A cathedral canon of Frombork whose De revolutionibus (1543) set the Earth spinning daily and circling the Sun yearly, and fixed the order and relative distances of the planets. He also wrote memoranda on reforming the Prussian coinage.
Perhaps there will be babblers who claim to be judges of astronomy although completely ignorant of the subject and, badly distorting some passage of Scripture to their purpose, will dare to find fault with my undertaking and censure it. I disregard them even to the extent of despising their criticism as unfounded. ... Astronomy is written for astronomers.
—— Copernicus, De revolutionibus, dedication to Pope Paul III (Nuremberg, 1543), trans. Edward Rosen (1978); the last sentence renders "Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur"
History
Copernicus was born in 1473 in Toruń, in Royal Prussia. His uncle Lucas Watzenrode, Bishop of Warmia, secured him a canonry at Frombork cathedral. He studied at Kraków from 1491 and in Italy from 1496 to 1503, reading canon law at Bologna and medicine at Padua, and took a doctorate in canon law at Ferrara. For the rest of his life he managed chapter estates, practised medicine and handled local politics in Warmia; astronomy was done in the margins. Before 1514 he circulated a short manuscript, the Commentariolus, which set the Earth spinning daily and circling the Sun yearly. Among his stated reasons was Ptolemy's equant, which made planets move uniformly about a point other than the centre of their circles, breaking the ancient rule of uniform circular motion. Between 1517 and 1526 he drafted memoranda on the Prussian coinage, observing that debased coin drives good coin out of circulation. In 1539 the young Wittenberg professor Georg Joachim Rheticus came to study with him, published a First Account (Narratio prima) in 1540 and pressed for the full book. De revolutionibus was printed by Johannes Petreius at Nuremberg in 1543. The Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander, who saw it through the press, added an unsigned preface saying that its hypotheses need not be true, only convenient for calculation. Copernicus died on 24 May 1543; his friend Tiedemann Giese wrote that he saw the finished book only on his last day.
Connections
Consequences1
- HeliocentrismcontributedOn the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543)
Sources
- Nicholas Copernicus, trans. Edward Rosen, On the Revolutions (translation and commentary) (1978)
- N. M. Swerdlow and O. Neugebauer, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus's De Revolutionibus (1984)
- Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (2004)
- F. Jamil Ragep, Copernicus and His Islamic Predecessors: Some Historical Remarks (History of Science 45) (2007)
Open questionswell attested
- The Commentariolus can only be dated to some time before 1514.
- Whether Copernicus inherited the Maragha school's results or reached them independently is unresolved.
- The story that Copernicus saw a printed copy of his book only on his deathbed comes solely from a letter by Tiedemann Giese.
- Accounts differ on the dates and order of the drafts of his treatise on money (1517, 1519, 1522, c. 1526).
Why it matters
The mathematics of De revolutionibus was still Ptolemaic, circles riding on circles, and its predictions were not markedly better than the old tables. Its force lay in coherence. Once the Earth joined the planets, retrograde loops became an effect of our own motion, and the order of the planets and their distances relative to the Sun could be worked out from observation, where geocentric astronomy had to assume them. Readers took what they needed: at Wittenberg Erasmus Reinhold built the Prutenic Tables (1551) on Copernicus's models while declining to believe that the Earth moves, and by 1600 only a handful of astronomers defended its motion as physical fact. Several of his geometrical devices closely resemble the Tusi couple and Ibn al-Shatir's lunar model from the Maragha tradition; some historians infer a line of transmission, others an independent rediscovery, and the route remains unproven.