Alexander Waugh
Spheres of Influence
A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos
By Dava Sobel
Bloomsbury 261pp £14.99
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) has, by tradition, taken all the credit for establishing the fact of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Before the publication of his thesis On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, and for some time after that, it was generally assumed that the Earth stood still at the centre of a planetary system with the sun, the stars and quite a few of the known planets circling around it. We talk of this change in perception as the ‘Copernican Revolution’ and of the heliocentric principle as ‘Copernicanism’ but, in point of fact, Copernicus was by no means the first to come up with a heliocentric schema. Around 250 BC, according to Archimedes, a philosopher called Aristarchus claimed that ‘the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit’. Dava Sobel writes that Copernicus ‘had no idea that Aristarchus of Samos had proposed much the same thing in the third century B.C.’ and that he ‘knew nothing of the Earth-moving plan of Aristarchus which had not yet been reported to Latin audiences’.
True, Archimedes’ Arenarius (quoted above) was not published in Latin until 1544, a year after Copernicus’s death, but I don’t see why Copernicus could not have read a library copy in Greek; more to the point, Sobel does reveal that Copernicus had read Plutarch. As far as I
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk