A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel: book review

A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos (2011, a signed copy by the author) was initially intended to be a play, a short drama. However, the author generously introduces Copernicus and tells the aftermath of his publication, sandwiched between a two-act play.

In 1510, aged 40, Nicolaus Copernicus re-envisioned the cosmos with the Sun as the centre, and not the Earth as was the theory at the time. It was unheard of to think that the Earth moved around the Sun, for scientists believed the Earth was static. Copernicus concealed his theory for 30 years fearing ridicule from his mathematician peers and the Church.

At the age of 25, Georg Joachim Rheticus travelled to Frauenburg in Varmia, northern Poland (now Germany) to meet Copernicus. This is where the play commences. The play dramatizes the “unlikely” meeting between the scientist Nicolaus Copernicus (who was also a Catholic priest) and his uninvited visitor who convinced him to publish his “crazy” astrological theory. Copernicus is now 65 and it is May 1539. The play is brief, featuring only a handful of characters: Copernicus, the Bishop of Varmia, the Bishop of Kulm, 14-year old Franz, 42-year old Anna (Copernicus’s housekeeper), and Rheticus the visitor.

Rheticus, born on February 16, 1514, is shy by nature, but he has an insatiable passion for mathematics and astrology. He casts his own horoscope and finds it “augured an abnormally short life” so he changed his birth date to February 15. No one knows how he convinced Copernicus to publish his theory of Earth’s rotation and revolution, but he did. Sobel’s account is refreshingly realistic.

The play is interesting and fast-paced. Rheticus, a Professor of Mathematics at Wittenberg, is Lutheran. Copernicus, a Catholic, is reluctant to admit the 25-year-old into his house: “I hate to send you away like this. But we are victims of these times.” These times being the period when Lutherans and Catholics were feuding. It is in Copernicus’s home that the planetarium is housed. The World Machine is a “globe-like nest of interesting rings, about the size of a manned spacecraft capsule, perched on a pedestal.” It demonstrates the rotation of the planets. Copernicus lets him into his home and keeps the visitor a secret from authorities. Rheticus stays for two years, working on the manuscript of Copernicus’s theory, transforming it from a “brief sketch” to a worthy publication.

Following the brief play, Sobel returns to the narrative—the life of Copernicus, and especially Rheticus, after the publication of “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.” On Rheticus’s 34^th birthday, in bad health, he was “surprised, perhaps, to find himself still alive” but knowing that he played an influential role in the life of Copernicus possibly sustained his existence. He died on December 4, 1574, at 60 years of age. Sobel does not dwell on the fact that changing his horoscope birth date may have changed his destiny—from a short to a long life—for although he proved his horoscope wrong, he proved the theory of Copernicus to be right.

Martina Nicolls is the author of “Bardot’s Comet” which explores the theme of destiny—in which a mathematician father changes his daughter’s name to suit a better “numerological” destiny.