Rare Books in the History of Scientific Discovery

Eureka! There's a new exhibit at Johns Hopkins highlighting some true bookish treasures.

From a piece in the Washington Post...

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.