Publisher's Synopsis
In the spring of 1539, Georg Joachim Rheticus, a twenty-five-year-old mathematics prodigy from Wittenberg, set off on an arduous three-week journey to northern Poland in order to meet the elderly but not-yet-famous amateur astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. While Copernicus had yet to publish anything on the topic of a new cosmology, rumors had abounded for years about his revolutionary theory (some would call it heretical) that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe, and about a manuscript he had almost completed on the subject. Intending to stay a month, Rheticus spent three years at Copernicus's side, during which time he sought means - both great and small - of heralding his teacher's radiant vision of beauty: a cosmology that moved the earth and immobilized the sun. By the early autumn of 1541, the aging astronomer had completed his manuscript, De revolutionibus, and Rheticus persuaded his mentor to let him take it
