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A More Perfect Heaven
Dava Sobel
How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos
Walker & Company
October 2011
On Sale: September 27, 2011
288 pages
ISBN: 0802717934
EAN: 9780802717931
Kindle: B005QBI0CI
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
By 1514, the reclusive cleric Nicolaus Copernicus had
written and hand-copied an initial outline of his
heliocentric theory-in which he defied common sense and
received wisdom to place the sun, not the earth, at the
center of our universe, and set the earth spinning among the
other planets. Over the next two decades, Copernicus
expanded his theory through hundreds of observations, while
compiling in secret a book-length manuscript that tantalized
mathematicians and scientists throughout Europe. For fear of
ridicule, he refused to publish. In 1539, a young German mathematician, Georg Joachim
Rheticus, drawn by rumors of a revolution to rival the
religious upheaval of Martin Luther's Reformation, traveled
to Poland to seek out Copernicus. Two years later, the
Protestant youth took leave of his aging Catholic mentor and
arranged to have Copernicus's manuscript published, in 1543,
as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions
of the Celestial Spheres)-the book that forever changed
humankind's place in the universe. In her elegant, compelling style, Dava Sobel chronicles, as
nobody has, the conflicting personalities and extraordinary
discoveries that shaped the Copernican Revolution. At the
heart of the book is her play And the Sun Stood Still,
imagining Rheticus's struggle to convince Copernicus to let
his manuscript see the light of day. As she achieved with
her bestsellers Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, Sobel
expands the bounds of narration,
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