Dennis Danielson

A fascinating biography of the father of trigonometry, the man who convinced Copernicus to publish his ground-breaking work "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" and then spent his life promoting it. Rheticus (1514-1574) was an inveterate traveler who couldn't stay in one university post for long before disappearing for a year or two to follow some scientific quest. As a young man he journeyed across Europe to meet Copernicus, whose ideas had caught Rheticus' imagination because they suggested a solution to the multitude of irregularities in Ptolemaic astronomy. Because of Rheticus' persistence, heliocentrism eventually became accepted science.

But this book is much more than a simple biography, and the reader learns about the extensive intertwining of medicine, astronomy and astrology; medicine and the beginnings of toxicology (the teaches of Paracelsus); the effects of religion on just about every aspect of science (mining, for instance, was considered blasphemous because it represented digging in the bowels of Mother Earth, the region of the devil); the laborious political, religious and logistical processes involved in publishing; and the stupendous effort of decades of hand-written calculations required to produce trigonometric tables (out to the 10th or 15th decimal!) required to prove Copernicus' theories. And, of course, there is the ever-present bickering and machinations among the (primarily) Protestant schools over minute disagreements in theology which often affected patronage, friendships, and even survival.

Entertaining, informative, and very well-written, with interesting reproductions of various documents and title pages and lengthy notes.… (plus d'informations)

I have mixed feelings about this book. It is nice to have all this material between the covers of a book: much of it is hard to find or a bit obscure. BUT I can't shake a sense that the editor comes down, himself, pretty heavily on the side of revealed religion ... which, I know, is completely his business and right (it's his book), but which leaves me cold as a reader.

I think for example the fact that he rather gives god the last word (with the Owen Gingerich selection) is significant ... and I like Owen Gingerich!… (plus d'informations)

This article is kind of adorable but quite strange. Danielson (who is the head of my department, whom I like very much, and whom I liked even more the other day when he teared up when Katie presented him with some teas on the occasion of his retirement) gives us a sort of sci-hist "cosmology wars, tracing the history of the Copernican Principle (placing us no longer at the centre of the universe--which to Copernicus was actually an elevation from a sort of solid waste planet to the stars, but beginning in the 18th century was taken as a demotion to insignificance) and the related cosmological principle (asserting the uniformity of the universe,its constant rate of expansion and the spontaneous creation of new matter to fill the gaps) and principle of mediocrity (placing us, therefore, nowhere special at all). Since the uniformity of the universe is a dead letter, he spends a lot of time looking at a post-principle of mediocrity cosmology, one that says we may be insignificant in terms of size but we are not in fact insignificant on a cosmic scale--that the phase in the development of the universe when the elements exist for life is so relatively short that the fact that we exist at a time when we can talk about how special it is that we exist at a time that we can talk about how special it is that we exist at a time etc., actually is quite special.


And that is beautiful and I'm with him. It matters in the only way that matters. And when he moves on to "and it's special that a tiny part of the universe, us, can understand the rest of it", I'm still with him, in the only way that matters. But it feel a little funny when he starts pushing for a post-Copernican world too--not so much incorrect as unnecessary; surely the real message of all this is not so much that we are at the centre after all as that there are different ways to be at the centre and in the end it doesn't really matter. and you certainly don't need to cite scientists in support of closing the door on Copernicus. It feels pushy.


But this is journalism, and so reductive, and too I understand that to a man of what I understand to be Danielson's type of faith there is a glory in some kinds of inquisitive centrality of the human that I don't feel, analogous to the Biblical literalism that I also don't need--puts things on solid ground; and a yearning therefore. And I love the optimism of all this. Essay appeared in American Scientist 97.… (plus d'informations)

In The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution (Walker, 2007) Dennis Danielson brings to life the man without whom Copernicanism might never have been presented to the world. Mathematician and astronomer, pupil and teacher, none more than Rheticus can be credited with the 1543 publication of De Revolutionibus, Copernicus' magnum opus and the book which would - eventually - open the eyes of the world.

Danielson skillfully traces the peregrinations of the young Rheticus around central Europe: from his birthplace in Feldkirch to educational institutions in Zurich, Wittenberg, and Nuremberg, and then on to Frauenberg in pursuit of a rumored "new idea" being espoused by amateur astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Planning to stay a month, Rheticus remained with Copernicus for several years, during which time his teacher wrote the manuscript outlining the new cosmology. When Rheticus left in the fall of 1541, he carried with him the manuscript of De Revolutionibus, which he delivered to printer/publisher Johannes Petreius in Nuremberg for publication.

This biography of Rheticus points out excellently the interconnectedness of mid-sixteenth-century European science (particularly astronomy), tracing various figures back to who taught them, who they were corresponding with, and where they were located. Danielson also does a good job working in the vital religious threads which were at play during the period.

Rheticus' story cannot be told without its more troubling aspects: expelled from his university post and his homeland following charges of sexually abusing a male student, Copernicus' disciple fled to Krakow and other cities, for many years forsaking astronomy and geometry for the practice of medicine. In a bizarre twist, it was another young scholar, Valentin Otto, who persuaded Rheticus late in life to return to his former calling and finish research into a projected work on triangles (published first in 1596 by Otto).

Danielson has done his research well, and its shows in this work. The text (very well designed) is nicely complemented by appropriate illustrations; I found both the footnotes and the index useful (an additional bibliography would have been welcome, however). An excellent biography.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/...… (plus d'informations)