Glad 550th birthday, Nicolaus Copernicus!
Renaissance astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Torun, Poland, 550 years in the past right now. At a time when deeply entrenched beliefs positioned the Earth on the middle of the universe – nested inside crystal spheres – he proposed the revolutionary concept that Earth revolves across the sun. Are you able to image the leap of creativeness required for him to conceive of a sun-centered universe?
Copernicus’ well-known e book – “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium” (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) – was revealed simply earlier than his demise in 1543. It set the stage for all of recent astronomy.
At present, folks communicate of his work because the Copernican Revolution.
Historical Greek views of the universe
Copernicus wasn’t the primary to conceive of a sun-centered universe. Early Greek and Mesopotamian philosophers additionally spoke of it.
It was the Greek thinker Aristotle, nonetheless, who proposed that the heavens comprised 55 concentric, crystalline spheres. He stated that celestial objects connected to those spheres.
In Aristotle’s mannequin, Earth lay on the middle of those spheres.
Nicolaus Copernicus broke the ‘crystal spheres’
So, Earth lay – mounted and enclosed – till Copernicus revealed his model of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe. Copernicus’s concepts and ground-shaking e book moved the Earth and changed it with the sun.
Read more: Copernicus’ revolution and Galileo’s vision, in pictures.
Backside line: At present is the 550th birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus, who eliminated Earth from the middle of the universe and set off a revolution.
