One sultry Iowa evening in the 1930s, Owen Gingerich’s mother brought him outside to cool off under the stars, an experience that set him on the road to his life’s work.
“On a summer night when I was 5, the temperature in the house at sunset still stood at over a hundred degrees, so my mother took cots outside for sleeping,” he recounted in 2005 during his William Belden Noble Lectures at Harvard Memorial Church, which he published the following year in the book “God’s Universe.”
“I looked up at the darkening sky and asked, ‘Mommy, what are those?’ To which she replied, ‘Those are stars — you’ve often seen them!’ I am reported to have responded, ‘But I never knew they stayed out all night!’ ”
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Their exchange, Dr. Gingerich wrote, “was the beginning of my love affair with the stars.”
A professor emeritus at Harvard University and senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, he died May 28 in Belmont. Dr. Gingerich, whose health had been failing, was 93 and had lived in Cambridge.
Along with his academic achievements in astronomy, Dr. Gingerich explored the delicate, fractious relationship between science and religion.
In writings and lectures, Dr. Gingerich looked “for a kind of middle road between two fundamental extremes,” he told National Public Radio after “God’s Universe” was published.
“You can have fundamentalist scientists who are so absolutely sure they understand it all and who are hard-core atheists,” he said. “And you can have fundamentalists on the religious side who are prepared to take a literalist reading of the Scriptures that has not been borne out historically. And it was for these people who are open-minded and willing to think about these questions, not from an extreme viewpoint, that I’ve written my book for.”
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The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, who died in 2011 and had been the minister at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, wrote in the foreword to “God’s Universe” that listening to Dr. Gingerich “as a man of faith and of science makes it possible to realize that those two great ways of thinking need not necessarily be pitched at odds with one another, unless one side is greedy, jealous, or uninformed about the other.”
As a scientist raised in a Mennonite family and a professor with a doctorate from Harvard, Dr. Gingerich took a modified view of intelligent design, which holds that the complexity of living organisms can’t be explained by evolution, and must be the work of a higher power.
“I believe in intelligent design, lower case ‘i’ and ‘d,’ " he said in an NPR interview in 2005. “I do have a problem with Intelligent Design capital ‘I’ and capital ‘D’ because it’s being sold as a political movement, as if somehow it’s an alternative to Darwinian evolution.”
There is a way, he said, to learn from science and religion, though doing so means breaking free of absolute beliefs.
“I suppose we’re all affected by the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the picture of God creating Adam, and I feel we have to work very hard to eliminate that kind of picture because it’s very misleading,” he told NPR.
“When we talk about the concept of God, it is such an infinity it’s not really possible for us to wrap ourselves around it and come to terms with precisely what we mean,” he said. “It’s not a father figure sitting up there with the big ‘on’ button and pushing it and the big bang happens.”
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During his college years, Dr. Gingerich aspired to be a science journalist.
“Owen was a walking astronomy encyclopedia and a prolific writer of books, invited conference papers, and articles for professional journals,” wrote Sky and Telescope magazine in a tribute.
At times, Dr. Gingerich took an investigative approach in his writings, such as when he rejected the writer Arthur Koestler’s suggestion that one of the greatest works of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus went largely unread hundreds of years ago.
“De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri Sex” — or “Six Books on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” — was published in 1543, the year Copernicus died. Challenging the theory that the sun and stars revolved around the Earth, Copernicus said the Earth circled the sun.
To prove Koestler wrong, Dr. Gingerich tracked down 276 copies of the first edition of Copernicus’s book and 325 of the second. Handwritten notes in the margins by eminent thinkers and scientists of the era proved that the book was widely read and influential in its era, Dr. Gingerich said.
“As in most good adventure stories, the rewards are in the pursuit itself. We learn how knowledge spread ever so slowly in a pivotal age,” wrote John Noble Wilford in a New York Times 2004 review of Dr. Gingerich’s book “The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus.”
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Dr. Gingerich’s book, Wilford said, “deserves to be read not only by historians and bibliophiles, but by anyone with a taste for arcane detective adventures and a curiosity about the motivations of scholarly perseverance.”
Born on March 24, 1930, Owen Jay Gingerich grew up in Iowa, Kansas, and Indiana, a son of Verna Roth Gingerich and Melvin Gingerich, who taught history in high school and college.
“We were a religious family,” Dr. Gingerich wrote. “My father’s four great-grandfathers were all Amish ministers.”
His father helped Owen build a telescope to further his study of the stars and planets. When Melvin began teaching at Goshen College in Indiana, Owen skipped his final year of high school and became a student there, studying chemistry and graduating in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree.
A summer job at the Harvard College Observatory led him to apply as a graduate student. He graduated from Harvard with a master’s degree and a doctorate.
In 1954, Dr. Gingerich married Miriam Sensenig, a nurse he met when they were Goshen College students.
After teaching at American University of Beirut to fulfill his conscientious objector obligation, and a subsequent teaching stint at Wellesley College, Dr. Gingerich was hired by Harvard and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, where he worked until retiring in 2000.
In retirement, he chaired an International Astronomical Union committee considering the fate of Pluto. The full organization decided to demote Pluto, changing its designation to “dwarf planet,” a term he called “a curious linguistic contradiction.”
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“A dwarf planet is not a planet,” he told space.com in 2006. “I thought that was very awkward.”
Dr. Gingerich’s research and personal interests brought him to many countries. He filled his home with “books and art pieces and artifacts from his travels,” said his son Jonathan of Somerville.
A service will be announced for Dr. Gingerich, who in addition to his wife and son Jonathan leaves two other sons, Peter of Manhattan, N.Y., and Mark of Columbus, Ohio; three grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
In embracing science and faith, Dr. Gingerich believed that some questions would never be answered.
When Dr. Gingerich was 17, his younger brother was fatally struck by a car while he was riding a bicycle and delivering newspapers. Years later, in one of his final diary entries, his father wrote that he still couldn’t understand why God had let the boy die.
“Ours is a world of love and ecstatic joy, but also a world of suffering and excruciating pain,” Dr. Gingerich wrote. “It is not a world of all or none, but a dappled world, where chance and randomness join with choice and inexorable law. Why creation is this way is perhaps the most unanswerable question of all.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.