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Everyone has experienced that situation where we crack a great joke and not many people hear, and then someone else repeats it louder, and everyone else is dying of laughter… except you. It stings when you are not given credit for your own thoughts and actions and then someone else steals them and makes them their own. Among some of the most famous astronomers during the sixteenth century, sit names like Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Tycho Brahe, however, the most prominent and influential of the era was the Polish, Nicolaus Copernicus. As astronomy progressed and developed from the very early years of discovery to, later on, sparking the Scientific Revolution, there were many ideas, concepts, and proposals set forth. Copernicus wrote the ‘De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium,” which inspired other astronomers of his time to continue his work and build further upon it, he was very accurate in his calculations, he ventured out to challenge the Church and society, and is thus considered the founder of modern-day astronomy and the scientific revolution as his countless plans and approaches to astronomy still hold true to today; the twenty-first century.
Most notable was Copernicus’ publication of the manuscript De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’) in 1543 at the age of 70. In this manuscript, Copernicus ascertained and verified that indeed the other planets orbited the Sun rather than the Earth. He arranged his model of the solar system and the pathway of each planet. James Evans put it best when he affirms, “Until the invention of the telescope and the discovery of the laws of motion and gravity in the 17th century, astronomy was primarily concerned with noting and predicting the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets, initially for calendrical and astrological purposes and later for navigational applications and scientific interest.” (Evans) The influence of this discovery that the earth was not the center of the universe, but rather the sun (heliocentric) was so profound that the new wave of astronomy that followed his conclusion was named the Copernican Revolution. His book also stated that the Earth has more than one motion, turning on its axis and moving in a circular orbit around the sun. As well as describing the stars as fixed, yet appear to move because of the Earth’s motion (Salaman Khan). Copernicus was not the first to suggest heliocentrism, as Aristarchus of Samos, a Greek astronomer who lived in the 200s BCE, theorized that Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun. (Biography.com Editors) Nevertheless, the key aspect is the term “theorized,” as Copernicus was the one to actually prove his thoughts with an accurate model and details to support it. As such, Copernicus’ writing is considered to be one of the foundational manuscripts of modern astronomy.
Copernicus is also arguably the most influential astronomer of the Scientific Revolution as he took the first step forward in going against the Church’s pedagogy. In a way, he showed the ropes to Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo by publishing his manuscript on his deathbed. The motivation and rationale for doing so was because the Church during the Renaissance was too overpowering, and literally burned, tortured, and seized people’s properties who went against their teachings. By putting his models and experiments into print he was able to defy the Church’s wrong studies of the time, that the universe must revolve around humans, therefore the Earth at its center. Most people of the Renaissance believed “Passages in the Bible implied that the earth does not move, the Bible is the word of God, and the penalty for disagreeing with God is death.” (Doc) At the beginning of the 17th centenary, the Catholic Church was in crisis. The Protestant Reformation was making its way all across Europe. Thus, the Church was suffering the loss of entire realms at a time. Accordingly, in Copernicus deciding to issue the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, for the Church it was almost as if the universe was collapsing. The Church sought to eradicate this concept by any means. However, despite their most vigorous efforts, heliocentrism continued to grow and gain popularity. As a Catholic, Copernicus had a good relationship with the Church, yet went against the geocentric doctrine, thus spurring other Catholic and Protestant astronomers like Brahe and Kepler, and Galileo to persist in the exploration of ideas never encountered before.
As well, Copernicus was respected and well-educated for his time compared to the other astronomers of the Scientific Revolution. Tycho Brahe literally died because he refused to relieve himself at a lavish aristocratic party. Even the brightest souls sometimes make unreasonable decisions, but Copernicus was not one of them. “Nicolaus Copernicus fulfilled the Renaissance ideal. He became a mathematician, an astronomer, a church jurist with a doctorate in law, a physician, a translator, an artist, a Catholic cleric, a governor, a diplomat, and an economist. He spoke German, Polish, and Latin, and understood Greek and Italian.” (Salman Khan)
Copernicus proved himself once again to be the most significant astronomer of the 16th and 17th centuries, as he inspired and spurred new insights from other astronomers of the scientific revolution and beyond. “Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was a good example of those who admired Copernicus’s achievement in tying all the motions of the planets closer to the Sun but who were unable to accept the motion of Earth” (Friedlander). Brahe, a fellow cosmologist made new observations based upon Copernicus’ previous ones assembled data, concluding that all the known planets except the Earth circled the sun, thus the whole system circled the Earth. Being Brahe’s assistant, Kepler was in search of mathematical regularity in the universe. He put forth 3 laws of planetary motion; “The planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus; The time necessary to traverse any arc of a planetary orbit is proportional to the area of the sector between the central body and that arc (the “area law”), and there is an exact relationship between the squares of the planets’ periodic times and the cubes of the radii of their orbits known as the “harmonic law.” (Brit) “Galileo Galilei was the first person to look at the heavens with a telescope, and Galileo wasn’t born until Copernicus had been dead for over 20 years.”
This leads to another aspect of Copernicus’ results that are regarded so highly influential, making him the most prominent astronomer of his era. Copernicus reacted to those who criticized him declaring, “There may be babblers, wholly ignorant of mathematics, who dare to condemn my hypothesis, upon the authority of some part of the Bible twisted to suit their purpose. I value them not, and scorn their unfounded judgment.” He based his resolutions on anything he could truly observe for himself, eschewing assumptions, opinions, and theories formulated and then handed down as facts without concise evidence. In contrast to Kepler, Galileo, and Brahe, Copernicus was very accurate in his calculations, models, and figures. Tycho Brahe was given a whole Island where he hired others to build more advanced astronomical instruments and carry out certain observations. Thus everything that is credited to him is still dubious. “Brahe’s ideas about his data were not always correct,” as his investigations were slightly flawed.
Repeatedly Copernicus established himself to be the basis of modern astronomy and further findings and innovations unveiled during the Scientific Revolution. It just goes to show how influential and significant his calculations and explorations of space were to modern science as there is even a periodic element named after him. It is called Copernicium, being the 112th element out of only 118. A prominent statue of the astronomer simply called the Nicolaus Copernicus Monument, stands near the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. There are also copies and similar models of this monument outside Chicago’s Adler Planetarium and Montreal’s Planétarium Rio Tinto Alcan. As well, Copernicus has a museum and research laboratory; Warsaw’s Copernicus Science Centre is solely devoted to him.
Although Copernicus’ concepts and designs took almost a hundred years to gain credence, fellow astronomers including Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Tycho Brahe, affirmed that the Earth indeed orbited the sun. In this sense, Copernicus demonstrated his ability and influence on the other astronomers of the Scientific Revolution. He provided a framework for others’ discoveries of the near future, allowing them to develop upon the ideas and formulate new ones, cementing the Copernican Revolution. Copernicus is seen to be set apart from the other astronomers in the sense of his dedication as he played a vital role in paving the way in the paradigm transformation to what astronomers are able to achieve nowadays.
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