Stories by Owen Gingerich

Aided by his wildly erroneous conception of the earth's circumference, Columbus redrew the globe, perhaps encouraging others to realign the heavens

While astronomy withered in medieval Europe it flourished in Islam. Renaissance astronomers learned from the texts of Islamic scholars who had preserved and transformed the science of the ancient Greeks

In arguing that the earth circles the sun Galileo adopted a mode of reasoning that led not only to his prosecution by the church but also to the new scientific methodology of hypothesis testing

In which the author, exploring who read Copernicus' book at the time of its appearance, discovers Tycho's personal copy of it. Tycho's notes show how he evolved his non-Copernican model of the solar system

Pluto, our sun's most remote and mysterious planet, may once a satellite of Neptune. Current theories about its origin provide new clues to the genesis of the solar system