"Who said simplicity was simple?" Nobody, I guess. But that's not even a question in William T. Vollman's contribution to the Great Discoveries series, Uncentering the Earth. No, we never get to simplicity: all we prove is that difficulty is difficult. Vollman tries, with occasional bursts of humor (often at the expense of those silly, misguided scholars who believed the Earth went around the Sun), but he gets bogged down trying to describe a science that really is "slightly beyond [his] intellectual competence." Vollman is a genius, by the way; what turns out to be slightly beyond him is greatly beyond us, even more so considering that his presentation that of a muddled middleman:
"In this sad little tract of mine--incomplete crib of an unreadable, error-ridden soliloquy addressed to a future which is author might have fled--I cannot hope to do justice to many of Copernicus's mathematical narratives; nor do I want to."Normally, I'd agree, but the emphasis of this series has been on communicating these big ideas--even those that are flawed versions that Newton and Kepler have changed. Furthermore, Vollman continues to insist that foraging through these texts, accurate or not, is important because of how they have shaped the world, paved the road, &c. It follows that while he is unable to do Copernicus justice, the historical coverage springs to life (or at least a semblance of lucidness). For all these disclaimers (and they are plentiful), for all this playful self-deprecation, Vollman's essay on astrology turns into Revolutions itself: "in thought-explorations which resemble the squat walls and heavy windings of Cracow's streets--and in prose of incomparable dreariness."
He's right to say that "this essay of mine cannot do much better": he is bogged down by trying to give a layperson-like description of how the universe itself works. His all too brief commentaries on the difficult circumnavigating of religious concerns also seems a bit trite considering that, in the end, Copernicus cheats prosecution by dying shortly after publication. Points are made, and then remade, and then made again, because Vollman understands the philosophical and contextual ramifications, not the astrology. And we are constantly reminded, for lack of mathematical explanations, that Copernicus "[o]ften, without sufficient data, or even for utterly wrong reasons . . . turns out to be completely right."
There are some good sections where Vollman strays from Copernican history, runs from Aristotle and Ptolemy, and hides from solar mathematics: these interludes are edifying breathers that cover physics and scripture instead. They're also--like David Foster Wallace's previous book in this pop-science series, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity--understandable. But these are just breaks, explanations of the tangentials that allow us to delve back into the density of terms like "precession" and "parallax." Granted, this is not my school of study, but I feel exhausted from all the re-reading I've done, and in need of some great Rosetta stone, the likes of which can only be found in a talented professor's gentle rephrasing.
Still, when Vollman manages to stand back and draw philosophical conclusions, we see the glimmer of hope in this tortured volume: "The more we peer into the pre-Copernican universe, the more harmonies we find. It is both our gain and our loss that those now seem ludicrous." Those card tricks that used to dazzle us as children: the question is not how did we ever fall for them, but why can't we still be amazed? This sums up to another sad truth: "Observation slowly overcomes intuition." For all the work of our gut, it turns out to be wrong quite a bit. That, unfortunately, is true for this book as well. My gut wanted Vollman to make a miracle out of a muddle, but observation has proved that there are some topics--astrology among them--that are better left to the stars.
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