Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, October 25, 2004 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Owen Gingerich

"The Book Nobody Read"

ABSTRACT -- In his fascinating account of the origins of modern science, The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler dubbed Copernicus' De revolutionibus "the book that nobody read". It took Owen Gingerich more than a decade to prove the novelist dead wrong. Unexpectedly, his unusual quest to examine all possible copies of the Polish astronomer's great opus led the Harvard professor into a thicket of adventures ranging from Federal District Court in Washington to episodes behind the iron curtain. In the process he became the international expert on the publishing history and gradual acceptance of the heliocentric system, the initial powerful concept that has shaped our modern understanding of the cosmos.

SPEAKER -- Owen Gingerich is Research Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Professor Gingerich's research interests have ranged from the recomputation of an ancient Babylonian mathematical table to the interpretation of stellar spectra. He is co-author of two models of the solar atmosphere, the first ones to take into account rocket and satellite observations. Professor Gingerich is a leading authority on the early astronomers Johannes Kepler and Nicholas Copernicus. For thirty years, Professor Gingerich traveled the world, examining over 500 sixteenth-century copies of Copernicus' great book De revolutionibus. His account of this quest is published by Walker & Co. as The Book Nobody Read. As a result of these studies, Copernicus' homeland, Poland, awarded Professor Gingerich the Order of Merit, and an asteroid was named after him. Professor Gingerich has published two anthologies of essays, The Great Copernicus Chase and Other Adventures in Astronomical History, and The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler. At Harvard he taught "The Astronomical Perspective", a core science course for non-scientists, which at the time of his retirement in 2000 was 'the longest-running course under the same management' at Harvard. In 1984 he won the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa prize for excellence in teaching. In 1999, he preached an Advent sermon at Washington National Cathedral. Professor Gingerich and his wife Miriam are enthusiastic travelers, photographers, and rare book and shell collectors.