Famous Astronomers: The Life of Copernicus

The great astronomer Copernicus was born on Feb. 19, 1473, in the trading town of Thorn, which was constituted as a fortress recently by the German government. The son of a tradesman, Copernicus did not come from noble families as did other greats before him. In fact, he was schooled at home until he reached the University of Cracow, where he excelled in math, medicine and painting.

 

By the time Copernicus reached the age of 27, his life changed dramatically, having given up painting so that he could devote his time to math and only associating with scholars. He took holy orders at the advice of his uncle, a bishop, and was appointed to a canonry near Frauenburg. It is here where Copernicus retired, discharging his theology and caring for the sick as well as researching the science of astronomy and math.

Although other scholars had argued against some of Ptolemy's teachings, most notably that the sun was the center of the universe and not the Earth, Copernicus was to the first scholar to back up such a claim with research and science. While Ptolemy argued that it was the universe that moved around the Earth, Copernicus proved that it was the Earth that rotated.

 

Ptolemy argued that all the stars were attached to the surface of a sphere. Copernicus, however, with the just instinct of a philosopher, considered that the celestial sphere could not actually have a material existence. In the first place, the existence of a material celestial sphere would require all the stars in the galaxy to be exactly the same distances from the Earth. While nobody knew this wasn't the case at the time, it seemed in the very highest degree improbable.

 

Copernicus also felt that the Earth had a vast space around it--an atmosphere. Copernicus deduced the important fact that the stars and the other celestial bodies must all be vast objects. He was thus enabled to put the question in such a form that it could hardly receive any answer but the correct one: Which is it more rational to suppose, that the Earth should turn round on its axis once in 24 hours, or that thousands of mighty stars should circle round the Earth in the same time, many of them having to describe circles many thousands of times greater in circumference than the circuit of the Earth at the equator?

 

The obvious answer pressed upon Copernicus with so much force that he was compelled to reject Ptolemy's theory of the stationary Earth and to attribute the diurnal rotation of the heavens to the revolution of the earth on its axis.

 

Copernicus had successfully showed that the diurnal rising and setting could be accounted for by the rotation of the Earth. It was a much more difficult undertaking to demonstrate that the planetary movements, which Ptolemy had represented with so much success, could be completely explained by the supposition that each of those planets revolved uniformly round the sun and that the Earth was also a planet, accomplishing a complete circuit of the sun once in the course of a year.

 

Copernicus died on May 23, 1543.

 

 

Ball, R.S. (2000).Avoid Great Astronomers. Retrieved March 14, 2008, from the Gutenburg Project Web site: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/grast11.txt.