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COPERNICAN What is Copernican? - Relating to or characteristic of the astronomical theories of Nicolaus Copernicus. Who is Nicolaus Copernicus? The life of Copernicus began in 1473 in a city called Torun in Northern Poland. • was a Polish astronomer who put forth the theory that the Sun is at rest near the centre of the Universe, and that the Earth, revolves annually around the Sun. This is called the heliocentric, or Sun-centered, system. • Nicolaus Copernicus was a mathematician and astronomer during a time of artistic and scientific innovation called the Renaissance. EDUCATION • During the mid 1480’s, Copernicus father passed away. His maternal uncle, Bishop of Varmia Lucas Watzenrode, generously assumed a paternal role, taking upon himself to ensure that Copernicus received the best possible education. • In 1491, Copernicus entered the university of Cracow, where he studied painting and mathematics. COPERNICUS THEORY Scholars believed that by around 1508, Copernicus had begun developing his own celestial model, a heliocentric planetary system. • Deviating from Aristotle’s idea that celestial bodies moved in a fixed circular motion around the earth. • Heliocentric system a cosmological model in which the sun is assumed to lie at or near a central point while earth and other bodies revolve around it. Copernicus had two main reasons for asserting that the sun was the center of our solar system. • While the Ptolemaic model was very good at predicting the positions of the planets, it wasn't precise, and over the centuries its predictions got worse and worse. • Copernicus didn't like the fact that the Ptolemaic model had big epicycles to explain the retrograde motions of the planets. He knew that this could be explained instead by having the Earth also moving around the Sun. CONTRIBUTION The publication of Copernicus' model in his b o o k D e revolutionbus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his event in the history of s c i e n c e , t r i g g e r i n g t h e Copernican Revolution and making an important contribution to the Scientific Revolution. C

The contributions of Nicolas Copernicus to astronomy were huge. Just like the other mathematicians like Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus also contributed a lot on the development of the modern astronomy. • He changed his philosophy astronomically and religiously. It was because the Roman Catholic teachings depend from the belief that the Universe is Earth centered. It was also in contradiction with the theory that Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer, argued about. DEATH  I n M a y o f 1 5 4 3 , mathematician and scholar Georg Joachim Rheticus presented Copernicus with a copy of a newly published “de revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Suffering the aftermath of a recent stroke, Copernicus was said to have been clutching the book when he died in his bed on May 24, 1543in from bork, Poland Those things which I am saying now may be obscure, yet they will be made clearer in their proper place. - NICOLAUS COPERNICUS...