THE BOOK NOBODY READ: CHASING THE REVOLUTIONS OF NICOLAUS COPERNICUS
Book ID/图书代码： 14060004B00638
English Summary/英文概要： In the spring of 1543, as the celebrated astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus lay on his deathbed, his fellow clerics brought him a long-awaited package: the final printed pages of the book he had worked on for many years, De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). Though Copernicus would not live to hear of its extraordinary impact, his book-which first posited that the sun, not Earth, was the center of the universe-is recognized as the greatest scientific work of the sixteenth century.
Four and a half centuries later, astrophysicist Owen Gingerich embarked on an extraordinary quest: to see in person all extant copies of the first and second printings of De revolutionibus. He was inspired by two contradictory pieces of information: Arthur Koestler’s claim, in his famous book The Sleepwalkers, that nobody had read Copernicus’s famous book when it was published; and Gingerich’s discovery, at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, of a first edition of De revolutionibus that had been richly annotated in the margins by Erasmus Reinhold, the leading teacher of astronomy in northern Europe in the 1540s-strongly suggesting that Koestler’s statement about the book was wrong.
After three decades of investigation, and after traveling hundreds of thousands of miles-from Melbourne to Moscow, Boston to Beijing-to view more than 600 copies of De revolutionibus, Gingerich has written an utterly original book built from his experience and the remarkable insights gleaned from Copernicus’s books. Eventually he found copies once owned by saints, heretics, and scalawags, by musicians, movie stars, medicine men, and bibliomaniacs. Most interesting were the copies owned and annotated by astronomers, which even today illuminate the long, reluctant process of accepting the sun-centered cosmos as a physically real description of the world, and the tensions among scientists and between science and the church. Part biography of a book and a man, part scientific exploration, part bibliographic quest, Gingerich’s book will offer new appreciation of the history of science and cosmology.
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 1543年5月24日，著名天文学家哥白尼在他弥留之际，终于在病榻上见到了刚刚出版的《天体运行论》样书，他用了“四个九年的时间”完成了这部长达六卷的科学巨著。哥白尼的主要贡献是创立了科学的日心学说，写出“自然科学的独立宣言”--《天体运行论》。他把统率整个宇宙的支配力量赋予太阳，而各个天体则都有其自然的运动。哥白尼的日心学说科学地阐明了天体运行的观象，推翻了统治长达一千多年的托勒密体系--地心学说，并从根本上否定了基督教关于上帝创造一切，地是静止不动的谬误。哥白尼慑于教会的统治，怕遭到反对和迫害，迟迟不愿将《天体运行论》公开出版。四个半世纪以后，天体物理学家欧文·金格利希（Owen Gingerich）亲自阅读了《天体运行论》，他被书中那两个相互矛盾的信息所震惊：Arthur Koestler声称：在他那本有名《梦游者》中写到哥白尼的那本书自出版后，没人读过，而Gingerich在爱丁堡皇家天文馆却发现了此书的首版，而且书边有Reinhold作的详细注解（他是十六世纪四十年代北欧著名的天文学讲师）。这正好驳斥了Koestler的说法。Gingerich潜心研究三十余载，游历数十万英里----从墨尔本到莫斯科，从波斯顿到北京，翻阅了六百多本流散在民间的《天体运行论》（De revolutionibus）。Gingerich的这本书原汁原味,他亲身取材,其中还有很多源自哥白尼那本书里精辟的论点.最终他从圣徒，异教徒，无赖，音乐人,电影明星，医生和藏书狂那收集到了许多当年出版的《天体运行论》。最有趣的是那些从天文学家们那里收集来的《天体运行论》都被他们作了注解，而这些书即使今天看来都很清楚的向我们阐述了那时接受日心学说为正统的宇宙学说是多么的漫长而艰难，以及科学家之间的争论和科学与宗教间的冲突。这本书一半讲得是那本书，一半是哥白尼，一半是科学研究，一半是著书目录的探索，此书对科学史和宇宙论提出了新的审视。
Awards/获奖情况：
About the Author/作者介绍： 欧文·金格利希（Owen Gingerich）哈佛大学—史密森尼天体物理中心的天文学及科学史教授。他是剑桥大学出版社《天文学通史》的编辑委员会主席。他的兴趣涉及广泛的历史范畴，但是他集中致力于哥白尼革命的研究。他已经出版了两部文集：《伟大的哥白尼寻踪》（The Great Copernicus Chase）和《天眼——托勒密、哥白尼、开普勒》（The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler）。现与他的妻子居住在马萨诸塞州的剑桥。
Format:HARDCOVER
Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：SOLD
Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE(到期可授)
Sales in other countries/其他国家销售情况：
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