Copernicus

Copernicus

Nicholas Copernicus is considered to be the founder of modern astronomy. He was born in Poland in 1473. After his childhood dreams of astronomy, he was sent off to Krakow University to study mathematics and optics. Later, returning from studying religious law in Italy, Copernicus, through the influence of his uncle, was appointed cannon in the Cathedral of Frauenberg. In the next few years, Copernicus continued his studies of astronomy alone in his church. He made most of his observations from a turret situated on a protective wall around the cathedral. In 1530, after more than thirty years of intense study, Copernicus completed his great work, “De Revolutionibus”, which presented the theory that the earth rotated on its axis and made one complete revolution daily, and, at the same time, traveled around the sun once yearly.
There is a common misconception that the Copernican model did away with the need for epicycles. This is not true, because Copernicus was able to rid himself of the long-held notion that the Earth was the center of the Solar system, but he did not question the assumption of uniform circular motion. Thus, in the Copernican model the Sun was at the center, but the planets still executed uniform circular motion about it. As we shall see later, the orbits of the planets are not circles, they are actually ellipses. As a consequence, the Copernican model, with it assumption of uniform circular motion, still could not explain all the details of planetary motion on the celestial sphere without epicycles. The difference was that the Copernican system required many fewer epicycles than the Ptolemaic system because it moved the Sun to the center.
This was a fantastic concept for the sixteenth century! All great thinkers of that age believed that the earth was the center of the universe, and heavenly bodies revolved around our planet. Copernicus died in 1543, His life had been a sheltered and academic one. He never knew what controversy his work had...

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