The primates known as humans, after ages of unawareness, managed to unveil the hidden dynamics of the universe in little more than a century.
It happened between 1543 and 1687, when Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton overturned Roman Catholic dogma and replaced it with a startling portrait of the universe. Their individual toils illuminated the mysteries of the solar system and then expanded to those of the wider cosmos.
The masterworks of these pioneers, as well as hundreds of other rare science books, are now on display at Sotheby’s New York before they go up for auction on Oct. 20. The ensemble consists of landmark works and first editions that are, according to Sotheby’s, coming onto the book market after decades in private collections.
“It’s a re-emergence,” said Richard Austin, Sotheby’s global head of books and manuscripts. No gloves are needed, he added, if visitors wash their hands carefully before handling the books. “You can look at these things online,” he said. “But it’s a very different experience when you hold them in your hands and say, ‘This is a book that changed our understanding of the universe.’”
The exhibition, “Reason and Revolution,” highlights books that detail scientific turning points. The opus of Copernicus has the highest opening bid estimate — up to $1 million. Overall, Sotheby’s expects proceeds of up to $7 million.
Scholars have criticized the disappearance of rare, historically significant science texts into private collections. But Nick Wilding, a historian of science at Georgia State University, said that, in the long run, the rare books tend to “gravitate to public institutions rather than private collections.” One reason, he said, is that institutions tend to have longer lives than private buyers.
Church doctrine was the backdrop to the radical ideas of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. Roman Catholic officialdom long held that humanity and the Earth sat at the center of the universe as the stars, planets and sun wheeled overhead. The heavens were said to be perfect, in stark contrast to the imperfections found on Earth. Then came the scientific revolution.
‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,’ by Nicolaus Copernicus
Published in 1543, Copernicus’ manuscript contradicted the Catholic Church, and in time, the church decided to show its displeasure. In 1600, it had Giordano Bruno, an advocate of the heliocentric theory, burned at the stake. Today in Rome, a statue of Bruno overlooks the Campo dei Fiori, where the philosopher was burned alive for heresy, its shadowed face looking defiantly in the direction of the Vatican.
The book’s early pages feature Copernicus’s famous diagram of the solar system. It shows the sun at the center and the paths of the known planets arranged in increasingly larger orbits. The text, after discussing the orbiters, declares in Latin: In medio uero omnium residet Sol, “But the Sun resides at the center of everything.”
His planetary tabulations let astronomers, navigators and calendar makers use his heliocentric model to compute and predict with new accuracy the longitudes and latitudes of the planets, the sun and the moon for any given date. In time, his breakthrough played a role in the reform of the Gregorian calendar, which much of the world now uses.
‘Starry Messenger,’ by Galileo Galilei
Galileo made a run of findings that reinforced the Copernican worldview and reimagined what lay beyond.
The book was a steppingstone to his great work, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,” published in 1632. His new endeavor strongly backed Copernicus, whose book the Catholic Church had put on its prohibited list. Galileo, too, felt the lash. In 1633, the Roman Inquisition put the Italian astronomer on trial. The spectacle of the elderly thinker being forced, under threat of torture, to recant his celestial views came to symbolize the church’s hostility to open inquiry.
Early in “Starry Messenger” (“Sidereus Nuncius”), Galileo lays out a diagram of a telescope “for the sake of easier understanding,” as he put it. The observer’s eye is at E and the shape of the tube is outlined by A, B, C and D, with the tube’s far end holding the curved lens. Lines extending outward suggest how incoming rays of light would become concentrated at the focal point of the eyepiece.
With detailed sketches, the book showed what Galileo saw when he turned his telescope on the moon: a surface torn by irregular mountains, suggesting brute upheavals. His observation ran counter to the church’s doctrine of celestial perfection.
The savant’s greatest discovery took up the greatest part of his book: that Jupiter was accompanied by four moons — a figure modern observers have expanded to 115. A Sotheby’s write-up notes that Galileo described the exact moment — Jan. 11, 1610 — when he increased his moon count from three to four. Once again, his finding undermined the church. The astute observer had demonstrated that not everything in the heavens circled Earth.
The most cosmic of Galileo’s discoveries was that the nighttime sky held at least 10 times as many stars as those visible to the naked eye. His diagram of the Pleiades cluster showed a field of 35 stars but just six (drawn larger) as naked-eye objects. So, too, he suggested that the bright band of the Milky Way and similar nebulous parts of the dark sky hinted at the existence of “innumerable stars grouped together” — setting the stage for the modern concept of galaxies.
‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,’ by Isaac Newton
The ghostly streaks of comets had long been seen as portents of calamity. Kings trembled. Now, in Newton’s hands, they became just another part of nature’s great whirling machine, their arrival controlled by gravity rather than the malevolent gods.
Page after page of the book features knotty diagrams that explain the invisible forces at work on the moon, the sun, the planets and Earth — notably its oceans and tides. Newton showed why they rise and fall with great predictability. The book also took on pendulum rates, orbital anomalies, the precession of the equinoxes, the drag of fluids, the speed of sound and the spiraling marvels known as vortices.
Despite its reputation for unreadability — fostered by its hundreds of equations, diagrams and obscure references — Newton’s 1687 book became a sensation in his lifetime. His discovery of gravity unlocked the universe, and his magnum opus laid out a method of inquiry that became the gold standard.
Newton did not laud Copernicus and Galileo. That wasn’t his style, nor was it needed. As a top scientist, he and his book paid them the highest of tributes by adopting and extending their worldviews and findings, especially those of Galileo, who investigated not just the heavens but also terrestrial forces. Once, in a letter to Robert Hooke, a fellow scholar, Newton did express his gratitude: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
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