Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus (or Coepernicus) (1473 – 1543 CE) was a Polish polymath who was, incidentally, an astronomer. Coepernicus took up an idea originally by Aristarchus and Nicholas of Cusa [1] Nicholas of Cusa suggested that the Earth and the sun are in motion and that the universe is infinite but had no specific theory of how the bodies move. [2] The mathematics was as complex as that of Ptolemy but the Copernican system needed fewer assumptions. It assumed only the earth orbiting the sun and the earth rotating with its axis tilted. These assumptions could explain the observed movement of the sun, moon and other planets. [1]
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[edit] De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
His book De Revolutionibus proposed a heliocentric model of the universe, in which the Earth orbited the sun (rather than the other way around, as had been assumed since the time of the ancient Greeks). One of his main motivations in doing so was to eliminate two niggling geometric weirdnesses that reared their ugly heads in Ptolemy's earth-centered model: epicycles, and equants. Epicycles were "circles within circles" that planets followed, i.e. spiral paths, which explained their retrograde motion across the sky at certain times of the year. Equants were "fake centers", points about which the planet acted as though it were in uniform circular motion, even though the center of its circular motion was somewhere else. Copernicus managed to eliminate equants using his sun-centered model, but couldn't manage to lose the epicycles -- in fact, in some places, he had to resort to epicycles within epicycles, something even Ptolemy never needed.
Although his book only provoked mild controversy (he feared putting a bug up the Roman Catholic Church's ass by suggesting that the Earth was not the center of the universe) and promoting heliocentrism, he was so concerned about how it would affect the Church that he delayed publication. Rumour has it that a copy of his finally published work was put in his hands on his death bed. Sixty years later it was banned as part of the "Galileo affair". However, astronomers and navigators were quick to adopt the Prutenic Tables based upon his work because, whether blasphemy or not, they worked better than the existing tables.[3] And that's how science works!
[edit] Trivia
In the past couple years, Copernicus has given his name to element 112, now called "copernicium".
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Copernicus, Nicholaus (1473-1543)
- ↑ Nicholas of Cusa and the Infinite
- ↑ Well, actually, Copernicus's tables were only more accurate than the earlier Ptolemeic tables in certain places, and were actually less accurate in others. It was Kepler who really blew the doors off the whole planetary-position-prediction thing, using elliptical orbits.