Owen Gingerich, astronomer who saw God in the cosmos, dies at age 93

Owen Gingerich, a well-known astronomer who was deeply interested in the history of his field – so much so that for years he tried to track down every first and second edition of Nicolaus Copernicus’s revolutionary treatise – and who was not shy about crediting God for a role in creating the cosmos he loved to study, died May 28 in Belmont, Massachusetts. He was 93.

His son Jonathan confirmed the death.

Professor Gingerich, who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and taught at Harvard for many years, was a lively teacher and writer. During his decades of teaching astronomy and history of science, he would sometimes dress up as a 16th-century Latin-speaking scholar for his classroom presentations, or convey a point of physics with a memorable demonstration; For example, The Boston Globe recounted in 2004 that he “routinely shot himself out of the room with the power of a fire extinguisher to prove one of Newton’s laws.”

He was nothing but enthusiastic about the sciences, especially astronomy. One year at Harvard, when his signature “The Astronomical Perspective” course wasn’t filling up as quickly as he would have liked, he rented a plane to fly a banner over campus that read, “Sci A-17. M, W, F. Try it!

Professor Gingerich’s stubbornness was fully manifested in his long search for copies of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri Sex (“Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”), first published in 1543, the year Copernicus died.

That book set forth the proposition that the Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than the other way around, a major challenge to scientific knowledge and religious belief at the time. The writer Arthur Koestler had claimed in 1959 that the Copernicus book had not been read in its time, and Professor Gingerich set out to find out whether that was true.

In 1970 he accidentally came across a copy of “The Revolutionbus” that was heavily annotated in the library of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, suggesting that at least one person had read it carefully. A quest was born.

Thirty years and hundreds of thousands of miles later, Professor Gingerich had examined some 600 Renaissance-era copies of “De Revolutionibus” around the world and developed a detailed picture not only of how thoroughly the work was read in his time, but also of how the word of his theories spread and evolved. He documented all this in “The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus” (2004).

John Noble Wilford, reviewing it in The New York Times, called “The Book Nobody Read” “a fascinating tale of a scholar as sleuth.”

“His enthusiasm for what could be considered a rather fine point of history is contagious,” added Mr. Wilford. “His book deserves to be read, not just by historians and bibliophiles, but by anyone with a penchant for arcane detective adventures and curious about the motivations of scientific perseverance.”

In 2006, Professor Gingerich found himself at the center of a Plutonian storm when he was chosen to lead an International Astronomical Union committee to recommend whether Pluto should remain a planet, a perennial issue in astronomy that continues to fester. Its panel recommended it should, but the full membership rejected that idea and instead made Pluto one “dwarf planet.” That decision left Professor Gingerich somewhat dismayed.

“I consider this a linguistic catastrophe,” he told The Guardian at the time.

Professor Gingerich was raised Mennonite and attended Goshen College, a Mennonite institution in Indiana, where he studied chemistry but thought of astronomy when, he later recalled, a professor there gave him crucial advice: “If you feel a calling to study astronomy to pursue, you have to go for it. We can’t let the atheists take over a field.”

He followed the advice, and throughout his career he often wrote or spoke about his belief that religion and science need not be at odds. He explored this theme in the books “God’s Universe” (2006) and “God’s Planet” (2014).

He was not a biblical literalist; he was of no use to those who ignored science and proclaimed the biblical creation story a historical fact. Yet, as he put it in “God’s Universe”, he was “personally convinced that a super-intelligent Creator exists outside and within the cosmos”.

Margaret Wertheim, reviewing that book in The Los Angeles Times, called it “bright and poetic.”

“In this age of sectarian warfare, when theists and atheists engage in increasingly hostile rudeness,” she wrote, “Gingerich elegantly expresses why he finds the universe a source of encouragement to his life, both as a scientist and as an like a Christian. We don’t have to agree with his conclusions to be supported and enchanted by the journey he takes us on.”

Owen Jay Gingerich was born on March 24, 1930 in the city of Washington in southeastern Iowa. His father, Melvin, was a high school history teacher who later became a college professor, and his mother, Verna (Roth) Gingerich, was a homemaker. Both were active in the Baptist church.

In an oral history recorded for the American Institute of Physics in 2005, Dr. Gingerich remembers that when he was about 9, his father brought home a book with instructions on how to make a telescope, which they then did using a mail tube and lenses that his father obtained from the local optician. The eyepiece was a dime-shop magnifying glass.

That gadget, Professor Gingerich said, worked well enough that “I could easily see Saturn’s rings, and so it was probably slightly better than Galileo’s telescope.”

At Goshen College, where he graduated in 1951, he became interested in journalism and edited both the yearbook and college newspaper. He also got a summer job at the Harvard College Observatory and applied to Harvard for graduate school, initially hoping to become a science journalist.

He received his master’s degree from Harvard in 1953 and his Ph.D. there in 1962. He began teaching there soon after and retired in 2000.

Professor Gingerich married Miriam Sensenig in 1954. She survives him, along with his son Jonathan and two other sons, Peter and Mark; three grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

Professor Gingerich, who was senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian astrophysical observatory, wrote numerous articles about his career in addition to his books. In an article for Science and Technology News in 2005, he talked about the gap between theories of atheistic evolution and theistic evolution.

“Frankly, it’s beyond science to prove the case one way or another,” He wrote. “Science will not collapse if some practitioners are convinced that there has been occasional creative input in the long chain of being.”