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Who was Owen Gingerich?


I have only recently discovered that a fellow named Owen Gingerich ever lived or died.  Yet he and I have very much overlapping timelines -- I was born when he was 28, and he died just two and a half years ago. Now that I know who he was, I am sorry I didn't learn of him sooner.

So here is a post for Gingerich, concluding "science week" at Jamesian Pragmatism Refreshed.  

Gingerich was an astronomer, and an important participant in debates over what we understand by the word "planet," debates that centered -- while he was most involved in them -- on the case of alleged planet Pluto.  Gingerich was also a teacher of the Harvard University course "The Astronomical Perspective," a core science course for non-scientists.

To me what is most fascinating about Gingerich, though, is his work as a historian of science, and especially of the early modern developments in astronomy and physics beginning with Copernicus and continuing through Newton's day.

In 2004, the science publisher Heinemann came out with a work of Gingerich's, THE BOOK NOBODY READ -- a discussion of the paradoxical way in which Copernicus's ideas came to have their epochal impact. The title of that work was itself a bit misleading.  Heinemann was arguing against an influential assertion by Athur Koestler, in 1959, that Copernicus' book on a heliocentric model of the solar system was "the book that nobody read ... an all-time worst seller."

Gingerich made a powerful case that Koestler was wrong. In the process he catalogues every copy of either of the first two editions of that famous book (the 1543 and 1566 editions) still known to exist. They all have extensive notes in the margins, indicating that not only were they read, they were read attentively. 

Gingerich's discussion also seems to take Galileo down a peg in importance.  Indeed, Galileo is pegged as someone who, though very adept at working the observations from new-model telescopes into arguments for the Copernican model, didn't really follow the mathematics of Copernicus' argument as well as did some of Galileo's contemporaries.    

Gingerich.  A new name for me.  One I think will be worth remembering. 

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