Re: Holiday reading suggestion?


Dr John Stockton wrote:
JRS: In article <B7ednYbFG7RaW-_ZRVny1w@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, dated Tue, 23
May 2006 09:22:24 remote, seen in news:uk.sci.astronomy, AB
<mail@xxxxxxxx> posted :
As we are possibly like-minded people here, does anybody have any
suggestions for some holiday reading this summer?


Approximate (?) details, from memory - "The Book that Nobody Read", by
Owen Gingerich, recently published, and possibly reviewed in "Physics
World".

It's about the copies of Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus"; it's about the
usual size for a book.

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk Turnpike v4.00 MIME. ©
Web <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/> - FAQqish topics, acronyms & links;
Astro stuff via astron-1.htm, gravity0.htm ; quotings.htm, pascal.htm, etc.
No Encoding. Quotes before replies. Snip well. Write clearly. Don't Mail News.

It is about how the myth grew that Copernican reasoning was
unpenetrable to all but a few while the annotations on the De
Revolutionibus books suggest otherwise.

The book has one of the few references to the second greatest
astronomical representation after the Copernican heliocentric
arrangement - Kepler's Panis Quadragesimalis seen on page 85 of the
following website -

http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/POSC_13_1_74_0.pdf

It shows you how the motion of Mars was plotted against the stellar
background and orbitally compared to the motion of the Earth -

"Copernicus, by attributing a single annual motion to the earth,
entirely rids the planets of these extremely intricate coils [spiris],
leading the individual planets into their respective orbits
[orbitas],quite bare and very nearly circular. In the period of time
shown in the diagram, Mars traverses one and the same orbit as many
times as the 'garlands' [corollas] you see looped towards the
centre, with one extra, making nine times, while at the same time the
Earth repeats its circle sixteen times "


Astronomia Nova 1609


These things are now lost to history,Stockton here adheres to the
Newtonian mutations based on what planetary motion looks like from the
Sun like a vandalised version of the exquisite Keplerian reasoning
where dwells the great minds.

Go ahead and look at the Panis Quadrgesimalis and then look at the
conclusions which contemporary imaging makes it dynamic so easy to
appreceate -

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0112/JuSa2000_tezel.gif


God forbid you ever feel the loss of an entire astronomical tradition
to mathematicians who make themselves bigger than the material.

.

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