Doctor Copernicus

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Book: Read Doctor Copernicus for Free Online
Authors: John Banville
Tags: Fiction, General
what starry trajectory, on which rung of those steadily ascending ladders of tabular
calculation, but once detected it had brought the entire edifice of a life’s work crashing down with slow dreamlike inevitability. Professor Brudzewski knew that Ptolemy was gravely
wrong. He could not of course admit it, even to himself; his investment was too great for that. This failure of nerve explained to Nicolas how it was that a mathematician of the first rank
could stoop into deceit in order, in Aristotle’s words, to save the phenomena , that is, to devise a theory grounded firmly in the old reactionary dogmas that yet would account for the
observed motions of the planets. There were cases, such as the wildly eccentric orbit of Mars, that the general Ptolemaic theory could not account for, but faced with these problems the Professor,
like his Alexandrian magister before him, leant all the weight of his prodigious skill upon the formulae until they buckled into conformity.
    At first Nicolas was ashamed on the Professor’s behalf. Then the shame gave way to compassion, and he began to regard the misfortunate old fellow with a rueful, almost paternal tenderness.
He would help him! Yes, he would become a pupil, and in the classroom take him gently in hand and show him how he might admit his folly and thereby make amends for the years of stubborness and
wilful blindness. And there would be another but very different book, perhaps the old man’s last, the crowning glory of his life, Tractatus contra Ptolemaeus , with a brief
acknowledgment to the student—so young! so brilliant!—whose devastating arguments had been the thunderbolt that had struck down the author on his blithe blind way to Damascus. O yes.
And though the text itself be forgotten, as surely it would be, generations of cosmologists as yet unborn would speak of the book with reverence as marking the first public appearance—so
characteristically modest!—of one of the greatest astronomers of all time. Nicolas trembled, drunk on these mad visions of glory. Andreas glanced at him and smirked.
    “You are sweating, brother, I can smell you from here.”
    “I do not have your calm, Andreas. I worry. I very much want to hear him lecture.”
    “Why? This stargazing and so forth, what good is it?”
    Nicolas was shocked. What good?—the only certain good! But he could not say that, and contented himself with a smile of secret knowing. They passed under the spires of St Mary’s
Church. Spring had come to Cracow, and the city today seemed somehow airborne, an intricate aetherial thing of rods and glass flying in sunlight through pale blue space. Andreas began to whistle.
How handsome he was, after all, how dashing, in his velvet tunic and plumed cap, with his sword in its ornate scabbard swinging at his side. He had carried intact into manhood the frail
heart-breaking beauty of his youth. Nicolas touched him tenderly on the arm.
    “I am interested in these things, you see,” he said, “that is all.”
    He had done his brother no wrong that he could think of, yet he seemed to be apologising; it was a familiar phenomenon.
    “You are interested—of course you are,” Andreas answered. “But I imagine you are not entirely unmindful either that our dear uncle is watching our progress closely,
eh?”
    Nicolas nodded gloomily. “So: you think I am trying by being zealous to outflank you in his favour.”
    “What else should I think? You did not want me to come with you today.”
    “You were not invited!”
    “Pah. You must understand, brother, that I know you, I know how you plot and scheme behind my back. I do not hate you for it, no—I only despise you.”
    “Andreas.”
    But Andreas had begun to whistle again, merrily.
    *
    Professor Brudzewski lived in a big old house in the shadow of St Mary’s. The brothers were shown into the hall and left to wait, ringed round by oppressive pillars of
silence stretching up past the gallery to the high ceiling

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