Talk:Erasmus Reinhold

Gingerich
Of this article's six paragraphs, two had very little to do with the subject. I have removed them. They were copied from the article about Owen Gingrich.

Arthur Koestler in 1959 wrote in "The Sleepwalkers"'s chapter "II THE SYSTEM OF COPERNICUS" about De revolutionibus orbium coelestium: "The Book that Nobody Read - the Book of the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was and is an all-time worst-seller." After finding in the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh a thoroughly annotated copy previously owned by Erasmus Reinhold, Owen Gingerich was inspired to check Koestler' claim and 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. 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.

Gingerich in 1973 also documented "The Role of Erasmus Reinhold and the Prutenic Tables in the Dissemination of the Copernican Theory".

That Owen Gingrich received Communist Poland's Order of Merit - 23 years before publishing his book - does not belong in an article about Erasmus Reinhold. One also wonders about Reinhold's role in spreading the Copernican Theory, as the article points out that he altered Copernicus' data to promote the older geocentric view. Finally, that, as is mentioned here, it took over two decades for Copernicus' book to see its first reprint, only underscores what Koestler stated in the first place, that the book had a miserable sales history. None of this has anything to do with Erasmus Reinhold.

I have, of course, left in the reference to Gingrich's book and the link to his Wikipedia page. B00P (talk) 05:48, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Melanchthon
I have removed a counter-factual statement from the article.

Reinhold was a member of the Melanchthon Circle, a group of Lutheran mathematicians associated with Melanchthon who were generally friendly to Copernican astronomy.

To state that "Lutheran mathemeticians associated with Melanchthon ... were generally friendly to Copernican astronomy" is pure rubbish. Not only does the article point out that Reinhold modified Copernicus' data to fit the old geocentric system, Melanchthon, himself, in his textbook Doctrines of Physics (1549), attempted to refute the Copernican system.

B00P (talk) 05:49, 3 April 2008 (UTC)