A More Perfect Heaven – Dava Sobel

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Nicolas Copernicus was a cautious man in an era when darkness shadowed brilliant flashes of insight and discovery. His painstaking calculations that showed the sun is fixed and the earth revolves around it directly contradicted religious dogma. The Church was furiously trying to stamp out the Lutheran heretics and Copernicus was himself a canon of the Church, dependent on it for his livelihood and position. He was also something of a perfectionist about presenting his revolutionary findings to the world.

Dava Sobel dramatizes the discoveries and the eventual publication of Copernicus’ work in A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos. It is, like her other recreations of the scientific breakthroughs that changed how we see things, deeply researched and imaginatively rendered. Copernicus seems to have been a pretty nice guy—smart, brave, responsible, diplomatic, humble, socially savvy, addicted to eclipses and stargazing, and possessed of unshakeable integrity.

The late 15^th-early 16^th century world he lived in was full of intrigue, power grabs, treachery and hardship but it also contained dazzling scholars, clear night skies, a predisposition to inquiry and a useful hunger for fame and glory that Copernicus could turn to his own advantage. When a young scholar shows up at his door, looking to persuade him to publish his massive heliocentric opus, the aging astronomer’s reluctance to stir up a hornet’s nest of ridicule and protest has met its match.

Sobel inserts a two-act play in the center of this book. Based on the real correspondence of Copernicus and his peers, the play portrays what might have happened between the two men and among the clergy and political forces in Poland at the time. Copernicus’ mistress, his bishop, canonical colleagues and the German mathematics professor, Georg Joachim Rheticus, are vivid characters. Sobel creates a believable scenario of how the younger man overcame Copernicus’ objections and eventually helped him to publish the ideas and proofs that would send the world spinning in space.

Dava Sobel delivers another good read about an important scientist who most people know as a name and a theory, if at all. Science is fascinating when it is located in its real narrative, even if the gaps in the story are necessarily filled in by intelligent invention.

A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos   Dava Sobel | Walker & Company  2011

Longitude — Dava Sobel

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Longitude is the story of a self-educated carpenter’s improbable invention of the marine chronometer, a saga colored by poisonously envious sabotage, heroic feats of astronomy and a lot of really bad shipwrecks. Dava Sobel has turned a dense thicket of scientific inquiry and discovery into a readable, revelatory tale of adventure that traces the interconnections of Captain Cook, Charles Darwin and Sir Isaac Newton and a number of key characters you likely never heard of. Money is a big motivator – no surprise – merchant trade and royal coffers were both impoverished by the uncertainties of the sea. Solving the navigation problem was critical enough to merit a prize worth the equivalent of millions.

John Harrison was a skilled carpenter who taught himself clockmaking and then set out to create a device that would keep such perfect time at sea that it could determine longitude. Latitude was easy enough. Star siting, sun angles, day length — even an unskilled sailor can find the distance from the fixed equator using those. But the long lines that curve from pole-to-pole were harder to pin down and a tiny mistake, an off-guess, could send you and your ship hundreds of miles off-course, onto perilous rocks in the dark or straight to the bottom of the sea.

The search for longitude inspired great observatories, led to advances in astronomy, engaged such luminaries as Galileo Galilei, Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton and produced the British Longitude Act of 1714 with its enticing cash prize. Harrison set himself to win the prize and created four separate “clocks” that were marvels of technology for his time and that still work perfectly today. He succeeded in developing a workable and elegant chronometer, the first, but not in avoiding the backstabbing and manipulation that nearly cost him the prize.

The story tacks back and forth from Harrison and his endless tinkering to astronomers charting the path of the moon and the positions of the stars. Ships are lost, treasure galleons are pirated, men die of scurvy or go blind squinting at the sun to calculate position. It seems so long ago, in this day of GPS talking cars and satellite positions, that setting out from port meant you were as likely to get lost as you were to get lucky. But one determined, unlettered visionary changed all that and Dava Sobel’s Longitude sheds light on an obscure passage in history that produced important nautical instruments we still use today.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time  Dava Sobel | Walker Publishing Company 1995