Owen Gingerich

When his family relocated, Owen Gingerich began attending Goshen College although having only completed his junior year of high school.

Among them was propelling himself out of the classroom using a fire extinguisher to demonstrate Newton’s third law of motion, and dressing up like a sixteenth-century Latin scholar.

The eventual definition adopted by the IAU added an additional requirement, that a body must have cleared its neighborhood of all other sizable objects, language that Gingerich was “not at all pleased” with.

[9] In 1959, in chapter II of The Sleepwalkers, titled "The System of Copernicus", Arthur Koestler wrote that: "The book that nobody read – the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres – was and is an all-time worst-seller."

After reading in the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh a thoroughly annotated copy previously owned by Erasmus Reinhold,[10] a prominent sixteenth-century German astronomer who worked in University of Wittenberg shortly after Copernicus' death, Gingerich was inspired to check Koestler's claim and to research who had owned and studied the book's first two editions, published in 1543 and 1566 in Nuremberg and Basel respectively.

Due largely to Gingerich’s work, De revolutionibus has been researched and catalogued better than any other first-edition historical text except for the original Gutenberg Bible.

In one of these, Intelligent design, he asserted “immense incomprehension from both the friends and foes.” On the one hand, he said that it is unfortunate that there seems to be a knee-jerk reaction among its critics that I.D.

But I have trouble with Intelligent Design – uppercase ‘I’ and ‘D’ – a movement widely seen as anti-evolutionist.” He indicated that teleological arguments, such as the apparent fine tuning of the universe, can count as evidence, but not proof, for the existence of God.

He said that “a common-sense and satisfying interpretation of our world suggests the designing hand of a superintelligence.”[13] Accepting the common descent of species, Gingerich was a theistic evolutionist.

[14]Gingerich’s beliefs had sometimes resulted in criticism from young earth creationists, who dissent from the view that the universe is billions of years old.

Gingerich had responded, in part, by saying that “the great tapestry of science is woven together with the question ‘how?’” while the biblical account and faith “addresses entirely different questions: not the how, but the motivations of the ‘Who’.”[1] At Harvard, Gingerich taught “The Astronomical Perspective,” a core science course for non-scientists, which at the time of his retirement in 2000 was the longest-running course under the same management (with David Latham) at the University.

A notable example was when in one semester, when the number of students signing up for the course lagged, Gingerich hired a plane to fly over Harvard Yard with a banner: "Sci A-17.

[17] He was awarded the Prix Jules Janssen of the Société astronomique de France (French Astronomical Society) in 2006.