Owen Gingerich - Career and Contributions

Career and Contributions

Gingerich was eventually led to teach astronomy at Harvard where his lectures became noted for attention-getting devices. Amongst these was propelling himself out of the classroom with a fire extinguisher to demonstrate Newton’s third law of motion and dressing up like a sixteenth century Latin scholar. He also is associated with the Smithsonian and served as chairman of the International Astronomical Union’s Planet Definition Committee, which was charged with updating the astronomical definition of planet to reflect recent discoveries such as Eris.

The seven-member committee drafted a definition which preserved Pluto’s status by only requiring a planet to be (1) large enough to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape) and (2) orbiting a star without itself being a star. This proposal was criticized by many for weakening the meaning of the term. The eventual definition adopted by the IAU added an additional requirement, that a body must have cleared its neighborhood of all other sizable objects, language that Gingerich was “not at all pleased” with.

In addition to astronomical research, he has also studied the history of astronomy. In the 1950s, he researched Charles Messier’s life and the Messier Catalog. Gingerich found notes by Messier on two additional Objects, discovered by Pierre Méchain, which he added to the Messier Catalog: M108 (NGC 3556) and M109 (NGC 3992). He investigated the missing Messier Objects, concluding that M91 was probably a comet and that M102 was probably a duplication of M101. The first conclusion was later dismissed as W.C. Williams brought up evidence that M91 is probably NGC 4548, but the second is still open (M102 may be NGC 5866).

Gingerich is a widely recognized authority on both Johannes Kepler and Nicolaus Copernicus, especially in regard to his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.

In 1959, in chapter II of The Sleepwalkers, titled "The System of Copernicus", Arthur Koestler wrote that: "The book that nobody read – the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres – was and is an all-time worst-seller." After reading in the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh a thoroughly annotated copy previously owned by Erasmus Reinhold, a prominent sixteenth-century German astronomer who worked in Prussia shortly after Copernicus' death there, Gingerich was inspired to check Koestler's claim and to research who had owned and studied the book's only editions prior to the mid-19th century, the original of 1543 in Nuremberg, and the second in 1566, Basel. Gingerich also documented where and how the book was censored. Due largely to Gingerich’s work, De revolutionibus has been researched and catalogued better than any first-edition historical text except for the original Gutenberg Bible. His three-decade-long personal survey of Copernicus’ great book De revolutionibus was recounted in The Book Nobody Read, published in 2004 by Walker & Co. That book and the research behind it earned him the Polish government’s Order of Merit in 1981.