In the middle of the 16th century a Catholic, Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, synthesized observational data to formulate a comprehensive, Sun-centered cosmology, launching modern astronomy and setting off a scientific revolution.
Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in Thorn (modern day Torun) in Poland. His father was a merchant and local official. When Copernicus was 10 his father died, and his uncle, a priest, ensured that Copernicus received a good education. In 1491, he went to Krakow Academy, now the Jagiellonian University, and in 1496 travelled to Italy to study law. While a student at the University of Bologna he stayed with a mathematics professor, Domenico Maria de Novara, who encouraged Copernicus’ interests in geography and astronomy.
During his time in Italy, Copernicus visited Rome and studied at the universities of Padua and Ferrara, before returning to Poland in 1503. For the next seven years he worked as a private secretary to his uncle, now the bishop of Ermland.
The bishop died in 1512 and Copernicus moved to Frauenberg, where he had long held a position as a canon, an administrative appointment in the church. This gave him more time to devote to astronomy. Although he did not seek fame, it is clear that he was by now well known as an astronomer. In 1514, the Catholic church was improving the calendar, and the pope appealed was Copernicus.
Copernicus’ major work ‘De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium’ (‘On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres’) was finished by 1530. Its central theory was that the Earth rotates daily on its axis and revolves yearly around the sun. He also argued that the planets circled the Sun. This challenged the long held view that the Earth was stationary at the centre of the universe with all the planets and the Sun around it.
Legend has it that Copernicus, in a sickbed when his great work was published, awoke from a stroke-induced coma to look at the first copy of his book when it was brought to him. He was able to see and appreciate his accomplishment, and then closed his eyes and died peacefully, on May 24, 1543. Thus he avoided both scorn and praise.
Copernicus was thought to be buried in the cathedral at Frombork, but no marker existed. Some of his bones were finally identified there, with a DNA match from a strand of his hair found in a book owned by him, and in 2010 he was given a new burial in the same spot, now marked with a black granite tombstone.
The Roman Catholic Church waited seven decades to take any action against On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. Why it waited so long has been the subject of much debate. In 1616 the Church issued a decree suspending On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres until it could be corrected and prohibiting any work that defended the movement of Earth. A correction appeared in 1620, and in 1633 Galileo Galilei was convicted of grave suspicion of heresy for following Copernicus’s position.
Scholars did not generally accept the heliocentric view until Isaac Newton, in 1687, formulated the Law of Universal Gravitation. This law explained how gravity would cause the planets to orbit the much more massive Sun and why the small moons around Jupiter and Earth orbited their home planets.
Copernicus’s model asked people to give up thinking that they lived in the center of the Universe. For him the thought of the Sun illuminating all of the planets as they rotated around it had a sense of great beauty and simplicity
SOURCE: B.B.C., Kahn Academy
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