“A More Perfect Heaven”

At Harvard, Dava Sobel discusses the conversation that convinced Copernicus to publish his lifework.

Thursday evening, Dava Sobel read excerpts from her most recent book, on Copernicus.

By his thirties, Nicolaus Copernicus had developed a theory that would turn the universe inside out, but for three decades, he kept his ideas almost entirely to himself. As a young man, he had formulated a mathematical model that placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the center of the solar system. To friends and colleagues, he promised a manuscript detailing his revolutionary ideas, yet decades later, perhaps wary of how those ideas would be received, he had published only a few tantalizing glimpses.

His groundbreaking work might have been lost but for a fortuitous meeting when Copernicus was in his mid sixties. “A young man came to see him and talked him into doing what he had avoided doing for a lifetime,” said writer Dava Sobel in a talk Thursday evening at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics on its monthly observatory night. “That really fascinated me.” In her most recent book, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos, released in 2011, Sobel used a combination of drama and nonfiction narrative to imagine the events that convinced Copernicus to publish his lifework, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. “Everyone knew that this meeting had taken place,” she said, “but no one knew what they had said to each other.”

Before a packed audience, Sobel presented excerpts from the book’s centerpiece, a play titled And the Sun Stood Still, reading the part of young mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus (the play debuts today in Boulder, Colorado). In her fictional account, Copernicus—read by renowned Copernicus scholar Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy and of the history of science emeritus—has built a “world machine” that embodies his heliocentric model. Rheticus, spinning in a chair at the machine’s center, believes he sees the stars move around him even though in reality, he is the body in motion. His experience prompts the two to discuss Copernicus’s radical ideas. “You mean, you really do mean to turn the earth!” Rheticus exclaims in astonishment. Foreshadowing the reaction of their contemporary scientific community, the younger man initially declares, “I came here in good faith, and what do I find? A lunatic! A deluded—a, a recluse, obsessed with an insane idea!”

History, at least, shows that both Copernicus’s theory and Rheticus’s persuasion prevailed in the end. With the younger man’s help, Copernicus finished his monumental book in the last years of his life; legend has it, in fact, that after seeing his completed manuscript, he died peacefully the same day. In closing, Sobel reflected on Copernicus’s legacy. “It depends how you look at him. Is he the great diminisher, who took us out of the center? But what is the center really?” she asked. “If, as we are told by astronomers today, everything we see in the universe, everything that’s light, is really only about 4 percent of what’s there, where does that leave us? We are either insignificant—or extremely special.”

See also “The Copernicus Quest,” describing Owen Gingerich’s mission to examine all extant copies of the first and second editions of Copernicus’s masterpiece, detailed in Gingerich’s 2005 book, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus.

You might also like

An Original Magna Carta, Hidden in Plain Sight

A rare original surfaces at Harvard at an “almost providential” moment. 

The 2025 Pulitzer Prizes Announced

Winners across five categories, from commentary on Gaza to criticism on public architecture

Off the Shelf

Operatic counterculture, a Passover graphic novel, James Joyce’s biographer, and more

Most popular

Government Revokes Harvard’s Ability to Enroll International Students

The move is the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s attacks on the University.

The New Gender Gaps

What to do as men and boys fall behind

Harvard President Responds to Secretary of Education

Alan Garber outlines steps the University has taken, and emphasizes compliance with the law.

Explore More From Current Issue

Making Green Energy Projects Financially Viable

A proposed “green” swap enables decarbonization of emerging market development projects.

Children's Books from Ann Kim Ha

Ann Kim Ha’s poignant children’s books

Harvard Wireless club

Student ham enthusiasts turn back time.