Quote from A More Perfect Heaven
A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos
by Dava Sobel
Walker & Company, New York, New York, 2011 273 pages
Since 1973, when the five hundredth anniversary of his birth brought his unique story to my attention, I have wanted to dramatize the unlikely meeting between Nicolaus Copernicus and the uninvited visitor who convinced him to publish his crazy idea.
Around the year 1510, near the age of forty, Copernicus re-envisioned the cosmos with the Sun, rather than the Earth, at its hub. Then he concealed the theory for thirty years, fearful of ridicule from his mathematician peers. But when his unexpected guest, called Rheticus, made the dangerous, several-hundred-mile journey to northern Poland in 1539, eager to learn the novel planetary order from its source, the aging Copernicus agreed to end his silence. The youth stayed on for two years, despite laws barring his presence, as a Lutheran, from Copernicus's Catholic diocese during this contentious phase of the Protestant Reformation. Rheticus helped his mentor prepare the long-neglected manuscript for publication, and later hand carried it to Nuremberg, to the best printer of scientific texts in Europe.
No one knows what Rheticus said to change Copernicus's mind about going public. Their dialogue in the two-act play that begins on page 81 is my invention, although the characters occasionally speak the very words they wrote themselves in various letters and treaties. I had intended the play to stand on its own, but I thank my perceptive editor, George Gibson, for urging me to plant it in the broad context of history by surrounding the imagined scenes with a fully documented factual narrative that tells Copernicus's life story and traces the impact of his seminal book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, to the present day." (pp. xiii-xiv)
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