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• Born: 19 February 1473
• Birthplace: Torun, Poland
• Died: 24 May 1543
• Best Known As: Astronomer known for figuring out that the sun is the center of our solar system

Name at birth: Niclas Kopernik

Nicolas Copernicus was born into a well-to-do family, and after his father died in 1483 he was put under the guardianship of his uncle, a bishop of Warmia (Poland). He went to university in Krakow and spent a decade in Italy, studying law and mathematics. A canon of the cathedral at Frombork, Copernicus carried out administrative duties and, from his house, observed the stars and planets. For years he worked on his theory that the planets in our solar system revolved around the sun (Ptolemy of ancient Greece had explained that the universe was a closed system revolving around the earth, and the Catholic church concurred). Hesitant to publish his work for fear of being charged with heresy, Copernicus summarized it in 1530 and circulated it among Europe's scholars, where it was greeted with enthusiasm. His work, titled De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was finally published in 1543, apparently just a few weeks before he died.

Because Copernicus' heliocentric theory of the planets defied 1,500 years of tradition, some historians mark the publication date of De revolutionibus as the beginning of the "scientific revolution."... It wasn't until 1835 that his work was taken off the list of books banned by the Vatican... Another scientist who got in trouble for believing that the earth moved around the sun: Galileo Galilei.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Library of Congress

[b. Toruñ, Poland, February 19, 1473, d. Frombork, Poland, May 24, 1543]

Copernicus was a scholarly church canon who succeeded in convincing almost all later astronomers that Earth rotates on an axis and revolves about the Sun. Aristarchus, an early Greek, had proposed similar ideas, but few accepted them. The ideas expressed by Copernicus were not exactly what we believe today -- for example, Copernicus used circles moving on circles to make his system work. Elliptical orbits were not recognized as possible until a century later.

The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was the founder of the heliocentric ordering of the planets.

Nicolaus Copernicus was born on Feb. 19, 1473, in Torun about 100 miles south of Danzig. He belonged to a family of merchants. His uncle, the bishop and ruler of Ermland, was the person to whom Copernicus owed his education, career, and security.

Copernicus studied at the University of Cracow from 1491 to 1494. While he did not attend any classes in astronomy, it was during his student years there that Copernicus began to collect books on astronomy and mathematics. Some of these contain marginal notes by him dating back to that period, but it remains conjectural whether Copernicus had already made at that time a systematic study of the heliocentric theory.

Copernicus returned to Torun in 1494, and in 1496, through the efforts of his uncle, he became a canon at Frauenburg, remaining in that office for the remainder of his life. Almost immediately Copernicus set out for Bologna to study canon law. In Bologna, Copernicus came under the influence of Domenico Maria de Novara, an astronomer known for his admiration of Pythagorean lore. There Copernicus also recorded some planetary positions, and he did the same in Rome, where he spent the Jubilee Year of 1500.

In 1501 there followed a brief visit at home. His first official act as canon there was to apply for permission to spend 3 more years in Italy, which was granted him on his promise that he would study medicine. Copernicus settled in Padua, but later he moved to the University of Ferrara, where he obtained in 1503 the degree of doctor in canon law. Only then did he take up the study of medicine in Padua, prolonging his leave of absence until 1506.

Upon returning to Ermland, Copernicus stayed in his uncle's castle at Heilsberg as his personal physician and secretary. During that time he translated from Greek into Latin the 85 poems of Theophylactus Simacotta, the 7th-century Byzantine poet. The work, printed in Cracow in 1509, evidenced Copernicus's humanistic leanings. At this time Copernicus was also mulling over the problems of astronomy, and the heliocentric system in particular. The system is outlined in a short manuscript known as the Commentariolus, or small commentary, which he completed about 1512. Copies of it circulated among his friends eager to know the "Sketch of Hypotheses Made by Nicolaus Copernicus on the Heavenly Motions," as Copernicus referred to his work. In it, right at the outset, there was a list of seven axioms, all of which stated a feature specific to the heliocentric system. The third stated in particular: "All the spheres revolve about the sun as their midpoint, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe." The rest of the work was devoted to the elaboration of the proposition that in the new system only 34 circles were needed to explain the motion of planets.

The Commentariolus produced no reaction, either in print or in letters, but Copernicus's fame began to spread. Two years later he received an invitation to be present as an astronomer at the Lateran Council, which had as one of its aims the reform of the calendar; he did not attend. His secretiveness only seemed to further his reputation. In 1522 the secretary to the King of Poland asked Copernicus to pass an opinion on De motu octavae spherae (On the Motion of the Eighth Sphere), just published by Johann Werner, a mathematician of some repute. This time he granted the request in the form of a letter in which he took a rather low opinion of Werner's work. More important was the concluding remark of the letter, in which Copernicus stated that he intended to set forth elsewhere his own opinion about the motion of the sphere of stars. He referred to the extensive study of which parts and drafts were already very likely extant at that time.

Copernicus could pursue his study only in his spare time. As a canon, he was involved in various affairs, including legal and medical, but especially administrative and financial matters. In fact, he composed a booklet in 1522 on the remedies of inflation, which then largely meant the preservation of the same amount of gold and silver in coins. For all his failure to publish anything in astronomy, to have his manuscript studies circulate, or to communicate with other astronomers, more and more was rumored about his theory, still on the basis of the Commentariolus.

Not all the comments were flattering. Luther denounced Copernicus as "the fool who will turn the whole science of astronomy upside down." In 1531 a satirical play was produced about him in Elbing, Prussia, by a local schoolmaster. In Rome things went better, for the time being at least. In 1533 John Widmanstad, a papal secretary, lectured on Copernicus's theory before Pope Clement VII and several cardinals. Widmanstad's hand was behind the letter which Cardinal Schönberg sent in 1536 from Rome to Copernicus, urging him to publish his thoughts, or at least to share them with him.

It was a futile request. Probably nobody knew exactly how far Copernicus had progressed with his work until Georg Joachim (Rheticus), a young scholar from Wittenberg, arrived in Frauenburg in the spring of 1539. When he returned to Wittenberg, he had already printed an account, known as the Narratio prima, of Copernicus's almost ready book. Rheticus was also instrumental in securing the printing of Copernicus's book in Nuremberg, although the final supervision remained in the care of Andrew Osiander, a Lutheran clergyman. He might have been the one who gave the work its title, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which is not found in the manuscript. But Osiander certainly had written the anonymous preface, in which Copernicus's ideas were claimed to be meant by their author as mere hypotheses, or convenient mathematical formalism, that had nothing to do with the physical reality.

The printed copy of his work, in six books, reached Copernicus only a few hours before his death on May 24, 1543. The physics of Copernicus was still Aristotelian and could not, of course, cope with the twofold motion attributed to the earth. But Copernicus could have done a better job as an observer. He added only 27 observations, an exceedingly meager amount, to the data he took over un-critically from Ptolemy and from more recent astronomical tables. The accuracy of predicting celestial phenomena on the basis of his system did not exceed the accuracy achieved by Ptolemy. Nor could Copernicus provide proof for the phases of Mercury and Venus that had to occur if his theory was true. The telescope was still more than half a century away. Again, Copernicus could only say that the stars were immensely far away to explain the absence of stellar parallax due to the orbital motion of the earth. Here, the observational evidence was not forthcoming for another 300 years. Also, while Ptolemy actually used only 40 epicycles, their total number in Copernicus's system was 84, hardly a convincing proof of its greater simplicity.

Still, the undeniable strength of Copernicus's work lay in its appeal to simplicity. The rotation of the earth made unnecessary the daily revolution of thousands of stars. The orbital motion of the earth fitted perfectly with its period of 365 days into the sequence set by the periods of other planets. Most importantly, the heliocentric ordering of planets eliminated the need to think of the retrograde motion of the planets as a physical reality. In the tenth chapter of the first book Copernicus made the straightforward statement: "In the center rests the sun. For who would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple in another or better place than this wherefrom it can illuminate everything at the same time."

The thousand copies of the first edition of the book did not sell out, and the work was reprinted only three times prior to the 20th century. No "great book" of Western intellectual history circulated less widely and was read by fewer people than Copernicus's Revolutions. Still, it not only instructed man about the revolution of the planets but also brought about a revolution in human thought by serving as the cornerstone of modern astronomy.

Further Reading

A popular modern account of Copernicus's life is A. Armitage, The World of Copernicus (1947). In Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (1957), Copernicus's theory is discussed in the framework of the process leading from ancient to modern science through the medieval and Renaissance centuries. For a rigorous discussion of Copernicus's theory the standard modern work is A. Koyré, The Astronomical Revolution: Copernicus, Kepler, Borelli (1969).

For more information on Nicolaus Copernicus, visit Britannica.com.

Copernicus, Nicolaus (1473-1543) Polish astronomer. The first developed heliocentric theory of the universe in the modern era was presented in De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, published in the year of Copernicus's death. The system is entirely mathematical, in the sense of predicting the observed position of celestial bodies on the basis of an underlying geometry, without exploring the mechanics of celestial motion. Its mathematical and scientific superiority over the Ptolemaic system was not as direct as popular history suggests: Copernicus's system adhered to circular planetary motion, and let the planets run on 48 epicycles and eccentrics. It was not until the work of Kepler and Galileo that the system became markedly simpler than Ptolemaic astronomy.

(kōpûr'nĭkəs) , Pol. Mikotaj Kopérnik, 1473–1543, Polish astronomer. After studying astronomy at the Univ. of Kraków, he spent a number of years in Italy studying various subjects, including medicine and canon law. He lectured c.1500 in Rome on mathematics and astronomy; in 1512 he settled in Frauenburg, East Prussia, where he had been nominated canon of the cathedral. There he performed his canonical duties and also practiced medicine. But the work that immortalized him is De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in which he set forth his beliefs concerning the universe, known as the Copernican system. That treatise, which was dedicated to Pope Paul III, was probably completed by 1530 but was not published until 1543, when Copernicus was on his deathbed. Modern astronomy was built upon the foundation of the Copernican system.

Bibliography

See his complete works (3 vol., 1973, 1978, 1985, ed. and tr. by E. Rosen); studies by E. Rosen (1984, 1995).

Copernicus, Nicolaus (1473–1543), Polish astronomer, born in Thorn (Torun), West Prussia, a province subject to the king of Poland. In about 1485, after his father's death, Nicolaus came under the care and patronage of his maternal uncle, who shortly afterward became bishop of Varmia (Ermland).

Education and Career

Beginning in 1491, Copernicus enrolled successively at the universities of Cracow, Bologna, and Padua, where he studied, respectively, mathematics and astronomy, canon and civil law, and medicine. He was elected a canon of the cathedral chapter of Varmia in 1497, providing him with a lifetime income. In 1503 he was awarded a doctorate in canon law from the University of Ferrara.

In 1610 Copernicus settled in Frauenburg (Frombork), near the Baltic Sea. There he carried out his canonical duties, practiced medicine, administered the holdings of the Varmia chapter, wrote on the problem of the debasement of the silver coinage of Royal Prussia, and continued to work intensively at improving the astronomical ideas he had begun to develop earlier.

As a student, Copernicus had become aware of the dichotomy between Aristotelian principles and the techniques employed by Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100–c. 170), the greatest astronomer of antiquity. For Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) the motionless Earth at the center of the universe was surrounded by uniformly rotating homocentric spheres carrying the Moon, Sun, and planets. The task of astronomy was to devise geometrical means for calculating the apparent positions of the celestial bodies, which neither moved uniformly nor maintained a constant distance from Earth. The planets, moreover, periodically moved with retrograde motion.

Some time after 1502, Copernicus circulated among a few individuals an anonymous treatise, subsequently titled Commentariolus (Brief commentary), an early stage in the development of his heliocentric system. He shortly afterward began De revolutionibus (On the revolutions), his detailed exposition of this system.

In 1539 Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574) of the University of Wittenberg visited Copernicus. Impressed by Copernicus's theory, Rheticus tested the waters for the publication of Copernicus's almost completed work by publishing in 1540 his own account of it, Narratio prima (First account). Its reception encouraged Copernicus to publish his own work, a copy of which reached Copernicus as he lay dying in 1543.

Andreas Osiander (1498–1552), a Lutheran minister, oversaw the printing of the latter part of Copernicus's book and inserted an anonymous preface asserting, contrary to Copernicus's opinion, that the work represented only calculating devices and not the true constitution of the universe.

The Copernican System

Copernicus's heliocentrism possessed several advantages over Ptolemaic astronomy. The apparent retrograde motions of the planets could now be accounted for by the revolution of Earth, dispensing with Ptolemaic astronomy's traditional geometric devices. Copernicus eliminated the Ptolemaic equant, a point not at the center of Earth about which the planets moved uniformly, and substituted a technique earlier used by a Muslim astronomer. Corrections to the apparent distances of the Moon also had Arabic roots. The relative distances of the planets from the Sun could now be determined as fractions or multiples of the distance from Earth to the Sun. Above all, Copernicus had created an integrated astronomical system, contrary to the independent sets of geometrical techniques for each of the planets characteristic of Ptolemaic astronomy. This was undoubtedly the prime consideration for the creation of his system.

Despite its advantages, heliocentrism was not without physical, observational, and theological problems. A revolving and rotating Earth violated several long-established Aristotelian principles, including the tendency of dropped bodies to fall to Earth at the center of the universe. Copernicus held that bodies fell because they tended to rejoin the spherical bodies of which they had been a part. For the Peripatetics, objects on a rotating Earth would be flung off, and objects thrown aloft should then land to the west of the point from which they were thrown. Copernicus responded that bodies on Earth or above it share in its circular motion. To the charge that observations made from an orbiting Earth should show stellar parallax, a change in the apparent position of the stars in the course of a year, Copernicus answered that a parallax could not be observed because the stars were much farther than had been believed.

Reception and Influence

In 1551 Erasmus Reinhold (1511–1553) published the Tabulae Prutenicae (Prutenic Tables) based on Copernicus's work. They were more accurate than the tables commonly in use, and they helped sustain interest in the Copernican theory. In particular, astronomers at the University of Wittenberg thought the Copernican theory was superior to that of Ptolemy in a number of respects, but they did not accept its heliocentrism. Throughout Europe a few astronomers were open to the validity of Copernicanism's fundamental hypothesis, but hardly any accepted it fully.

However, successive challenges to Aristotelian concepts, based on precise observations, began to remove some objections to Copernicanism. Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), whose astronomical observations were more accurate than any previously recorded, rejected heliocentrism, as did a few others, in favor of a geoheliocentric system, in which the planets circled the Sun, while the Sun revolved about the motionless Earth. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), using Brahe's data, modified Copernicus's system significantly in 1609. Kepler placed the Sun in one of the foci of each of his elliptical planetary orbits, which were traversed with non-uniform motion. This led to a significant improvement in the prediction of planetary positions.

Galileo Galilei's (1564–1642) observations with the telescope beginning in 1609, as well as his subsequent publications on the nature of motion, were most important in the removal of Aristotelian objections to a moving Earth and to the size of the solar system. The placing of Copernicus's De revolutionibus on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1616 and Galileo's subsequent trial for heresy had little effect. With the work of Kepler and Galileo, as well as the influence of Cartesianism, heliocentrism became increasingly accepted; most astronomers were won over by the middle of the seventeenth century.

Copernicanism marked a turning point in the history of astronomy and provided a foundation for the remarkable achievements in related sciences in the seventeenth century. Copernicus's heliocentrism played a significant role in debates about the cause of planetary motion, and the nature of space, matter, and motion, and was thus a significant component of and stimulus to the scientific revolution.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Copernicus, Nicolaus. Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Translated by A. M. Duncan. Newton Abbot and New York, 1976. Translation of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, 1543.

——. Three Copernican Treatises: The Commentariolus of Copernicus, The Letter against Werner, The Narratio Prima of Rheticus. Translated with an introduction by Edward Rosen. 3rd rev. ed. New York, 1971.

Secondary Sources

Armitage, Angus. Copernicus: The Founder of Modern Astronomy. New York and London, 1957. A general survey in the context of the history of astronomy.

North, John. "Copernicus' Planetary Theory." In The Norton History of Astronomy and Cosmology. Chapter 11. New York and London, 1995. A brief survey for the general reader.

Swerdlow, Noel M., and Otto Neugebauer. Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus's De Revolutionibus. 2 parts. Berlin and New York, 1984. Has a substantial nontechnical introduction, including biographical details and the development of Copernicus's ideas.

—WILBUR APPLEBAUM

(1473-1543)

Nicolaus Copernicus, whose astrological calculations are generally credited with breaking the hold of the geocentric perspective of the universe on Western thought, was born on February 19, 1473, in Torun (or Thorn), Poland. His father, a wealthy merchant, provided Nicolaus an education at the University of Krakow, where he received a broad education in the sciences, and the University of Bologna, where he studied for five years (1496-1501), in the liberal arts. It was still an era in which one could largely master the whole body of scientific knowledge.

Copernicus' father also arranged for his son's appointment as a church canon, and upon his return from Italy, he settled in at the Cathedral at Frombork (Frauenberg), where he lived quietly for the rest of his life. Though attending to a wide range of duties, and despite having no telescope (as yet to be invented), over a period of years Copernicus observed the heavens and kept careful records of his observations. He gave thought to a problem that had long haunted astronomy. As the planets moved across the heavens, at times they appeared to move backward (or retrograde). This backward motion was a major offense to any understanding of the divine perfection of the heavens. To solve this problem, Copernicus proposed the idea that the Sun was the center of the solar system, and the Earth, like the other planets, circled it. While not a totally new idea, he backed his idea with his data. His idea had appeal in that it preserved, for the time being, the movement of the heavenly bodies in their perfection. It met opposition in its moving the Earth from the center of creation.

Although Copernicus published his theories as early as 1514, in a manuscript privately circulated to a few friends, his final work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres), was not released until the end of his life (he did not live to see published copies). He had turned the manuscript of his book over to his astrologer friend, Joachim Rheticus, to publish. The real impact of Copernicus' work would come decades later as Johann Kepler, Galileo, and Isaac Newton built on it and made plain some of the implications of humanity's not living at the center of the universe.

As Copernicus' heliocentric view became widely known, it became a major challenge to astrology, an art based on Ptolomy's geocentric views. Attempts to create a heliocentric astrology emerged as Europe gave up an Earth-centered view of the world over the next two centuries, but most astrologers remained hostile to such a change. They argued that since astrology concerned the life of earthlings, the relation of the heaven-ly bodies to Earth remained the key item in their art. After all, even Copernicus did not give up astrology and like most people with some astronomical expertise, cast horoscopes. The move to a heliocentric astronomy did not require a change to a heliocentric astrology. Some new heliocentric astrologies have been proposed in the last generation, partly as an anticipation of future human life on other planets, but they have yet to be seriously considered by most astrologers.

Sources:

Khun, Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astrology in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957.

Kitson, Annabella, ed. History and Astrology: Clio and Urania Confer. London: Mandala, 1989.

Rosen, Edward. Copernicus and His Successors. Hambleton Press, 1995.

(kuh-pur-ni-kuhs)

A Polish cleric and scholar of the sixteenth century. In 1543, Copernicus produced the first workable model of the sun and planets that had the sun at the center. (See Galileo, Ptolemaic universe, and solar system.)

(kuh-pur-ni-kuhs)

A Polish scholar of the sixteenth century who argued that the Earth moves about the sun.