Earle Havens walks up to a three-tier glass case and pauses reverently.
“Here we bow,” says the 39-year-old, raising his arms above his head to signify his unworthiness.
(Will Kirk) - A hand-colored plate of the Copernican heliocentric system of the sun and planets in Atlast Coelestis by Johann Doppelmayr (Nuremberg, 1742).
(WILL KIRK) - The Eureka! collection has copies of offprints of journal articles by Albert Einstein between 1901 and 1906.
Behind the crystal-clear panes before him are books. It’s only on leaning in for a closer look that Havens’s spontaneous adulation makes sense. The works are centuries old — published in 1687 and 1722 — and remain in terrific condition. Then there are the titles: a first edition of “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” and “Traite d’Optique.”
Written by Isaac Newton.
These early tomes by the father of calculus laid the groundwork for the law of gravitation and explained that light is composed of separate colors. Even a scientifically obtuse former English major can’t help but share his awe.
Nearby, an iron-nickel meteorite — on loan from Johns Hopkins’s physics and astronomy department — sits on a cushion between a 1752 publication of Edmond Halley’s “Astronomical Tables . . . for Computing the Places of the Sun, Moon, Planets, and Comets” and 18th-century illustrations of equipment Benjamin Franklin used in his quest to discover the properties of electricity.
“There are books in this room of which there are only a dozen copies that survived in the world,” says Havens, curator of rare books and manuscripts at Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries, as he gestures to the 55 pieces on display in one room.
Hopkins’s George Peabody Library — a rare-books collection within the university’s Sheridan Libraries — is debuting “Eureka! Rare Books in the History of Scientific Discovery,” a collection of more than 300 works bequeathed to the university last fall, after the November 2009 death of Hopkins alumnus Elliott Hinkes, a Los Angeles oncologist and rare-book collector.
These artifacts are quite impressive in themselves. Yet what makes them all the more intriguing is their collective illustration of pivotal moments in scientific history: discoveries that forever altered our perspective of the world.
“It reminds us that we all stand on the shoulders of giants,” says Matt Mountain, director of Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute, paraphrasing a quote by Newton. “Every discovery we make relies on testing and validation and circulation of ideas.”
There’s the 1566 unbound pages of Nicolaus Copernicus’s “De Revolutionbus Orbium Colestium” (“On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”), in which the Polish astronomer posited that the sun, not Earth, was the center of the solar system. A few steps away, there’s a 1613 study on sunspots by Galileo. Across the room is a 1953 article by Cambridge biologists James Watson and Francis Crick that discusses DNA’s double-helix structure.
As a small joke, Havens placed early journal printings of rival physicists Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein in the same case.
The scope of the exhibit is so momentous it’s easy to get caught up in the sweep of successive discoveries without thinking of the man who made such an experience possible.
That would be a mistake.
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