"the universe screamed" "the mind shudders"

William T. Vollmann gives himself the task of exhuming Copernicus's The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Along the way, he also attempts to exhume how people in Copernicus's time thought and felt about the cosmos. Through the book, we find out how terribly written The Revolutions is. It doesn't sound like much fun to read. Thankfully Bill does the reading for us, and gives us the gist, meanwhile also telling us more about Ptolemy and his system, about Aristotelian physics and beliefs, about the religious feelings and thoughts of the times, and most of all about just what Copernicus's system (which, although rigidly heliocentric, is also rigidly still Aristotelian) improved upon (and what it didn't (hint: god damn perfect circles)).

Wonderful!

Also, I feel like Feyeranband's Against Method is a nice companion. Not for his scientific anarchism, but for his exegesis of Galileo's work. They really do go well together. ( )

This is an interesting book, and Vollman gets high marks for actually reading Copernicus (I tried once and gave up quickly). As part of a series of books on scientists by non-scientists, it is written at an appropriate level for someone like me. Vollman isn't interested so much in the science as he is in the place of Copernicanism in history. He notes often that astronomy has advanced so far that Copernicus seems quaint in his insistence on circular motion even with his heliocentric universe. What he finds more interesting is how this is but the opening salvo in the battle that brought down the (always odd) scriptural-Ptolemaic universe alliance. The problem with the book is he never quite gets the balance between the science and the story right. So it's not a great book, but I enjoyed reading it. 3 stars seems about right to me. ( )