Via Steinn, the Smithsonian's Astronomy Abstract Service has an index entry for some book called De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by some Polish guy. They've got a scanned electronic version available for free, but the stupid thing is in Latin, and who speaks that these days?
Also, it's only got two citations, and both of those are more than ten years old. Boy, this guy will never get tenure...
If you have access to JSTOR, you can also read a cranky letter from some guy at Cambridge. The more things change...
As Steinn says, "I love those intertube thingies, may they never be clogged."
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I was shown this today, and it totally rocks.
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As Steinn says, "I love those intertube thingies, may they never be clogged."
Net neutrality, man. Fight for it. The battle against that is a battle for cloggage.
-Rob
Thanks for the smile. I'm filling in water quality permits and I needed it.
I know that posting this comment is a waste of time and probably some nationalist idiot will say "yes he was" but the author of De Revolutionibus was not Polish (or German either). He was an Ermlander! Ermland (Warmia in Latin) where he was born and lived all of his life, except for the years that he was away at university, was a sovereign province ruled by a Prince Bishop who in the authors youth just happened to be his maternal uncle who set him up with a cosy job for life so he didn't need to worry about tenure!
In all this discussion of tenure, I think we should recall what can happen to our colleagues in the social sciences like archaeology:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/10/10bryan.html
Yesterday's Nobel Prize is tomorrow's homework. Shortcut! Rephrase science into mediocrity embraced by inertia. Peer review then rejects prodigiously stupid and unfashionably clever proposals both.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/wrongest.htm
Ah, Dr. Jones antics never age.
I love how the only two citations on De Revolutionibus are from 1994 and 1995.
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Wasn't there a book about this called The Book Nobody Read? Apparently, a lot of people did read the book, including many of the founders of modern physics and astronomy. The author actually tracked down a good number of the extant copies and found all sorts of marginal notes, including notes and advances transcribed from one copy to another, and, of course, the Vatican's "notes to the reader" providing the theologically correct interpretations of certain paragraphs.
Of course nobody cites De revolutionibus anymore. It has been superceded by more recent, more accurate works. Besides, citation has little to do with real impact. I remember one paper in the CACM on "reverse indexing" describing what we would now call data structures and typing. It was what is called "intuitively obvious". It was so important and so obvious in hindsight that it is hard to believe that someone had to even think of it. The times were ripe. The idea was in the air and the paper promptly forgotten.