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Re: The Book Nobody Read



On reading the review of this book on Amazon's web site I realized that
it is a story I heard about thirteen years ago, directly from the
author, when he gave a Michael Ovenden Memorial Lecture in
Vancouver. The title of his lecture was "The Great Copernicus Chase",
which is also the title of his earlier book on the history of science.

[Conscious digression] In 1988 Evelyn and I had the pleasure of
visiting the Strahov Monastery in Prague where Kepler's copy of De
Revolutionibus presently resides. By our customary good fortune we
were with a friend (Vladimir Kambersky) who is a friend of the director
or curator of the library, who just happened to be there on that Sunday.
He invited us to come in and see some of the prizes of the collection.
He insisted I look at (and turn the pages of!) the Copernicus even
though I protested that I was not wearing the cotton gloves which I
supposed were necessary for such an activity. After this intoxicating
experience (there were several other rare books, too) the director
insisted we sign his guest book, and he showed us some of the names
of people who had signed before us, including Lord Nelson (and Lady
Hamilton? if my feeble memory serves me). As this was just a chance
meeting I was utterly unprepared for what had transpired, and upon
taking leave of my library host, by way of thanks, I bestowed upon him
a shiny new Canadian one dollar coin (now irreverently termed a
"loonie"), a supply of which I had brought along as souvenirs for
children. My gift, it turns out, hit the mark rather well, as Vladimir
informed me the director is a coin collector, and he had not seen a
loonie before. Evelyn and I will return to visit our friends in Prague
in a couple of weeks.

Getting back to Owen Gingerich, it is an interesting sidelight that he
is a religious man. He makes a very interesting "argument from design"
that Aquinas and Paley could not have known. To Gingerich there is no
more powerful sign of the existence of God in Nature than the nuclear
resonance in Carbon-12 that permits the synthesis of nuclei having
atomic mass number greater than five. (By extension it could also be
argued, I suppose, that George Gamow, who predicted the existence of
this resonance, is a latter-day prophet.) That is certainly the most
fundamental piece of evidence I have heard adduced in this cause,
though it has not convinced me.

Leigh