John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

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“If at the foundation. . but despair?” from Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling , translated by Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N. J., 1968).

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“I hold it true. . the ancients dreamed.” from Albert Einstein’s Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford, 1933 (quoted by Jeremy Bernstein in Einstein , London, 1973)

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“Science aims at. . of commonplace experience.” from Sir Arthur Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge, 1923).

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“It is of the highest. . we are confronted.” from Max Planck (quoted by Bernstein in Einstein , p. 156)

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“The death of one god is the death of all.” from Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”, Collected Poems (London, 1955).

A fully comprehensive bibliography would be wholly inappropriate, and probably impossible to compile, in a work of this nature; nevertheless, there is a small number of books which, during the years of composition of Doctor Copernicus , have won my deep respect, and whose scholarship and vision have been of invaluable help to me, and these I must mention. I name them also as suggested further reading for anyone seeking a fuller and perhaps more scrupulously factual account of the astronomer’s life and work.

The standard biography is Ludwig Prowe’s Nicolaus Copernicus (2 vols., Berlin, 1883-4); it has not, however, been translated into English, so far as I can ascertain. Two brief and delightful accounts of the life and work are Angus Armitage’s Copernicus, Founder of Modern Astronomy (London, 1938), and Sun, Stand Thou Still (London, 1947). A more technical, but very elegant and readable explication of the heliocentric theory is contained in Professor Fred Hoyle’s Nicolaus Copernicus (London, 1973). However, the two works on which I have mainly drawn are Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution (Harvard, 1957), and Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (London, 1959). To these two beautiful, lucid and engaging books I owe more than a mere acknowledgment can repay.

For the light which they shed upon the history and thought of the period I am grateful to F. L. Carsten, whose The Origins of Prussia (Oxford, 1954) was extremely helpful; Frances A. Yates, who, in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964), revealed the influences of Hermetic mysticism and Neoplatonism upon Copernicus and his contemporaries; W. P. D, Wightman’s Science in a Renaissance Society (London, 1972), and M. E. Mallett’s The Borgias (London, 1969).

I must emphasise, however, that any factual errors, willed or otherwise, and all questionable interpretations in this book are my own, and are in no way to be imputed to the sources listed above.

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As well as the numerous extracts from Copernicus’s own writings which I have incorporated in my text, and which I do not feel I need to identify, I have quoted from six different sources, which are identified in the Note on page here

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For their help and encouragement, I wish to thank the following: David Farrer, Dermot Keogh, Terence Killeen, Seamus McGonagle, Douglas Sealy, Maurice P. Sweeney, and the staff of Trinity College Library, Dublin. The final word of thanks must go to my wife, Janet, for her patience and fortitude, and for the benefit of her unerring judgment.