Setting the history of science right
Keith S. Taber
I recently read a book of essays by Edward Rosen (1995) who (as described by his publisher) was "the editor and translator of Copernicus' complete works, was the leading authority on this most celebrated of Renaissance scientists". Copernicus is indeed, rightly, highly celebrated (for reasons I summarise below *).
The book was edited by Rosen's collaborator, Erna Hilfstein 1, and although the book was an anthology of reprinted journal articles, none of the chapters (articles) had abstracts. This reflects different disciplinary norms. In the natural and social sciences most journals require abstracts – and some even offer a menu of what should be included – but abstracts are not always expected in humanities disciplines.
Read about the abstract in academic articles
A collection of published papers from various journals – all lacking abstracts
It is not unusual for an academic book to be a compilation of published articles – especially when anthologising a single scholar's work. I was a little surprised to find the different chapters in the same book having different formats and typefaces – it had been decided to reproduce the articles as they had originally appeared in a range of journals (perhaps for authenticity – or perhaps to avoid the costs of new typesetting?)
But it was the absence of article abstracts that most felt odd. The potential reader is given a title, but otherwise little idea of the scope of an article before reading. Perhaps it was my awareness of this 'omission' that led me to thinking that for a number of the chapters it would be possible to offer a very minimal abstract (an acute abstract?) that would do the job! Certainly, for some of these chapters, I thought a sentence each might do.
That is not to dismiss the scholarship that has gone into developing the arguments, but Rosen often wrote on a very specific historical point, set out pertinent ideas from previous scholarship, and then argued for a clear position contrary to some earlier scholars.
So, here are my suggestions for 'acute' abstracts
Six summary encapsulations
Chapter 6: on the priest question
Copernicus has often been described as a priest, but Copernicus was never ordained a priest.
Copernicus was a canon in the Roman Catholic church, but this made him an administrator (and he also acted as physician), but he never became a monk or a priest.
Chapter 7: on the notary question
Copernicus has been described as a 'happy notary' but Copernicus was not a notary.
Although Copernicus had various roles as an administrator, even as something of a diplomat, he never took on the role of a legal notary.
Chapter 8: on the disdain question
Copernicus is sometimes said to have had a dismissive attitude to the common people, but there is no evidence that this was so
A comment of Copernicus on not being concerned with the views of certain philosophers seems to have been misinterpreted.
Chapter 11: on the axioms question
It has been claimed that Copernicus misused the term axioms in his work, but his use was perfectly in line with authorities
Today axioms are usually expected to be the self-evident starting points for developing a deductive argument, but Aristotle's definition of axioms did not require them to seem self-evident.
Chapter 16: on the papal question
It has been claimed that Copernicus' 'Revolutions' was approved by the pope before publication, but the manuscript was never shown to the pope
This seems to be a confusion regarding an anecdote concerning a completely different scholar.
Chapter 17: on the Calvin question
It has been suggested that Calvin was highly critical of Copernicus, but it seems unlikely Calvin had ever heard of him
While Calvin's writing strongly suggest he was committed to a stationary earth and a sun that moved around the earth, there is no evidence he had specifically come across Copernicus.
A manifold chapter
Having noticed how so many of Rosen's articles took one claim or historically contentious idea and developed it in the light of various sources to come to a position, I was a little surprised when I reached Chapter 20, 'Galileo's misstatements about Copernicus', to find that Rosen was dealing with 5 distinct (if related) points at once – several of which he had elsewhere made the unitary focus of an article.
Rather than write my own abstract, I could here suggest a couplet of sentences from the text might have done the job,
"According to Galileo, (1) Copernicus was a priest; (2) he was called to Rome; (3) he wrote the Revolutions by order of the pope; (4) his book was never adversely criticised; (5) it was the basis of the Gregorian calendar. Actually, Copernicus was not a priest; he was not called to Rome; he did not write the Revolutions by order of the pope; the book received much adverse criticism, particularly on the ground that it contradicted the Bible; it was not the basis of the Gregorian calendar."
Rosen, 1958/1995, pp.203-204
I noticed that this was the earliest of Rosen's writings that had been included in the compilation – perhaps he had decided to dispense his ideas more sparingly after this paper?
Actually, there's a lot to be said for abstracts that pithily précise the key point of an article, a kind of tag-line perhaps, acting for a reader as an aide-mémoire (useful at least for readers like me who commonly stare at rows of books thinking 'I read something interesting about this, somewhere here…'). I have also read a lot of abstracts in research journals that would benefit from their own (further) abstracts, so perhaps such acute abstraction might catch on?
* Appendix: A scientific giant
Copernicus is indeed 'celebrated', being seen as one of the scientific greats who helped establish modern ways of thinking about the world – part of what is often perceived as a chain that goes Copernicus – Kelper – Galileo – Newton.
Copernicus is most famous for his book known in English as 'On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres', or just 'Revolutions'. The key point of note is that at a time when it was almost universally agreed that the earth was stationary at the centre of 'the world', i.e., the cosmos, and that everything else revolved around the earth, Copernicus proposed a system that put the sun at the centre and had the earth moving around the sun.
(Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay)
From our modern worldview, it is difficult to imagine just how, well yes, revolutionary, that move was (even if Copernicus only moved the centre of the universe from earth to the sun, so our solar system still had a very special status in his system). This is clear from how long it took the new view to become the accepted position, and the opposition it attracted. Newton later realised that strictly the centre of revolution was the centre of mass of the solar system not the sun per se. 2
One problem was that there was no absolute observational test to distinguish between the two models and there were well-established reasons to accept the conventional geocentric model (e.g., we do not feel the earth move, or a great wind as it spins beneath its atmosphere; as the most dense element earth would naturally fall to the centre of the world, beneath water, air, fire, and the ether that filled the heavens {although the Earth was not considered a pure form of the element earth, it was earthy, considered mostly earth in composition 3}; and scriptures, if given a literal interpretation, seemed to suggest the earth was fixed and the sun moved.)
Copernicus' model certainly had some advantages. If the earth is still, the distant sphere with all the fixed stars must be moving about it at an incredible rate of rotation. But if the earth spun on its axis, this stellar motion was just an illusion. 4 Moreover, if everything revolves around the earth, some of the planets behave very oddly, first moving one way, then slowing down to reverse direction ('retrograde' motion), before again heading off in their original sense. But, if the planets are orbiting the sun along with the earth (now itself seen as a planet) but at different rates then this motion can be explained as an optical illusion – "these phenomena…happen on account of the single motion of the earth" – the planets only seem to loop because of the motion of the earth.
Despite this clear improvement, Copernicus model did not entirely simplify the system as Copernicus retained the consensus view that the planets moved in circles: the planets' "motions are circular or compounded of several circles,…since only the circle can bring back the past". With such an assumption the observational data can only be made to fit (either to the heliocentric model or its geocentric alternative) by having a complex series of circles rather than one circle per planet. Today when we call the night sky 'the heavens', we are using the term without implying any supernatural association – but the space beyond the moon was once literally considered as heaven. In heaven everything is perfect, and the perfect shape is a circle.
It was only when Kepler later struggled to match the best observational data available (from his employer Tycho Brahe's observatory) to the Copernican model that, after a number of false starts, he decided to see if ellipses would fit – and he discovered how the system could be described in terms of planets each following a single elliptical path that almost repeated indefinitely.
A well-known story is how by the time Copernicus had finished his work and decided to get it printed he was near the end of his life, and he was supposedly only shown a printed copy brought from the printer as he lay on his deathbed (in 1543). In the printed copy of the book an anonymous foreword/preface 5 had been inserted to the effect that readers should consider the model proposed as a useful calculating system for following the paths of heavenly bodies, and not as a proposal for how the world actually was.
Despite this, the book was later added to the Roman Catholic Church's index of banned works awaiting correction. This only occurred much later – in 1616, after Galileo taught that Copernicus' system did describe the actual 'world system'. But, in the text itself Copernicus is clear that he is suggesting a model for how the world is – "to the best of my ability I have discussed the earth's revolution around the sun" – not just a scheme for calculating purposes. Indeed, he goes as far to suggest that where he uses language implying the sun moves this is only to be taken as adopting the everyday way of talking reflecting appearances (we say 'the sun rises'). For Copernicus, it was the earth, not the sun, that moved.
Sources cited:
- Copernicus, N. (1543/1978). On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (E. Rosen, Trans.). Prometheus Books.
- Rosen, E. (1995). Copernicus and his successors (E. Hilfstein, Ed.). The Hambledon Press.
Notes
1 I discovered from some 'internet research' (i.e., Googling) that Erna was a holocaust survivor, "[husband] Max and Erna, along with their families, were sent first to Płaszów, a slave-labor camp, and then on a death march to Auschwitz".
2 Newton also wrote as if the solar system was the centre of the cosmos, but of course the solar system is itself moving around the galaxy, which is moving away from most other galaxies…
3 These are not the chemical elements recognised today, of course, but were considered the elements for many centuries. Even today, people sometimes refer to the air and water as 'the elements.'
4 Traditionally, the 'heavenly spheres' were not the bodies such as planets, moons and stars but a set of eight conjectured concentric crystalline spheres that supposedly rotated around the earth carrying the distant stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, the Moon, Venus and Mercury.
5 A preface is written by the author of a book. A foreword is written by someone else for the author (perhaps saying how wonderful the author and the work are). Technically then this was a foreword, BUT because it was not signed, it would appear to be a preface – something written by Copernicus himself. Perhaps the foreword did actually protect the book from being banned as, until Galileo made it a matter of very public debate, it is likely only other astronomers had actually scrutinised the long and very technical text in any detail!