested for the rest of her life. However she was a stubborn and cantankerous old battle-axe and determined to confront her accuser and so late in 1617 she returned home to do just that. Things took their course and in August 1620 following years of legal wrangling Katharina Kepler was arrested and imprisoned on forty-nine formal charges of practicing witchcraft.

Kepler travelled back to Württemberg and alongside the attorney he had engaged for his mother he personally took charge of her defence. The original prosecutor so in awe of the powerful defence team being arranged against him, highly unusual in a witchcraft trial, had the whole process moved to a higher court. Finally after much more legal wrangling the prosecution and the defence submitted their final statements. The final statement for the defence was a closely argued logical structured 128-page demolition of the prosecutions case largely written by Kepler himself. The whole case was now passed on the law faculty of the University of Tübingen, Kepler’s Alma Mater, who decided that Katharine should be taken to the hangman and shown the instruments of torture and ordered to confess. On 21^st October 1621 this was duly carried out but the stubborn old lady refused to bend she said,

“Do with me what you want. Even if you were to pull one vein after another out of my body, I would have nothing to admit.” Then she fell to her knees and said a Pater Noster. God would she said, bring the truth to light and after her death disclose that wrong and violence had been done to her. He would not take the Holy Ghost from her and would stand by her.

[Max Casper, Kepler, Trans & Ed C. Doris Hellman, 1959 p. 255]

The Duke now declared that having suffered this ordeal and not confessed she had confounded the evidence against her and should be set free, which she duly was as soon as Johannes had paid the court costs.

One interesting aspect of the modern versions of this story is that all the authors assume and indeed emphasise that Katharine was entirely innocent of the charges against her and that she was the victim of a malicious plot carried out by the Reinholds and Einhorn the local magistrate. Whilst this point of view does have a lot of validity it is not totally correct. It was obvious from his writings that Kepler was convinced that his mother was indeed a witch. She earned at least part of her income peddling magical potions. The modern writers declare these to be simple peasant herbal cures but it is clear that these potions owed their supposed efficacy to charms or magic spells that Katharine had learnt from her own mother and that this knowledge of the arcane was what her clients were paying for. Katharine’s reputation of a purveyor of spells and charms certainly worked against her when her enemies were constructing their case against her.

When I decided to write about Kepler’s mother and her trial for witchcraft in my annual Kepler Christmas post this year I took the opportunity to finally read James A. Connor’s Kepler’s Witch: An Astronomer’s Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother, which I bought some time ago. I wish I hadn’t! The book is a biography climaxing with the story of Katharine’s witchcraft trial. Connor starts by explaining that he wishes to concentrate on the biography and will therefore be leaving the science out of the story. Writing a biography of Kepler without the science is like making whiskey sours without the whiskey! However it is not possible so Connor does includes brief descriptions of Kepler’s scientific activities. I wish he hadn’t! He has literally no idea what he’s talking about and the results are pitiful. I have no desire to relive the whole horror but I was fascinated to discover that before Kepler wrote his Dioptrice (1611) telescopes only had one lens! It is not only in terms of science that Connors displays strange interpretations of history. When discussing the causes of the witch craze he explains that it was due to the ignorant superstition of peasants in small towns and villages. The role played by the churches doesn’t exist in Connor’s historical vision and the mass trials and executions that took place in the large towns and cities are also apparent non-existent in Connor’s universe. I discovered what I consider to be the worst sin in Connor’s book purely by accident. He plagiarises massively. To check some of the claims he was making I controlled them against the English translation of Max Casper’s Kepler, the standard biography. I was surprised as I discovered a whole paragraph in Connor’s text that was word the word the same as a paragraph in the Casper’s text. I then started to check systematically and discovered quite a lot of similar identical passages. Conclusion, if you were thinking of buying or reading Connor’s book don’t bother read the Casper’s instead it’s at least a hundred times better

Humanity’s interest in the so-called pseudo-sciences has not always been bad for science.

In a recent piece on her excellent Guardian Science blog, The H Word, my #histsci soul sister Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt asked, “Is there a rising tide of irrationality?” summarising her opinion with the following subtitle:

Despite claims that pseudoscientific views are on the rise, history shows that belief in things like astrology or the paranormal have always been with us and are likely to remain

Being my usual provocative self I thought I would take the time to point out that not only has the belief in things like astrology and the paranormal always been with us but that this belief has over the centuries made a not insubstantial contribution to the evolution of the so-called legitimate sciences. What follows is not intended to be an exhaustive survey of the subject but an indicator that humanity’s interest in the apparently non-rational has not necessarily been so disastrous as the members of the so-called Skeptical Community would have us believe.

As Ms Higgitt specifically mentions astrology I thought it would make for a convenient starting point. Some form of astrology or more generally a belief in celestial influence was the main driving force behind the development of astronomy from its beginnings in the prehistoric mists of time up to the beginning of the eighteenth century CE. Most if not all astronomers in antiquity were also astrologers a fact best illustrated by the fact that the author, Ptolemaeus, of the definitive account of technical astronomy in antiquity, his Syntaxis Mathematiké, was also the author of the definitive technical account of astrology, his Tetrabiblos.

We find this connection flowering in the Early Modern Period where the principle founders of the new astronomy – Gmunden, Peuerbach, Regiomontanus, Apian, Rheticus, Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo et al. – were all practicing astrologers. (The first person in the comments, who claims they only did it for the money gets to clean my bike for the next twelve months) In fact we know that the principle motivation for the majority of them in improving astronomy was to provide a more accurate apparatus for delivering the raw data for astrology. It is first the generation of astronomers active in the latter part of the seventeenth century – Cassini, Newton, Flamsteed, Halley et al. – who abandoned astrology for astronomy qua astronomy, although both Cassini and Newton were motivated to take up the subject by an early interest in astrology.

During the Humanist Renaissance the strong interest in astro-medicine or, as it was know, iatro-mathematics led to the establishment, for the first time, of dedicated chairs for the study of the mathematical sciences at the mediaeval universities.

During the Early Modern Period attempts to establish astrology as an empirical science led to the emergence of the science of meteorology and also made major contributions to a modern fact based approach to history. All in all not a bad record for the most ridiculed of pseudo-sciences.

Sticking with the “A”s we move on to alchemy. Often ridiculed as complete nonsense in reality alchemy made some major contribution, along side astrology, to the evolution of the sciences in the Early Modern Period.

Most difficult to determine is alchemy’s contribution to the development of its first cousin chemistry as the two disciplines were entwined in a close embrace well into the eighteenth century. What is certain is that most of the equipment and the methodology that became standard fare in the chemistry laboratory were developed over the centuries by alchemists.

Paracelsus has been called the father of pharmacy, a term, that regular readers of this blog will know, I detest. However it is a historical fact that the science of pharmacy as we know it has its origins in the activities of the Paracelsian iatro-chemists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose activities were based on a modified alchemy developed by their guru Theophrastus.

Alchemy also played a surprising role in the history of physics in the work of the seventeenth century’s most infamous alchemist, Isaac Newton. To quote I. Bernard Cohen probably the greatest of all Newtonian scholars:

Thus Newton’s acceptance of forces [and also action at a distance] as fundamental entities was conditioned to a significant degree by his studies of alchemy.[1]

In fact Newton’s rejection of the then dominant mechanical philosophy for an alchemy inspired physics of invisible forces acting at a distance led to the Principia being rejected by both the Cartesian and the Leibnizian physicists as occult (read pseudo) science.

Staying with old Isaac for a brief moment, as I have blogged in the past, he and other Bible chronologists, millennialists to the core (and you can’t get more pseudo than that!), in their endeavours to establish the date of the apocalypse made significant contributions to the development of modern historical methodology.

Should anybody jump to the conclusion that with the successful completion of the so-called scientific revolution this unholy alliance between the one pure doctrine of science and its distinctly unsavoury sister the occult had finally come to an end they would be mightily mistaken.

For example in the nineteenth century Vitalism, Naturphilosphie and Mesmerism, all three of which would be decried as pseudo-scientific today, all played important and significant roles in the scientific debates of the period pushing forward the development of various scientific disciplines.

Even the twentieth century was far from immune from the influence of highly dubious subjects within the evolution of the sciences. When he died the scientist, science communicator and novelist, Arthur Koestler left money in his will for the establishment of a chair for the investigation of the paranormal, an act that caused a major outcry within the scientific community. However throughout the twentieth century investigations of supposed paranormal phenomena such as telepathy, telekinesis, out of body experiences etc. have contributed to experiment design and evaluation, the development of statistical evaluation of experiments and made general contributions to the development of the cognitive sciences.

Should anyone believe that twentieth century physics is immune from woo they should read up on the history of the heuristics employed by those who developed the standard model, rational is something else.

Of course I’m not advocating the pursuit of pseudo-science or in anyway supporting those who try to sneak pseudo-science into the school curriculum but as a historian of science I do have problems with the often almost hysterical attitude of the Skeptical Community towards what they see as the demonic forces of woo. On one occasion when discussing the role that astrology played in the evolution of modern astronomy I was told by a leading German Skeptic, who was at that time a physics post doc at my local university and is still deeply involved in science communication, that I should not say such things in public because I would give people a false impression of science. As a historian of science I can only say that it is the supporters of Dawkins, Mayer et al who with their gospel of scientism who give people a false impression of science. Science has evolved over the centuries along a strange and convoluted path and will almost certainly continue to do despite the best efforts of the Hordes of Pharyngula and their ilk to place it in a straightjacket.

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[1] Isaac Newton The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, A new translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman assisted by Julia Badenz Preceded by A Guide to Newton’s Principia by I. Bernard Cohen pp. 57 – 58

The pocket diary: A great Renaissance invention

The other day Kate Morant, author of the interesting Halley’s Log Blog, tweeted the following question on my twitter stream:

Help! My iPhone diary’s become corrupted. By month ok, but by list all the apptmts randomly reassigned to diff dates. Any tips?

Being the friendly and helpful chap that I am, I tweeted back:

Buy a pocket diary (a great Renaissance invention) and a pencil.

Now I have already written about the origins of the pencil, another great Renaissance invention, in an earlier post so I thought it would be nice to write something about the scientific origins of the pocket diary.

Most people know that the printing of books with moveable type was (re)invented by Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg in Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century. (Moveable type printing had been invented twice before in China, eleventh century, and in Korea, thirteenth century) What most people don’t know is that one of Gutenberg’s first pieces of commercial printing was a single sheet wall calendar, which also counts as the earliest known printed scientific publication. Those not in the know are probably thinking why is a calendar a scientific publication?

In the Renaissance one of the dominant forms of medicine was astro-medicine, that is medical diagnosis and treatment based on astrological phenomena. Calendars contained the phases of the moon and other astronomical information, such as planetary conjunctions, to help physicians determine the auspicious and inauspicious days for treatments such as bloodletting and cupping. The importance attached to this information can be judged by the fact that many towns and districts employed a mathematician as an official calendar maker, whose function was to deliver this astronomical data for the physicians, barbers and surgeons of the town.

Astronomers and astrologers also produced and used ephemerides, which are more complex tables giving the daily positions of all the heavenly bodies. In the 1470s Regiomontanus set up the first scientific publishing house in Nürnberg and amongst other astronomical and astrological texts published the first printed ephemerides and astronomical/astrological calendars in book form. The calendars were simplified versions of the ephemerides with a reduce amount of data. Both publications proved immensely popular and were quickly copied by many other printer publishers.

We have several well-attested examples of astronomers and astrologers using their ephemerides to note important occurrences in the margins at the relevant date. For example the Nürnberger astronomer/astrologer Johannes Schöner recorded the birth of his children in the margins of his ephemerides.

At some point an enterprising printer publisher came up with the idea of binding empty pages into their book form astrological medical calendars between the printed pages providing a space were the users could make their notes instead of having to use the margins. This simple novelty caught on and the pocket diary was born. A vestigial reminder of the origins of the pocket diary can be seen in the phases of the moon that are still included in almost all diaries. These are not there so you remember to go out and marvel at the full moon but to help you to determine the correct day to indulge in a bit of bloodletting to cure the fever that accompanied that dose of flu you picked up at the office party.

The Tycho Myth

The last couple of days have seen two astronomical anniversaries associated with the great Danish observational astronomer Tycho Brahe. Tycho first observed the super nova of 1572 from Herrevad Abbey in Southern Sweden on 11^th November and five years later he first observed the great comet of 1577 from his observatory of Uraniborg on the island of Hven on 13^th November. These two events have entered the folklore of the history of astronomy and their supposed impact has defined Tycho’s position in the pantheon of the astronomers who ushered in the new astronomy. Unfortunately most of what is said about them is false or at best distorted.

In both cases it is claimed that through his observations of these events Tycho singlehandedly demolished the previously held belief in the incorruptibility of the heavens and with it geocentricity and thereby paved the way for the entrance of heliocentricity. Although there is a grain of truth hidden somewhere in this claim it is an oversimplified and largely incorrect version of what actually took place in the sixteenth century.

The oversimplified version ignores the fact that the standard mediaeval view of the heavens was an uneasy mix of Aristotelian cosmology and Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy. I say uneasy because the two theories were not necessarily conform and in the view of some contemporary experts even contradictory. The belief that the heavens were incorruptible was part of the Aristotelian cosmology and it was perfectly possible to hold and defend a geocentric view of astronomy without believing in it; in fact in the later part of antiquity a leading philosophical school, the Stoics, did just that. Observational evidence refuting the incorruptibility of the heavens by no means led to a heliocentric astronomy.

The story becomes even more complex when you realise that Tycho was by no means the first important astronomer in the sixteenth century to question Aristotelian cosmology on just this point. In the 1530s there had been a series of major comets in Europe, observation of which triggered a widespread debate on the nature of comets and whether they are sub- or supra-lunar. Independently of each other Fracastoro and Cardano in Italy as well as Gemma Frisius and Jean Pina in Northern Europe concluded that contrary to Aristotle’s teachings comets were corruptible supra-lunar phenomena simultaneously rejecting Aristotle’s dictum on the incorruptibility of the heavens and his strict division between the sub-lunar and supra-lunar spheres. This position was conform with the cosmological teachings of the Stoics, which were not coincidentally undergoing a renaissance in Europe at this time. Forty years before Tycho made his much celebrated observations leading European astronomers had driven a very large nail into the coffin of Aristotelian cosmology without even considering abandoning Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy.

In the case of the super nova of 1572 it was not Tycho’s influence that led to the general acceptance that this was a supra-lunar change in the heavens but that of Christoph Clavius a dyed in the wool defender of the Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy. Again Clavius, a Jesuit mathematician and the leading astronomical authority in Europe in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, was prepared to abandon a philosophical point of Aristotelian cosmology but did not consider this is anyway grounds to abandon the geocentric astronomy.

Of course in the long run these sixteenth century observations did play a role in the gradual disintegration of the mediaeval concept of the cosmos and the acceptance of the first stage of the one we hold today but Tycho’s role in the story was by no means so central or innovative as it is usually painted.

Dear Stu, you might be a good novelist but you’re a lousy historian.

The latest Guardian science blog by Stuart Clark contains a piece of history of science stupidity that can only be explained by assuming that he hit the Kool Aid before putting finger to keyboard.

Like many science bloggers Dr Clark has decided to add his voice to the mighty chorus crying shame over the more than somewhat bizarre court judgement in the Italian earthquake case. Also like several of his Internet colleagues he has chosen to draw parallels with the equally notorious case of Galileo Galilei from 1633. This is in my opinion an unwise move. In general trying to draw comparisons across centuries of history is not usually a very good idea. Put simply circumstances change. The social and political contexts of the two cases are completely different. Just to take some simple points; the one case is in a democratic country in a civil court in the twenty-first century, the other is in an absolutist state, in an ecclesiastical tribunal in the seventeenth century. It’s not even a case of comparing apples and oranges, more like comparing apples and orang-utans!

Having said all of that Clark actually makes some fairly valid and intelligent points. Having established that the earthquake case is one of bad science communication and not one of bad science he then goes on to claim that Galileo’s case was also one of bad science communication. This is only partially correct as the case had several dimensions of which the bad science communication was only one and not necessarily the most important. However given the usual rubbish that people spout when talking about the trial of Galileo, Clark certainly earns quite a few Brownie points. He then even improves on his own performance by pointing out that Galileo was actually making scientific claims that he couldn’t back up with evidence, never a very smart move. So far so good.

So why have I called the good Dr Clark a lousy historian? Am I just being mean spirited? No! The sting is in the tail. Having actually written a reasonably sensible article he then goes and spoil it all in his third from last paragraph with some statements of breath taking stupidity as he steps in it with both feet.

In 1633, the punitive treatment of Galileo eviscerated the practice of astronomy in Italy for centuries. He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life and although the conviction was for miscommunication, astronomy itself became toxic. Even the staunchly Catholic Society of Jesus moved its astronomical efforts to the far east (sic)  to stay out of the Vatican’s gaze.

In the first sentence he writes, “…eviscerated the practice of astronomy in Italy for centuries”. Now eviscerated literally mean gutted, that is disembowelled. So he is claiming that Italian astronomy was demolished, destroyed, wiped out, became effectively non-existent, disappeared from the face of the earth, or whichever suitably dramatic means of destruction you prefer; a strong claim indeed. This however is not enough, this hatchet job on the ancient and honourable science of astronomy was not for a few months or a couple of years but for centuries, note the plural. This means for at least two hundred years, which would take us to 1833! However if one means two centuries then one usually says a couple of centuries; centuries without qualifications implies much more, three or four or … This would of course take us past the present day. Lets be generous and say that Dr Clark got a little carried away in the heat of the moment and he really meant to say a century and not centuries. Does this improve his chances of being right? No, unfortunately it doesn’t.

I’m not going to write a complete history of seventeenth century Italian astronomy post Galileo but I will indulge in some cherry picking to demonstrate that the good Dr Clark is talking through his posterior. Before I do so I should point out that the Jesuit mission to the Far East, including the transmission of European astronomy, started long before the trial of Galileo and has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Galileo gained his fame through his telescopic observations so let us start with the history of the telescope in astronomy post Galileo. The first person to successfully develop an astronomical or Keplerian telescope was Francesco Fontana (1580 – 1656) an Italian astronomer. He was superseded as the leading European telescope maker by Eustachio Divini (1610 – 1685), an Italian astronomer, who also made several important astronomical discoveries. Divini reigned supreme until challenged and in his turn superseded as Europe’s number one by Giuseppe Campini (1635 – 1715) an Italian astronomer whose telescopes were purchased by all of the leading European astronomers. It was Campini and not Cassini who first observed the so-called Cassini Division in the Rings of Saturn.

Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625 – 1712) was of course an Italian astronomer and a Jesuit educated and trained one at that. Some people might object that Cassini worked in France, and not Italy, as the de facto head of the Paris Observatory but he was already regarded as one of the leading European astronomers when he became the subject of the most expensive transfer deal in seventeenth century astronomy, moving from professorship at the University of Bologna to Paris. Cassini was a protégée of Riccioli and Grimaldi. Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598 -1671) was a Jesuit priest who was the first to successfully confirm Galileo’s laws of fall whilst his partner Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1618- 1663), another Jesuit priest, was the first to observe and describe optical diffraction. Together they produced one of the most accurate maps of the moon.

Astronomy is a science that requires the accumulation of vast quantities of data, best accomplished as a collective activity. In the seventeenth century Athanasius Kircher (1601 -1680), also a Jesuit priest, who was not an Italian, but was professor of Mathematics at the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit University in Rome, collected data from Jesuit and non-Jesuit astronomers throughout the world that he collated and then distributed throughout the European astronomical community.

The list goes on. Niccolò Zucchi (1586 -1670) Jesuit astronomer and friend of Galileo famous for his failed attempt to construct a reflecting telescope. Giovanni Battista Zupi (1590 -1650), Jesuit astronomer, who was the first to observe the orbital phases of mercury, thus proving that it orbited the sun. Geminiano Montanari (1633 -1687), Italian astronomer, was the first to demonstrate that Algol is a variable star. Carlo Antonio Manzini (1599 – 1668), Italian astronomer, was the first to publish an account of how to grind and polish telescope lenses.

I could go on but I don’t wish to bore my readers. If you have come this far I think you will agree that for an eviscerated corpse seventeenth century Italian astronomy proved remarkably lively and that the Jesuit seem to have been rather present and not withdrawn at all.

The other professor of mathematics at Wittenberg.

Anybody who knows a bit about the history of astronomy in the early modern period or who has wasted their time and money reading Dava Sobel’s last perversion of the history of science will know that Copernicus was finally persuaded to publish his De Revolutionibus by Georg Joachim Rheticus who was professor of mathematics at the University of Wittenberg. To be precise he was appointed professor for the lower mathematics, i.e. arithmetic and geometry, by Phillip Melanchthon in 1536. In the same year Melanchthon appointed Erasmus Reinhold, who was born on 22^nd October 1511, professor for the higher mathematics, i.e. astronomy and music. Like his colleague Rheticus, Reinhold made a significant, but less well-known, contribution to the reception of Copernicus’ heliocentricity.

Reinhold was the son of Johannes Reinhold, a tax collector, from Saalfeld in Thüringen. He entered the University of Wittenberg as a student in the winter semester 1530/31 graduating MA in 1535 and as already noted above being appointed professor in 1536. He remained in Wittenberg the rest of his life serving terms as dean of the faculty of arts and as rector of the university. He died in 1553 probably of tuberculosis. He was respected as a practicing astronomer and was considered and excellent teacher.

To understand Reinhold’s contribution to heliocentricity one first has to consider the function of mathematical astronomy. Since at least the first algebraic astronomical models of the Babylonians up to the seventeenth century the main function of mathematical astronomy was to supply accurate predictions of the positions of celestial bodies and the occurrence of celestial phenomena such as lunar and solar eclipses; this data then being utilised by astrologers, navigators, cartographers and others. The mathematical models of the cosmos produced by Ptolemaeus and others described and traced the movement of the various heavenly bodies, in order to make the positional predictions those movements had to be turned into data tables showing the weekly/daily/hourly positions of those bodies; these list of data are known as planetary tables or ephemerides. Various sets of tables that had been calculated for the geocentric models were already in existence and their inaccuracies were one of the major driving forces behind moves to reform mathematical astronomy throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of which Copernicus’ De revolutionibus was one result. Copernicus had not calculated planetary tables for his heliocentric model and this task fell to Erasmus Reinhold.

Using modified versions of the models supplied by Copernicus, in his magnum opus, Reinhold calculated the first ever set of heliocentric planetary tables, financed by and dedicated to Albrecht Duke of Prussia, they were titled the Prutenicae Tabulae Coelestium Motuum, which translates as the Prussian Tables of Celestial Motion. They were originally destined to be published by Johannes Petreius, who had published De revolutionibus, but he died before they were finished and so the first edition was published by Ulrich Morhard in Tübingen in 1551. Morhard’s widow produced a reprint of the first edition in 1562. A second edition was edited by Michael Maestlin, Kepler’s teacher, in Tübingen in 1571. A third edition was published in Wittenberg in 1585.

The tables were eagerly awaited by the sixteenth century astronomical community, irrespective of whether they believed in heliocentricity or not, with the hope that Copernicus’ new mathematical models would deliver more accurate predictive data than the older tables based on the geocentric models. Unfortunately this proved not to be the case. In some aspects the new tables were better than their predecessors, in others about the same and in some even worse. This failure to deliver was due to the fact that the data on which the Copernican models were constructed was the same defective or inaccurate data as that on which the earlier geocentric models had been constructed. It also severed to slow down the acceptance of a heliocentric cosmology.

The inability of both the geocentric and the heliocentric planetary tables to deliver accurate celestial predictions is what started off a young Tycho Brahe (who died 24 October 1601) on his twenty-plus years programme of astronomical observation in order to obtain a new accurate set of basic data on which to construct planetary orbit models. It was using Tycho’s vast collection of data that Kepler was able to construct his elliptical heliocentric astronomy. The tables that Kepler then calculated using his models and Tycho’s data, the Tabulae Rudolphinae or Rudolphine Tables named after the German Emperor römisch-deutsche Kaiser Rudolph II who financed them, finally did the trick. Compared with all of their predecessors the Rudolphine Tables were extremely accurate and they were the major factor in persuading people to adopt a heliocentric cosmology and in fact a Keplerian elliptical world view and not a Copernican one as is often falsely claimed.

An Italo-Chinese Jesuit

The first history of science post that I wrote for The Renaissance Mathematicus was about the Jesuit mathematicus and educational reformer Christoph Clavius and his introduction of the mathematical sciences into the curricula of the European Catholic schools, colleges and universities at the beginning of the seventeenth century. My post ends with a brief list of some of the most prominent Jesuit and non-Jesuit beneficiaries of Clavius’ mathematical education programme in the seventeenth century. One of the earliest of Clavius’ graduates, who studied under the master himself in Rome, was the Italian Jesuit mathematicus Matteo Ricci who was born 6^th October 1552.

Ricci entered the Jesuit order in 1571 and studied mathematics, astronomy and cartography amongst other things under Clavius at the Collegio Romano. After graduation in 1577 he applied and was accepted to serve in the Jesuit mission to India. As was usual he was first sent to Coimbra in Portugal to prepare for his Asian service and then in 1578 he sailed to the Jesuit mission in Goa. From here Ricci was sent to Macao in China in 1582. In 1583 he was invited by the Chinese governor to settle in Zhaoqing. Ricci succeeded in becoming accepted into Chinese society, where all other Europeans in the early modern period had failed, by accommodating to Chinese mores and habits. He clothed himself as a Buddhist monk and learnt to speak, read and write Classical Chinese; even writing the first Chinese-Portuguese dictionary. Even given his gentle accommodative approach it took Ricci nineteen years to gain access to Beijing and the centre of Chinese power. From 1588 until his death in 1610 he was the leader of the Jesuit mission to China.

During his time in Zhaoqing Ricci produced the first modern Chinese map of the world based on the world map of Abraham Ortelius thereby introducing the Chinese to America for the first time.

1604 Japanese copy of Ricci’s Chinese World Map

Later he went on to produce the first modern map of the Far East

Ricci’s Far East Map

With the help of his Chinese Christian converts Ricci produced a Chinese translation of the first six books of Clavius’ annotated edition of the Elements of Euclid thus introducing the Chinese to Western mathematics.

 Ricci and his  prominent convert, Xu Guangqi (Copperplate print from Athanasius Kircher’s China illustrata, 1667

Through his knowledge of astronomy Ricci succeeded in becoming appointed as an advisor to the Chinese government. The mathematical abilities that Ricci acquired from Clavius made it possible for him as the first European in the early modern period to penetrate Chinese society and to build a bridgehead for the Jesuit mission to China. Ricci successors in this mission, in particular Ferdinand Verbiest and Adam Schall von Bell, building on Ricci’s successes introduced modern European astronomy, including Copernican heliocentricity, into China.

Transmission of scientific knowledge from one culture to another plays an important role in the history of science. Till about the thirteenth century CE the Chinese were scientifically and technically well in advance of Europe but by the seventeenth century they were lagging well behind. The Jesuit mission to China in the seventeenth century brought the Chinese up to date on the newest developments in Western mathematics, astronomy and cartography. The door to this transmission of knowledge was opened by Matteo Ricci.

The wheel in the sky keeps on turning.

Having recently mostly blogged about bad popular history of science and questions of historiography and methodology I thought it was time to return to writing about some real history of science. Back in 2010, I blogged about the fact that there were not just two cosmological-astronomical systems competing with each other at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as commonly believed and also falsely claimed by Galileo (Copernicus contra Ptolemaeus), but a whole menagerie of systems battling it out for ascendency till Kepler’s elliptical heliocentrism won out in about 1660. Another common misconception is that there was only one geocentric astronomical system inherited from antiquity. There were in fact several competing systems and I would now like to sketch the history of one of these systems that usually gets ignored in discussions on the subject but proved very resilient from its conception in the sixth century BCE up to the middle of the seventeenth century CE, the geocentric-geokinetic system.

In this system the earth is at the centre of the cosmos but it is not stationary; it rotates on its polar axis. To understand how this system came into being we have to take a look at the original Greek two spheres model of the cosmos, which originated in the sixth century BCE. In this model the earth is a sphere at the centre of the cosmos the outer limits of which are delineated by the sphere of the fixed stars. In the standard version of this model the earth is stationary but the sphere of the fixed stars rotates from east to west completing a complete rotation in twenty-four hours. In the geocentric-geokinetic model the sphere of the fixed stars is stationary whereas the earth rotates around its polar axis once a day. Both rotations are known technically as diurnal rotations but for simplicities sake we shall refer to the geocentric-geokinetic model as the diurnal rotation model.

The arguments proffered in defence of the diurnal rotation model are interesting because although they are based on a false premise, they are in fact strictly physical arguments. The false premise is that the sphere of the fixed stars really exists and is not just an optical illusion. Already in the third century the Greeks had a fairly accurate idea of the true size of the earth and although they had no idea how far away the stars really were they knew that the earth was incredibly small in comparison to the sphere of the fixed stars. In the second century CE Ptolemaeus writes in his Syntaxis Mathematiké:

Moreover, the earth has, to the senses, the ratio of a point to the distance of the sphere of the so-called fixed stars. [The so-called refers to the precession of the equinox meaning the sphere is not fixed but shifts if only very slightly]

He then brings a series of mathematical arguments based on optical perceptions that the earth has no perceptible size in relation to the distance of the heavens.

Both arguments in favour of earthly rotation are based on this immense difference in size of the two spheres. The first argument says that it is more probably that the comparatively small mass of the earth rotates rather than he immeasurably greater mass of the sphere of the fixed stars. The second argument is based on velocity. A point on the equator has a velocity of approximately 1600 kmph. If the sphere of the fixed stars only had a radius 1000 times greater than the earth then a point on its equator would have a velocity one million times greater and would simply fly apart. Both arguments are very convincing but are countered by the standard problems of the fact that we experience no sense of movement on the surface of the earth; no headwind etc. as I have previously discussed here. In general the latter facts dominated and earthly rotation was generally rejected. However it had its proponents and remained in the mainstream cosmological discussions until heliocentrism finally won out in the seventeenth century.

Although the theory was supposedly held and discussed earlier the earliest known major proponent of diurnal rotation was Heracleides a fourth century BCE pupil of Plato. In a work falsely attributed to Plutarch, The Opinions of the Philosophers it is written that:

Heraclides of Pontus…makes the earth move not in a progressive motion, but like a wheel in a rotation from west to east about its own centre.

With less detail the same view is attributed earlier to the Pythagoreans Hicetas and Ecphantos about whom almost nothing is known. Cicero attributes the theory to Hicetas and even to Plato in the Timaeus but says that the passage is obscure. He is indeed right in saying that Plato is here very obscure and it is in fact difficult to determine if he believed in earthly rotation or not; Copernicus, in the 16^th century, seemed to think that he did. Seneca thought the theory worthy of serious consideration

That this system was still being discussed in the second century CE can be seen in the Syntaxis Mathematiké where Ptolemaeus writes:

But certain people […] they supposed the heavens to remain motionless, and the earth to revolve from west to east about the same axis [as the heavens] making approximately one revolution each day; …

He then goes on to produce a series of arguments contradicting this possibility.

In the early middle ages the early Christian authors of course rejected the theory. However in the fifth century CE the widely read and highly influential Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata was an enthusiastic supporter of the theory bringing a relativity theory to justify himself:

As a man in a boat going forward sees a stationary object moving backwards, just so at Lanka [the earth’s equator] a man sees the stationary asterisms [stars] moving backwards [westward] in a straight line.

It is often falsely claimed that Aryabhata propagated a heliocentric system but although he clearly supports diurnal rotation for the earth he never mentions annual rotation of the earth around the sun.

In the seventh century his landsman and fellow mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta who was equally wide read and influential, especial amongst the mediaeval Islamic astronomers, described the theory but rejected it.

In the high middle ages the theory was discussed by several Islamic astronomers. In the fourteenth century two of the so-called Paris physicists Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme both discussed the theory very favourable in their writings. Both of them acknowledged that following the principle of simplicity, now known as Occam’s razor, diurnal rotation of the earth was preferable to diurnal rotation of the sphere of the fixed stars. In fact in his philosophical discussion of the principle of simplicity Buridan uses exactly this theory as an example of the principle in operation. Both of them, like Aryabhata, also drew upon a relativity of motion argument using moving ships to explain the apparent motion of the sphere of the fixed stars. Having come this far, both of them then reject the theory on the grounds of tradition.

In the fifteenth century Pierre d’Ailly discusses the theory in order to reject it. Nicholas of Cusa subjects the theory to the same very favourable discussion as Buridan and Oresme like them however finally rejecting it on grounds of tradition.

In the sixteenth century Nicolaus Raimers Baer published, in 1588, the first so-called Tychonic, heliocentric-geocentric, model of the cosmos in which the planets orbit the sun but the moon and the sun both orbit the earth but in his system as opposed to Tycho’s own system the earth has diurnal rotation. In 1600 William Gilbert published his De Magnete a book that was highly influential on the development of science in the first half of the seventeenth century. In the final section of his book Gilbert posits a geocentric system with diurnal rotation. His justification for this model is his, mistaken, believe that a terrella, i.e. a spherical magnet, when suspended will continue to rotate. Having to his own satisfaction demonstrated that the earth is a large spherical magnet it too would rotate on its axis. The widespread popularity of Gilberts book was a major contributing factor to the fact that when a heliocentric-geocentric system became the primary accepted model of the cosmos between approximately 1620 and 1660 it was Raimers Baer’s system with diurnal rotation rather than Tycho’s static one.

I personally think that it is very interesting that throughout history people were more easily prepared to accept a moving earth rotating around its own axis than one hurtling through space around the sun.

It’s silly questions time again: “Was Newton a scientist or a sorcerer?

Back in May the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones asked, “Is Leonardo da Vinci a great artist or a great scientist?” making, as I pointed out at the time, a serious category mistake. Something must be in the drinking water at the Guardian because now Stuart Clark on the Guardians Science Blogs is asking “Was Newton a scientist or a sorcerer?” making, you guessed it, a serious category mistake. As my Internet friend Tom Levenson, who is himself something of a Newton expert, pointed out on twitter Gotta stop with “Scientist and/or sorcerer” nonsense. Newton never saw himself in those terms… In fact Tom’s tweet says it all but for those not in the know, who might want to learn more, I will elaborate.

For all those at the back who haven’t been paying attention Newton cannot have been a scientist because the term was first coined by William Whewell in 1833 and did not come into common usage until around 1870. There are those who will immediately say that Newton thought like a modern scientist so it doesn’t matter if the term is anachronistic he was one, so there. The problem with this claim is that it’s based on a very limited knowledge of Newton, his life, his work and the way he thought. Put very simply Newton did not think like a modern scientist, which brings us to the second prong of Stuart Clark’s dichotomy.

Clark calls Newton a sorcerer because he was a practicing alchemist, which displays an immense ignorance of the world of seventeenth century thought on his part. A sorcerer is a practitioner of magic in fact a practitioner of black magic and that is a very, very different thing from an alchemist. What follows is a brief outline as to why Clark’s appellation is so inappropriate (with apologies to all serious historians of alchemy, astrology and natural magic for a totally inadequate explanation of these disciplines in the early modern period).

In the early modern period there are three so-called occult (occult just means hidden or concealed) sciences: astrology, natural magic and alchemy all of which found their legitimacy in the micro-cosmos macro-cosmos philosophy. This cosmology says as above so below or the world we live in is a reflection of the heavens. Astrology investigates the connections between the heavens and the earth and tries to define the heavenly or celestial influences. Both natural magic and alchemy are methods that try or at least hope to directly influence or manipulate those influences. Practitioners of all three disciplines distance themselves clearly from demonic or black magic that tries to manipulate nature through demonic powers. A sorcerer is a user of demonic magic.

Newton rejected both astrology and natural magic and is also on record as not believing in witches or ghost so I think we can safely say he also rejected demonic magic, so he definitely wasn’t a sorcerer. He was however a convinced alchemist. This was not a mild side-line or passing fantasy as some commentators on Clark’s post would like to believe, the study of alchemy was his main occupation six months of the year for about thirty years. Also this was not after he ceased doing scientific work as many sources would have you believe but parallel to his main period of scientific activity between 1666 and 1696 when he gave up academia to move to London and the Royal Mint. It is important to understand that for Newton and his fellow alchemists, which included Robert Boyle and John Locke, alchemy was an epistemic discipline that is a branch of knowledge like optics or mechanics.

So Newton was neither a scientist nor a sorcerer so what was he? We have already seen he was a committed alchemist, what else?

Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge so it is safe to call him a mathematician. To find out what he was we can look at his two principle publications The Optics and Principia. The Optics is basically a book on geometrical optics, which was then still a sub-discipline of mathematics, in fact Newton in his roll as professor lectured on optics, so this can safely be subsumed under his roll as mathematician. The Principia is actually titled Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica or in English The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, all of which tells us that Newton was a natural philosopher. So we have mathematician and natural philosopher. However the title of his main work tells us that he was a representative of a fairly new breed of academic the mathematical natural philosopher. Newton wasn’t the first of this genus, which had slowly evolved since sometime in the High Middle Ages, Galileo, Kepler, Borelli and Huygens being other examples from the seventeenth century.

Maybe we could restate Clarks question as “Was Newton a mathematical natural philosopher or an alchemist?” but should we do so we would be again doing Newton an injustice. We are back to the reason that Newton did not think like a modern scientist. For Newton his theological studies (that I haven’t dealt with here) and his alchemical studies were an integral part of his natural philosophical investigations, in fact they were at the very heart of those investigations so to present these two aspects of his work as a dichotomy would be totally false.

In his blog post Clark quotes a footnote from Richard Westfall one of the deans of Newton studies:

“My modes of thought are so far removed from those of alchemy that I am constantly uneasy in writing on the subject … [Nevertheless] my personal preferences cannot make more than a million words he wrote in the study of alchemy disappear.”

He then goes on to quote novelist Rebecca Stott:

“Westfall admitted to wishing that he could make those million words disappear.”

This is a complete misrepresentation. It was one of Westfall’s doctoral students Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs who wrote the definitive account of Newton’s alchemical studies The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, or the Hunting of the Green Lyon and also the definitive account of how his alchemy fitted into his approach to knowledge The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought. Both books are highly recommended for anybody who wishes to know more about Isaac the Alchemist.

For an excellent short account of the misrepresentation of Newton’s alchemical activities I recommend this post from last year by Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt at he blog Teleskopos: Newton and alchemy: a constant surprise?

Addendum: As Ian Hopkinson correctly pointed out on Twitter Newton is of course a Fig Roll.

Dava Sobel tries her hand at historical fantasy.

Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time is almost certainly the most successful popular history of science book published in the last fifty years. This is to some extent understandable as it is a well written enthralling tale of one mans battle against the establishment to solve a great scientific challenge, the determination of longitude at sea. It suffers however from a major flaw, it is a distortion of the real history it is claiming to relate. Sobel makes this tale of a complex episode in the history of science into a struggle between good, represented by John Harrison, and evil represented by Nevil Maskelyne, a severe distortion of the historical facts. To discover more about what really took place I recommend reading the posts at The Board of Longitude Project Blog, my concern here is Sobel’s latest history of science outing A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos.

When I first read her Longitude I was very impressed by the story that she told about a period and a development in the history of science about which I then knew very little. Unfortunately for Ms Sobel I was so impressed that I decided to investigate further and started to acquire and read the academic literature on the subject and fairly quickly learnt that Sobel’s version of the story was anything but accurate. Having made this experience I was more than sceptical when I first discovered that Sobel had chosen the life and work of Copernicus as the subject for her latest book. I feared that she would make a mess of it and unfortunately my fears have been confirmed. One can get a first impression of how Sobel deals with the subject from an interview she gave about the book earlier this year in Cosmos.

Cosmos: What is A More Perfect Heaven about

Sobel: It’s about Copernicus and how he was talked into publishing his crazy idea, heliocentrism. It was an idea he developed in his youth and told only a few people about and promised he would write a book on the subject. He eventually did, but he worked on the book for decades and became increasingly fearful he would be laughed at and that people would use the Bible to claim his idea was irreligious.

Here we have Sobel repeating the old myth that Copernicus didn’t want to publish because he feared the religious reaction; this has been dismissed by historians of science for decades. Copernicus didn’t publish because he couldn’t deliver. In his Commentariolus he had claimed he would provide proof that the world (read universe or solar system) was heliocentric. He was nowhere near being able to deliver that proof and that is why he hesitated to publish his book.

Sobel: He seems to have decided not to publish it, but then he was surprised to get a visit from a young German mathematician, a brilliant man called Rheticus, who was a colleague of Martin Luther. Rheticus was on a self-improvement journey and he learned about Copernicus’s work while in Nuremberg, so he went off to see him – a journey of 500km. Copernicus’s region of Poland was Catholic, and the bishop had banished all Lutherans, so when this fellow showed up it was a conflict on several levels.

Except in the formal sense that they were both professors at the same university Rheticus was not a colleague of Luther’s and the suggestion that he was is part of Sobel’s disinformation tactic.

Sobel: I remember learning that story in 1973 – the 500th anniversary of Copernicus’s birth. There was an article by science historian Edward Rosen in a magazine called Sky and Telescope, and I remember thinking what a great play it would make. The characters are different in every way, but they came together on this one idea and somehow Copernicus managed to keep them there for two years, and Rheticus helped him complete the book.

Here we have the core of Sobel’s distortion of history, which I will deal with later but I find it significant that Sobel bases her work on a source that is anything but up to date or accurate for that matter.

After a lot of hesitation as to whether I really wanted to waste my money on a book that I was fairly certain was not very good I finally succumbed and bought the Kindle edition. Sadly, to have my worst suspicions confirmed.

The book is in three sections. The first is a conventional biography of Copernicus, which however doesn’t really deal with his astronomy. The second, and major, part of the book is written in the form of a play and is a fictional reconstruction of what occurred between Copernicus and Rheticus when the latter visited Frauenburg and persuaded the reluctant author to part with his manuscript and allow it to be published. The final part deals with the reception and further developments of the heliocentric hypothesis, Kepler, Galileo etc.

The biography at the beginning of the book is actually quite good although given the nature of the material it is anything but scintillating. Sobel deals with the material well and presents a rounded picture of Copernicus the political administrator and physician, which is what he was. There is nothing new here but as there isn’t a good modern English language biography of the man it might have made for a good book if not for the following section. My only quibble with the first section is that Sobel keeps emphasising Copernicus’ astronomical observations as if they were highly significant. This was not the case. In fact Copernicus made comparatively few observations in his forty odd years as an active astronomer and most of those that he did make were of a comparatively trivial nature. He was not an observational astronomer he was a theoretician.

It is with the second, central, part that the book unravels very spectacularly. Sobel claims to be writing historical fiction in this section, creating a plausible reconstruction of what took place between the two mathematicians during their time together, a period that we know very little about. However what she has produced could at best be called historical fantasy, although the use of the word historical here is very much stretching the point. What we have is a collection of ahistorical cardboard cut out figures spouting soap opera dialogue that is at time so bad it’s embarrassing.

The problems start with the opening scene where Copernicus comes home to find the newly arrived Rheticus sleeping on his doorstep. Rheticus is presented as a sort of naïve, simpleton, teenage astronomical groupie who has just hitch-hiked in from Wittenberg in the clothes he is standing up in and with a bag slung over his shoulder to pay his respects to his hero Copernicus. Historically plausible? Like hell it is. Although relatively young, 25, and given to hero worship Rheticus was the independently wealthy son of a minor Italian aristocrat who was professor of mathematics at a leading European university that was a major centre of humanistic learning. He was travelling with a servant and alone the folio editions of the books that he had brought with him, as a gift for Copernicus would have required the services of a pack mule if not a horse. He in fact checked into a hostelry like any other wealthy and educated visitor and sent a message to Copernicus requesting an audience. Sobel now proceeds to play the religious card for all that it’s worth repeating a standard myth that because we are in the middle of the Reformation and Rheticus is a Lutheran Protestant from Wittenberg visiting a Catholic Prince Bishopric that some how his life must be in danger. What we have here in reality is actually an interesting historical phenomenon because throughout the Reformation and Counter Reformation scholars, who weren’t fire breathing preachers, were treated with consideration and respect on both sides of the divide. As long as they kept their noses out of religious affairs they were free to come and go and to correspond as they pleased. All of the time that Rheticus spent in Ermland he was treated, as what he was, an honoured scholarly guest. Before moving on there is one minor point that relates back to those observations. The naïve groupie on being allowed to view Copernicus’ manuscript asks, so many observations did you make them all yourself? Well no, the vast majority of the observations used in De revolutionibus are taken from other sources. As I said Copernicus was a theoretician not an observer.

The situation in Sobel’s mini-drama gets even worse when we come to Copernicus and the Bishop of Frauenburg. Here we get a repeat of the Longitude scenario with Copernicus presented as a wise and caring saint, a sort of Prussian Albert Schweitzer, who hides the Protestant groupie in his attic like a sixteenth century Anne Frank. As I’ve already pointed out there was no need what so ever for Rheticus to hide anywhere. Even worse is Sobel’s vision of the Bishop of Frauenburg, he, who is never given a name, is presented as a snivelling, paranoid, anti-science cretin, who is determined to bring about the downfall of both Copernicus and his book. A fair representation? Like hell it is.

The real life Bishop of Frauenburg at the time of Rheticus’ visit was Johannes Dantiscus an acknowledge humanist scholar and a crowned poet laureate. He had served for many years as a diplomat for various kings, emperors and princes throughout Europe before entering the church and maintained an extensive correspondence with many leading European scholars. He had personally met Phillip Melanchthon, Rheticus’ superior and mentor, respected him as one of the most learned men of the age but regretted that he was a Protestant. One of his correspondents had been Johann Reuchlin Melanchthon’s uncle and the leading humanist Hebrew scholar in Europe. Dantiscus was a cultivated, highly educated and very knowledgeable man. Far from being anti-science and trying to block Copernicus’ work he sent a copy of Rheticus’ Narratio Prima, the first published account of Copernicus’ heliocentric hypothesis, to Gemma Frisius in Leuven and tried to persuade him to come to Frauenburg to work together with Copernicus. The real Bishop of Frauenburg didn’t fit Sobel’s simplistic fairy tale of saints and demons and religious and scientific persecution so she invented a completely fictional character who bears no resemblance to Johannes Dantiscus.

All of this would be all well and good if Sobel wasn’t claiming to be producing a plausible reconstruction of what took place in Frauenburg between 1539 and 1541.  However what she presents has absolutely nothing to do with the known facts and whatever did take place was certainly nothing like Sobel’s warped distortion of history.

Reading the third section of the book I got the impression that this was filler material added to bulk out a rather thin volume. It is a very uninspired retelling of standard myths and falsehoods about the history of heliocentrism between 1543 and 1630, which contributes absolutely nothing towards redeeming a truly bad book. If you were thinking of reading or even buying this book save your time and money it’s not worth either the cost or the effort.