"It doesn't happen often, but there are times when a single book turns the world on its head. Isaac Newton's Principia unraveled the mystery of gravity. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species explained how evolution worked."
"But before either of these, there was On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres by Nicolaus Copernicus. It was published in 1543. In it, Copernicus made the astounding claim that Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around."
Dava Sobel, who visits tomorrow, Nov. 10, was profiled yesterday on NPR. The author of A More Perfect Heaven, a new biography of Copernicus, Sobel speaks about the huge impact the astronomer's small book had on human civilization. More.
