By NEIL GENZLINGER
Owen Gingerich, a noted astronomer who was particularly interested in the history of his field — so much so that he spent years trying to track down every first- and second-edition copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’s revolutionary treatise — and who was not shy about giving God credit for a role in creating the cosmos he loved to study, died on May 28 in Belmont, Mass. He was 93.
His son Jonathan confirmed the death.
Professor Gingerich, who lived in Cambridge, Mass., and taught at Harvard for many years, was a lively lecturer and writer. During his decades of teaching astronomy and the history of science, he would sometimes dress as a 16th-century Latin-speaking scholar for his classroom presentations, or convey a point of physics with a memorable demonstration; for instance, The Boston Globe related in 2004, he “routinely shot himself out of the room on the power of a fire extinguisher to prove one of Newton’s laws.” He was nothing if not enthusiastic about the sciences, especially astronomy. One year at Harvard, when his signature course, “The Astronomical Perspective,” wasn’t filling up as fast as he would have liked, he hired a plane to fly a banner over the campus that read: “Sci A-17. M, W, F. Try it!”
Professor Gingerich’s doggedness was on full display in his long pursuit of copies of Copernicus’s “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri Sex” (“Six Books on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres”), first published in 1543, the year Copernicus died.
That book laid out the thesis that Earth revolved around the sun, rather than the other way around, a profound challenge to scientific knowledge and religious belief in that era. The writer Arthur Koestler had contended in 1959 that the Copernicus book was not read in its time, and Professor Gingerich set out to determine whether that was true.
In 1970 he happened on a copy of “De Revolutionibus” that was heavily annotated in the library of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, suggesting that at least one person had read it closely. A quest was born.
Thirty years and hundreds of thousands of miles later, Professor Gingerich had examined some 600 Renaissance-era copies of “De Revolutionibus” all over the world and had developed a detailed picture not only of how thoroughly the work was read in its time, but also of how word of its theories spread and evolved. He documented all this in “The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus” (2004). John Noble Wilford, reviewing it in The New York Times, called “The Book Nobody Read” “a fascinating story of a scholar as sleuth.” “His enthusiasm for what might be judged a rather fine point of history is infectious,” Wilford added. “His book deserves to be read not only by historians and bibliophiles, but by anyone with a taste for arcane detective adventures and a curiosity about the motivations of scholarly perseverance.”
In 2006 Professor Gingerich found himself at the center of a Plutonian storm when he was chosen to lead a committee of the International Astronomical Union charged with recommending whether Pluto should remain a planet, a perennial issue in astronomy that continues to fester.
Genzlinger is a writer with NYT©2023
The New York Times
