Solid objects would be ripped from the surface, a ball dropped from a great height would not strike the ground directly below it, and so forth. One of the objections raised to the heliocentric theory was that if Earth were moving, we would all sense or feel this motion. His ideas, although not widely accepted until more than a century after his death, were much discussed among scholars and, ultimately, had a profound influence on the course of world history. But he did not assume (as most people did) that Earth had to be in the centre of the universe, and he presented a defence of the heliocentric system that was elegant and persuasive. He began with several assumptions that were common in his time, such as the idea that the motions of the heavenly bodies must be made up of combinations of uniform circular motions.
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Copernicus wanted to develop an improved theory from which to calculate planetary positions, but in doing so, he was himself not free of all traditional prejudices. By this time, the old Ptolemaic system needed significant adjustments to predict the positions of the planets correctly. (credit: Nicolai Copernici)Ĭopernicus described his ideas in detail in his book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium ( On the Revolution of Celestial Orbs), published in 1543, the year of his death. Notice the word Sol for “Sun” in the middle. This system was published in the first edition of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. Copernicus developed a heliocentric plan of the solar system. Only the Moon orbits Earth as shown in Figure 2.Ĭopernicus’ System. Copernicus concluded that Earth is a planet and that all the planets circle the Sun. His great contribution to science was a critical reappraisal of the existing theories of planetary motion and the development of a new Sun-centered, or heliocentric, model of the solar system. His training was in law and medicine, but his main interests were astronomy and mathematics. Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Torun, a mercantile town along the Vistula River. One of the most important events of the Renaissance was the displacement of Earth from the center of the universe, an intellectual revolution initiated by a Polish cleric in the sixteenth century. Although he could not prove that Earth revolves about the Sun, he presented such compelling arguments for this idea that he turned the tide of cosmological thought and laid the foundations upon which Galileo and Kepler so effectively built in the following century. Copernicus was a cleric and scientist who played a leading role in the emergence of modern science. This time of rebirth (in French, “ renaissance”) in astronomy was embodied in the work of Copernicus who is illustrated Figure 1. Many of the names of the brightest stars, for example, are today taken from the Arabic, as are such astronomical terms as “zenith.”Īs European culture began to emerge from its long, dark age, trading with Arab countries led to a rediscovery of ancient texts such as Almagest and to a reawakening of interest in astronomical questions. The birth and expansion of Islam after the seventh century led to a flowering of Arabic and Jewish cultures that preserved, translated, and added to many of the astronomical ideas of the Greeks.
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