What? No preview? BA, you should be ashamed.

Sure, evidence abounded that the planets orbited the sun. But there was NO reason to suppose that the sun didn’t, in turn, orbit the Earth, other than just a feeling of “wouldn’t it be neat if it were so!”. In fact, there was substantial evidence AGAINST an Earth orbiting the sun: No one had ever detected stellar parallax!

Tycho Brahe was probably the single staunchest voice of reason in that age. His Geocentric model featured the sun and moon going around the Earth, and the rest of the planets going around the sun. It DID require the Earth to rotate on its axis once every day, but this was a far less absurd notion (for its time) than the idea that the Earth hurtled around the sun once a year.

Of course, today, we HAVE detected stellar parallax, and so the heliocentric model has gotten its time in the sun (so to speak). But in Copernicus’s, Galielo’s, and even Kepler’s time, the evidence simply wasn’t there to support it.

A second edition auctioned recently achieved a new record of €100 000. Go back twenty or thirty years when Owen Gingerich acquired his and you will find that he only paid a couple of hundred dollars. The prices exploded in the 1990s and have been spiraling ever since.

Next best to having the original library of Alexandria scroll access.

Anyone want to bid on copies of Aristarchus or on the lost plays of
Sophocles?

“It’s a pity. I think every astronomer wants it, but unfortunatetly they don’t even earn enough to buy such a used, second-hand (N’th-hand?) book.”

There was a time that these things didn’t cost so much! Of course a first edition of De Revolutionibus will usually fetch much more at auction than a second edition. However Owen Gingerich lists himself as owning two copies of the second edition. I’m sure that Harvard hasn’t made him wealthy.

George

P.S.

Thanks to Josh for the link to Christie’s!

Please stop using emoticons that more than half of your readers do not understand.

“<3″ is a heart rotated 90 degrees CW, so what Phil wrote means “I (heart) heliocentrism.”

The only meaning I could find for <3 was an ass being mooned.

Now _that’s_ an interpretation I have never previously encountered . . .

The only meaning I could find for <3 was an ass being mooned.

Otherwise, I ?> your work.

The only meaning I could find for \ your work.

The only meaning I could find for your work.

Btw, with how much BA hates the Wall Street Journal I found it kind of Ironic that the two big ads on the top of the the web page were ads for the Wall Street Journal. I know that he doesn’t control the ads but still…

Btww, the above comment posted by “Gibsy on 12 Jun 2008 at 8:28 pm” Is total spam and is in dire need of deleting most promptly.

Then you want to read Cattus Petasatus. The story of a home invasion by a chaotic entity who, with two demonic associates, creates havoc and mayhem in a house where two children are left unattended.

Heliocentrism?

Goodness, gracious me! Whatever will these pseudoscientists think up next? They’ll be telling us we all evolved from monkeys before too long… tsk, tsk.

It’s too much, ah tell thee – all too much.
–

Good news: Octavo.com will sell you a pdf CD of an original Copernicus for $40. Print out your own million dollar exact replica. They also have Galileo’s Siderius and Newton’s Optics. Even a hundredaire like me can own a priceless library (one off) for peanuts! Want Einstein? His collected papers are out, also exact copies or translations, your choice, but very high quality stuff, also for $40 or so…Google Caltech, home of the E. papers project. Enjoy!

This would be like replacing your Betamax copy of “Plan 9 From Outer Space” with a Blu-Ray. It’s just not cricket old chap.

The catalogue’s online; the listing for this little gem is right here. The provenance lists some guy named Myron Prinzmetal in the first half of C20, then Richard Green (apparently he was a big collector of scientific papers, it’s his collection on the auction block).

And there’s some other gems in there as well. There’s papers by Einstein and Turing, books by Kepler and Brahe, and even a first edition of Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, the book that brought down the wrath of the churches on Galileo (and was banned for 200 years afterward). I’d LOVE to get my mitts on that, but it’s expected to go for $60,000 to $80,000…