Copernicus gets his place in the sun

A MORE PERFECT HEAVEN: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos, by Dava Sobel. Walker & Co., 273 pp., $25.

Copernicus knew what makes the world go round.

Philosopher and mathematician, physician and church canon, he calculated and theorized that the Earth moved around the sun. Nicolaus Copernicus "defied common sense and received wisdom" and "fathered an alternate universe," author Dava Sobel writes.

Sobel's "A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos" chronicles and dramatizes the story of the momentous discovery and how it came to be published.

Her account is generally lucid and engaging. But the problem for Sobel, a former reporter for The New York Times and an East Hampton resident, stems from her effort to make the story even more accessible.

She sticks a two-act play in the middle of it. And this curiosity advances at the pace of Pluto. Imagining or adapting the dialogues of history is risky. The results often fall somewhere between high-school stagecraft and Hallmark Hall of Fame. Don't expect Tom Stoppard.

Sobel's play, titled "And the Sun Stood Still," gets your attention, beginning with a bishop retching and ending with an image of a head spinning. But more than anything else, it's a distraction, one that this adventure doesn't need.

Sobel succeeds, however, in describing the details of a remarkable life and an Inquisitorial age -- no time for free thinkers before, during or after Copernicus. Galileo Galilei would go to prison and Giordano Bruno to the stake.

The portrait of modern astronomy's framer shows a devoted, shrewd scientist and a sensible, adept church administrator who became a visionary. Yet, concerned about expected criticism, he didn't seek to have his theory published and hid it for 30 years.

Mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus would change that. Drawn by talk about Copernicus' grand idea at a time when Martin Luther was sparking another revolution, Rheticus visited the elderly Copernicus, who taught him the details of the theory. Worried about ridicule, Copernicus welcomed Rheticus' enthusiasm for his thesis. And Rheticus would write "an informed summary" of it.

More important, he figured out a way to spur publication of "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres" -- in itself, a tale of effective lobbying and marketing.

Copernicus suffered a stroke in November 1542. He died in 1543, moments after he was handed a copy of his printed book. Eventually, and predictably, "On the Revolutions" would be placed on the Index of Prohibited Books.

That was 1616. It stayed on the list for more than two centuries. "The condemnation of Copernicus' ideas by the Roman Church, which would have devastated the Catholic canon had he lived to hear of it, probably served to make his book more popular," Sobel writes. In 1617, a new edition was published in Amsterdam. In 2008, a copy sold for $2.2 million.

Sobel says, "Copernicus strove to restore astronomy to a prior, purer simplicity -- a geometric Garden of Eden. He sacrificed the Earth's stability to that vision, and pushed the stars out of his way."

Last year, on the "537th return of his birthday," scientists honored the patient Pole. They named super-heavy atomic element number 112 "copernicium."