Interview: Dava Sobel - Come the revolution

That man was Nicolaus Copernicus, and around 1510 he devised this theory of a heliocentric universe, then kept it under wraps for the next 30 years, afraid of drawing ridicule from his peers and censure from his Church. But one day a brilliant, young mathematician called Georg Joachim Rheticus turned up on his doorstep, having heard rumours he felt compelled to investigate. Though it was risky – Rheticus was one of those freshly minted Lutherans, in the days when they were outlawed – the two men put their heads together to refine the manuscript that would ultimately become De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres).

Modern readers have grown up knowing that Earth is round and orbits the sun every 365 days. We have seen a man walking on the moon, and run our communication lifelines through satellites. For most, it could be a stretch to understand the shock of Copernicus’s new ideas.

But now there’s the newest book from Longitude author Dava Sobel. A More Perfect Heaven is an absorbing work of non-fiction wrapped around a two-act play that literally brings these men back to life, and by doing so, recreates the sense of astonishment, horror, and wonder that greeted Copernicus’s revolutionary theory of the cosmos when it came to light in the mid 1500s.

Sobel, a New Yorker, is a petite, stylish woman of 74, with a sleek crop of white hair. Her father was an old school GP who wanted his daughter to follow in his footsteps.

“He was the kind of GP who went to people’s homes when they were sick, and made housecalls at night. But his life was so hard. He worked all the time, so it didn’t really look attractive. And we never went anywhere because somebody was about to have a baby, and he couldn’t be away.”

Her mother was a chemist, so theirs was not a household that believed science and mathematics weren’t subjects girls should study, and both fascinated Sobel from an early age.

She did, however, encounter prejudice when she applied for a place at The Bronx High School of Science. It’s a prestigious state run school that only admits students who meet rigorous standards and pass an entrance exam. “I was told outright that boys would be accepted preferentially over girls, in a ratio of about four to one,” she says. “There was no shame. It was 1961. It was just the way of the world then.”

Despite her keen interest, Sobel couldn’t envisage a career as a scientist. “It didn’t feel like the right thing, though I didn’t know what the right thing was.” She got a degree in theatre history, but instead of pursuing life as an academic, she was recruited by IBM. They paid well, but she hated it. “It was a big corporation with a corporate mentality. I was lost. So I decided to go back to graduate school for anthropology. But I bumped into a classmate who was working for the local newspaper, who said, ‘There’s an opening in my department, why don’t you come over?’ ”

Journalism had never occurred to her, though she enjoyed writing term papers and now confesses to an early fantasy of being a novelist. “But I never had ideas for fiction – that was a real problem! But the minute I was on staff, seriously, within the first week, I thought, I’m home. Every day you had to go out and learn about something, and then come back and write about it. It was great.”

Longitude began as a proposal for a magazine article. It was 1993, and Sobel was a freelance science journalist by then, with five or six regular clients, including the New York Times. She’d met the curator of historical scientific instruments at Harvard, at a convention, and he told her about an upcoming event, The Longitude Symposium. “He said it would be really great, and I believed him, so I wrote a proposal and everybody turned me down. But Harvard Magazine changed their mind, and I went, and it changed my life.”

Selling the magazine piece was so arduous that it never occurred to her to pitch it as a book, but when the story came out she was approached by a publisher. “That was the first unbelievable thing that happened.”

She was surprised by the success of Longitude, but has an interesting theory about why it made such an impact. “I think it was about the fact that it was about something that everybody thought was uninteresting, and it turned out to have this deep history, a life and death kind of history. It made you think that there were a lot of other interesting stories around that you hadn’t even thought about. It doesn’t just appeal to people who love science, there were a lot of sailors and clock collectors. It’s just a great story about someone coming from outside the establishment, self-educated, who manages to do what the entire scientific establishment of Europe has failed to do. Man bites dog.”

It also, she acknowledges, spawned a copycat industry, but she’s quick to tell me that Cod, by Mark Kurlansky, wasn’t one of those imitators. “Cod was a done deal – written and finished – before my book came out. We have the same publisher. But there were others that really saw Longitude as a model.”

Sobel’s own follow up best sellers were Galileo’s Daughter, and The Planets, and when she stops promoting A More Perfect Heaven, she’ll embark on a book about the women hired as skilled workers to process astronomical data in the laboratory of Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory from 1877 to 1919. They were nicknamed Pickering’s Harem – which they despised – and were also known as the Harvard Computers.

For now, though, the publicity machine’s gears are engaged on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s distracting, and prevents Sobel from starting her research, but it’s not without its unique rewards. “When you write something, you gain a familiarity with the material, but something about talking about the book and having to answer questions about it makes that firmer in your mind. And it’s interesting to see what questions it raises with other people that maybe I never considered.

“Or you discover something. With Galileo’s Daughter, everybody knew there was a portrait, but there was only a black and white photo of the portrait, which had disappeared. I really tried to find it before the book came out, I even hired an expert in 17th-century Italian art to write to museums and look for it, and placed ads in journals.

“We couldn’t find it, so for the original jacket we had an artist take the photo and colour it. As soon as the book appeared in England, I got a letter from somebody at the Wellcome Trust saying, ‘We own the painting, here it is.’ He sent me a slide and said I could come see it any time. I never thought to look in England for it.”

Something you can look for in Scotland, her book reveals, is a first edition of Copernicus’s groundbreaking work. And not just any old edition, but one that’s been annotated from start to finish by Erasmus Reinhold, the senior mathematician at the University of Wittenberg – Rheticus’s university.

It’s part of the collection of rare astronomy books held by Edinburgh’s Royal Observatory. Sobel hoped to make a pilgrimage to see it while she was here for the book festival, but, she jokes, “Unlike the rest of the world, the librarian at the observatory is the one person not in Edinburgh in August!”

Sobel’s books are filled with so many brilliant, fascinating mavericks. Is there someone she is fondest of?

With a smile she replies, “Probably Galileo, he’s a very loveable sort.”

l A More Perfect Heaven, How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos by Dava Sobel is published on 5 September by Bloomsbury, priced £14.99.