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For other uses, see The Copernican Revolution (disambiguation).
Copernican Revolution
1543–
class-skin-invert-image
Galileo before the Holy Office, a 19th-century painting by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury
LocationEarly Modern Europe
Leader(s)Proponents: Nicolaus Copernicus, Thomas Digges, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, John Wilkins, Pierre Gassendi, Isaac Newton
Opponents: Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Tommaso Caccini, Pope Paul V, Cardinal Bellarmine, Pope Urban VIII, Vincenzo Maculani, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Pope Alexander VII
Key events

Copernican Revolution is a phrase with different meanings in different contexts. In astronomy, the phrase refers to the transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism. For Christianity and Western culture, it may instead refer to the dismantling of the human-centric medieval cosmology and its cultural consequences. In physical cosmology, the phrase may be used to refer to the emergence and formalization of the Copernican principle that humans are not privileged observers of the universe. Within the philosophy of science, the Copernican Revolution is the first historic example of a paradigm shift in science. Finally, the phrase is sometimes used by English speakers as a metaphor for any radical intellectual upheaval that fundamentally reorders or reshapes our understanding of the world.

The Copernican Revolution is named for the Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who in the 16th century proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Driven by a desire [citation needed] for a more perfect (i.e. circular) description of the cosmos than the prevailing Ptolemaic model - which posited that the Sun circled a stationary Earth - Copernicus instead advanced a heliostatic model where a stationary Sun was located near, though not precisely at, the center of the heavens.

Heliocentrism

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Main articles: Heliocentrism and Copernican heliocentrism

Almagest

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Main articles: Ptolemaic model and Almagest
16th-century representation of Ptolemy's geocentric model in Peter Apian's Cosmographia, 1524

The idea of heliocentrism - a Sun-centered Universe - can be traced back to Aristarchus of Samos, a Hellenistic author writing in the 3rd century BC, who may in turn have been drawing on even older concepts in Pythagoreanism. Ancient heliocentrism was, however, eclipsed by the geocentric model presented by Ptolemy in the Almagest[1] (c. AD 150) and accepted in Aristotelianism.

European scholars were well aware of the problems with Ptolemaic astronomy by the 13th century. The debate was precipitated by the reception of Averroes's criticism of Ptolemy and it was revived by the recovery of Ptolemy's text and its translation into Latin in the mid-15th century.[a] The mathematician and science historian Otto E. Neugebauer argues that the debate in 15th-century Latin scholarship must also have been influenced by the criticism of Ptolemy that was produced, after Averroes, in the Ilkhanid-era (13th to 14th centuries) Persian school of astronomy associated with the Maragheh observatory (especially the works of Al-Urdi, Al-Tusi and Ibn al-Shatir).[3]

Copernicus learned about Ptolemy's model when he was a university student through Theoricae novae planetarum[4] by Georg von Peuerbach, compiled from lecture notes by Peuerbach's student Regiomontanus and printed in 1472.[5] Regiomontanus himself was the teacher of Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara, who was in turn the teacher of Copernicus.

Purging the Equant

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Main article: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
Motion of the Sun (yellow), Earth (blue), and Mars (red). At left, Copernicus's heliocentric motion. At right, traditional geocentric motion, including the retrograde motion of Mars. For simplicity, Mars's period of revolution is depicted as 2 years instead of 1.88, and orbits are depicted as perfectly circular or epitrochoid.

Copernicus studied at Bologna University during 1496–1501, where he became the assistant of Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara. He is known to have studied the Epitome in Almagestum Ptolemei by Peuerbach and Regiomontanus (printed in Venice in 1496) and to have performed observations of lunar motions on 9 March 1497. In De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, published in 1543, Copernicus attempted to align his work as closely as possible with Ptolemaic tradition. A comparison of his work with the Almagest shows that he followed Ptolemy's methods[6] and even his order of presentation.[7] Yet, in order to purge astronomy of the equant - which violated the philosophical ideal that all celestial motion must be perfect and uniform[8] - Copernicus challenged Ptolemy’s geocentrism, an orthodoxy that had prevailed for over a millennium. Copernicus' heliostatic model (with a stationary Sun located near, though not precisely at, the mathematical center of the heavens[9][10][11]) retained several false Ptolemaic assumptions such as the planets' circular orbits, epicycles, and uniform speeds,[12] but also included accurate ideas such as:

  • The Earth is one of several planets revolving around the Sun in a determined order.
  • The Earth rotates daily on its axis and revolves annually about the Sun.[13]
  • Retrograde motion of the planets is explained by the Earth's motion.
  • The distance from the Earth to the Sun is small compared to the distance from the Sun to the stars.

In The Sleepwalkers, the author and journalist Arthur Koestler writes that De revolutionibus orbium coelestium "was and is an all-time worst-seller."[14] Discovering a first edition of De revolutionibus that had been extensively annotated by the leading teacher of astronomy in Europe in the 1540s - which seemed to contradict Koestler - the astronomer and science historian Owen Gingerich spent three decades tracking down and personally examining all existing first and second editions of Copernicus' major work. He not only established that De revolutionibus was widely read by 16th century astronomers but also what they thought of it:

Reinhold and his many followers admired Copernicus for a quite different aesthetic idea, the elimination of the equant. Copernicus devoted the great majority of De revolutionibus to showing how this could be done. While he had eliminated all of Ptolemy's major epicycles, merging them all into the Earth's orbit, he then introduced a series of little epicycles to replace the equant, one per planet. Because this made the motion uniform in each Copernican circle, the anti-equant aesthetic was satisfied. My Copernican census eventually helped to establish that the majority of sixteenth-century astronomers thought eliminating the equant was Copernicus' big achievement, because it satisfied the ancient aesthetic principle that eternal celestial motions should be uniform and circular or compounded of uniform and circular parts.[15]

Copernicus' challenge reached 16th-century astronomers but failed to displace the dominance of Ptolemy's geocentrism, which only fell out of favor among astronomers after Galileo's telescopic observations of 1610.[16] But Copernicanism did gain a handful of supporters in the 16th century. Thomas Digges[17] and Giordano Bruno[18] used Copernicus' new estimate of the distance to the stars to argue for an indefinitely extended or even infinite universe in opposition to the ancient orthodoxy of celestial spheres. William Gilbert also argued (correctly) that Copernicus was right about the Earth rotating on its axis (instead of an outer "shell" of rotating stars) while also arguing (incorrectly) that the mechanism of the Earth's rotation is magnetism.[19]

The science historians A. Rupert Hall,[20] Herbert Butterfield,[21] Arthur Koestler[22], Otto Neugebauer[23] and David Wootton[24] all emphasize that, from a strictly scientific point-of-view, Copernicus' work should not be considered revolutionary.

Protestant Attacks

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Further information: Nicolaus Copernicus § Protestant attacks on the Copernican system

Copernicus was a canon, a lifelong official of the Catholic Church. Even before his death in 1543 and during the following 70 years (until 1610), his model faced withering criticism from Protestant leaders who were locked in combat with the Church, were often animated by a fierce anti-clericalism and typically adopted a literalist approach to Scripture. Protestant leaders Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon both attacked Copernicus. Luther famously cited the Book of Joshua to prove the sun moves and reportedly called Copernicus a "fool."[25] His colleague Melanchthon urged governments to repress the "absurd" theory.[26] Meanwhile, the Catholic Church indirectly used Copernican mathematics in its reform of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 and otherwise, until 1610, remained officially silent on either the merits or demerits of Copernicanism.[27][28]

Telescope

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Main articles: Astronomy § Early telescopic, and Galileo Galilei § Phases of Venus
In 1610 Galileo Galilei observed with his telescope that Venus showed phases, despite remaining near the Sun in Earth's sky (first image), which was strong evidence that the geocentric model (second image) was false.[29][16]

Galileo Galilei, sometimes referred to as the "father of modern observational astronomy,"[30] developed his own telescope with enough magnification to allow him to study Venus and discover that it has phases like a moon. His improvements to the telescope, astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism were all integral to the Copernican Revolution.

Based on the designs of spectacle-maker Hans Lippershey, Galileo designed his own telescope which, in the following year, he had improved to 30× magnification.[31] Using this new instrument, Galileo made a number of astronomical observations which he published in the Sidereus Nuncius in 1610. In this book, he described the surface of the Moon as rough, uneven, and imperfect. He also noted that "the boundary dividing the bright from the dark part does not form a uniformly oval line, as would happen in a perfectly spherical solid, but is marked by an uneven, rough, and very sinuous line, as the figure shows."[32] These observations challenged Aristotle's claim that the Moon was a perfect sphere and the larger idea that the heavens were perfect and unchanging.

Galileo's next astronomical discovery would prove to be a surprising one. While observing Jupiter over the course of several days, he noticed four stars close to Jupiter whose positions were changing in a way that would be impossible if they were fixed stars. After much observation, he concluded these four stars were orbiting the planet Jupiter and were in fact moons, not stars.[33] This was a radical discovery because, according to Aristotelian cosmology, all heavenly bodies revolve around the Earth and a planet with moons obviously contradicted that popular belief.[34] While contradicting Aristotelian belief, it supported Copernican cosmology which stated that Earth is a planet like all others.[35]

In 1610, Galileo observed that Venus had a full set of phases, similar to the phases of the moon we can observe from Earth. This was explainable by the Copernican or Tychonic systems which said that all phases of Venus would be visible due to the nature of its orbit around the Sun, unlike the Ptolemaic system which stated only some of Venus's phases would be visible. Due to Galileo's observations of Venus, Ptolemy's system became highly suspect[36] and the majority of leading astronomers subsequently converted to various heliocentric models,[16] making his discovery one of the most influential in the transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism.[37]

Trials of Galileo

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Main article: Galileo affair
Cristiano Banti's 1857 painting Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition

Galileo's Letters on Sunspots, published in 1613, defended the view that sunspots are features of the Sun's surface but also reported his 1610 telescopic observations of the full set of phases of Venus. In his 1615 Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, Galileo argued that the language of the Bible had been accommodated to be understandable to uneducated people and should therefore not be interpreted as literal scientific descriptions and the Catholic Church risked reputational damage in the long run if it officially condemned heliocentrism.[38][39]

Galileo received staunch support from a Carmelite friar, Paolo Antonio Foscarini, who published a book defending Galileo's work and presenting it as compatible with the Bible,[40] but also bitter opposition from some philosophers and clerics, two of whom denounced him to the Roman Inquisition early in 1615, warning "that Galileo should not go outside mathematics and physics and should avoid provoking theologians by teaching them how to read the Bible".[41] The Dominican friar and preacher Tommaso Caccini both issued a complaint to the Inquisition and also attacked Galileo in sermons, ordering him to withdraw from philosophy and citing Acts 1:11: "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?".[42]

The report of the Inquisition's consultants declared heliocentrism as "false and contrary to Scripture" in February 1616.[43][44] The Church demanded Galileo stop teaching and defending Copernican theory, to which Galileo agreed. In March, the Church's Congregation of the Index issued a decree suspending De revolutionibus until it could be "corrected."[45] The edits to De revolutionibus, which omitted or altered nine sentences, were issued four years later, in 1620.[46]

A second trial in 1633 led to Galileo's house arrest and a ban on his books.[47]

Profane universe

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God, depicted as the Great Architect of the Universe, creating the Universe using geometric and harmonic principles. Many Christians have believed that to seek to understand these principles was to seek and worship God. c. 1250

"In its extrascientific consequences," writes historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, "the Copernican theory is not typical: few scientific theories have played such a large role in non-scientific thought."[48] The Copernican Revolution began as a narrowly technical revision of classical astronomy[49] but ended by altering the West's relation to both the Universe and God. By reimagining the Earth not as the unique and focal center of God’s creation and attention[50] but instead as just an unremarkable planet, circulating purposelessly around an ordinary star, no different from an uncountable number of others, the Revolution became an enormous cultural upheaval that shattered the long-standing synthesis of Aristotelian physics and Christian theology. A Universe where the physical location of human beings had easily understood spiritual significance[51] gave way to a cosmic scheme where human existence appeared neither unique nor privileged.[52][53]

The end of the human-centered cosmos was eventually part of a complete replacement of a finite[54] and qualitative world by an infinite and quantitative one. That replacement appeared to leave human beings alone in a silent, infinite universe[55] where existence was no longer a reflection of divine values but merely a neutral fact of mathematics. The science historian Alexandre Koyré describes this unintended outcome - the stripping of hierarchical order, purpose and meaning from the universe — as the "utter devalorization of being."[56] Stripping away the religious logic that had undergirded Western culture up to Copernicus, the Revolution forced a significant fraction of humanity to find alternative sources for identity and meaning, a transition which is arguably still ongoing.[57][58]

Copernican principle

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Main article: Copernican principle

In physical cosmology, the Copernican principle states that humans are not privileged observers of the universe.[59] Named after Copernicus by the 20th-century mathematician and cosmologist Hermann Bondi, the principle posits that observations made from Earth are representative of those made from any average position in the universe.

Most modern cosmology is based on the assumption that the cosmological principle is almost, but not exactly, true on the largest scales. The Copernican principle represents the irreducible philosophical assumption needed to justify this, when combined with the observations. If one assumes the Copernican principle and observes that the universe appears isotropic or the same in all directions from the vantage point of Earth, then one can infer that the universe is generally homogeneous or the same everywhere (at any given time) and is also isotropic about any given point. These two conditions then justify the cosmological principle.[60]

The Copernican principle has never been proven, and in the most general sense cannot be proven, but it is implicit in many modern theories of physics. Cosmological models are often derived with reference to the cosmological principle, slightly more general than the Copernican principle, and many tests of these models can be considered tests of the Copernican principle.[61]

Paradigm shift in science

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Main article: Paradigm shift
Thomas Kuhn is credited with coining the term "paradigm shift" to describe the creation and evolution of scientific theories.

A "paradigm shift" is a concept in the philosophy of science that was orginally introduced by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn characterized the Copernican Revolution as the first historical example of a paradigm shift:

"Probably the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm shift is that they can solve the problems that have led the old one into crisis...Claims of this sort are particularly likely to succeed if the new paradigm displays a quantitative precision strikingly better than its older competitor. The quantitative superiority of Kepler's Rudolphine Tables to all those computed from the Ptolemaic theory was a major factor in the conversion of astronomers to Copernicanism...[Further] particularly persuasive arguments can be developed if the new paradigm permits the prediction of phenomena that had been entirely unsuspected ... Copernicus' theory, for example, suggested that planets should be like the earth, that Venus should show phases, and that the universe must be vastly larger than had previously been supposed. As a result, when sixty years after his death the telescope suddenly displayed mountains on the moon, the phases of Venus, and an immense number of previously unsuspected stars, those observations brought the new theory a great many converts, particularly among non-astronomers."[62]

Kuhn acknowledged that Copernicus' work De revolutionibus was not itself revolutionary:

"...measured in terms of its consequences, De Revolutionibus is a relatively staid, sober, and unrevolutionary work. Most of the essential elements by which we know the Copernican Revolution - easy and accurate computations of planetary position, the abolition of epicycles and eccentrics, the dissolution of the spheres, the sun a star, the infinite expansion of the universe - these and many others are not to be found anywhere in Copernicus' work. In every respect except the earth's motion the De Revolutionibus seems more closely akin to the works of ancient and medieval astronomers and cosmologists than to the writings of the succeeding generations who based their work upon Copernicus' and who made explicit the radical consequences that even its author had not seen in his work. The significance of De Revolutionibus lies, then, less in what it says itself than in what it caused others to say. The book gave rise to a revolution that it had scarcely enunciated. It is a revolution-making rather than a revolutionary text."[63]

Decades after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published, Kuhn replaced the idea of paradigm shift with the idea that scientific language is a taxonomy and that a scientific revolution is essentially a restructuring of taxonomic categories.[64][65] He adopted the model of the biological process of speciation to describe the birth of a new scientific specialty:

[R]evolutions, which produce new divisions between fields in scientific development, are much like episodes of speciation in biological evolution. The biological parallel to revolutionary change is not mutation, as I thought for many years, but speciation. And the problems presented by speciation (e.g., the difficulty in identifying an episode of speciation until some time after it has occurred, and the impossibility even then, of dating the time of its occurrence) are very similar to those presented by revolutionary change and by the emergence and individuation of new scientific specialties.[66]

Metaphorical usage

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Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1787 edition) drew a parallel between the Copernican hypothesis and the epistemology of his new transcendental philosophy.[67] Kant's comparison is made in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (published in 1787; a heavy revision of the first edition of 1781). Kant argues that, just as Copernicus moved from the supposition of heavenly bodies revolving around a stationary spectator to a moving spectator, so metaphysics, "proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis", should move from assuming that "knowledge must conform to objects" to the supposition that "objects must conform to our [a priori] knowledge".[b] Scholars have argued that Kant's analogy is flawed, however, because it essentially reverses Copernicus' logic.[69] Tom Rockmore also notes Kant himself never used the specific phrase.[70]

Following Kant, the phrase "Copernican Revolution" in the 20th century came to be used as a metaphor for intellectual upheaval.[71][72]

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ "Averroes' criticism of Ptolemaic astronomy precipitated this debate in Europe. [...] The recovery of Ptolemy's texts and their translation from Greek into Latin in the middle of the fifteenth century stimulated further consideration of these issues."[2]
  2. ^ In an English translation: "Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus's primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the intuition of objects."[68]

Citations

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  1. ^ Kuhn 1957, p. 72-73: "...Ptolemy's contribution is the outstanding one...His Almagest, the book that epitomizes the greatest achievements of ancient astronomy, was the first systematic mathematical treatise to give a complete, detailed, and quantitative account of all the celestial motions."
  2. ^ Osler 2010, p. 42.
  3. ^ Saliba 1979, pp. 571–576.
  4. ^ Dekker 2005, pp. 85–102.
  5. ^ "The Early Manuscripts of Georg von Peuerbach's Theoricae Novae Planetarum"
  6. ^ Neugebauer 1968, p. 103: "...there was not a single proof or mathematical procedure in the De Revolutionibus which did not have its exact replica in the Almagest. Copernicus again and again demonstrated by numerical computation that his model agreed with Ptolemy's."
  7. ^ Cohen 1985, p. 35: "Copernicus admired Ptolemy enormously; in organizing his book, ordering the different chapters and choosing the sequence in which various topics were introduced, he followed Ptolemy's Almagest."
  8. ^ Wootton 2015, p. 152: "All movement within it (outside of the immediate vicinity of the Earth) is determined by the fundamental principle that heavenly movement is circular and therefore unchanging. Ptolemy, Copernicus thought, had betrayed this principle not...by adding epicycles to deferents in order to explain why the planets sometimes appear to move backwards in the sky, but by introducing the equant in order to speed them up and slow them down."
  9. ^ Dreyer 1953, p. 343: "The man who had deposed the earth from its proud position as the centre of the universe and had recognized it to be merely one of the planets, had yet felt compelled to give it quite an exceptional position in his new system. Though he had said 'in the midst of all stand the sun,' he had in his planetary theories assumed the centre of all movements to be the centre of the earth's orbit, where the sun was not."
  10. ^ Butterfield 1957, p. 40: "It was a disadvantage of [Copernicus'] system that it was not quite heliocentric after all - the Earth did not describe an exact circle with the sun at its centre, and, in fact, all the movements of the skies were reckoned not from the sun itself, but from the centre of the earth's orbit, which came somewhat to the side."
  11. ^ Wootton 2015, p. 152: "Copernicus's universe is different from Ptolemy's in that the sun, not the Earth, lies at (or rather, to be exact, very close to) its centre."
  12. ^ Kuhn 1957.
  13. ^ Grant 1971, p. 87: "[Copernicus] was convinced that the assumption of a daily and annual motion of the earth not only explained the known celestial phenomena, but revealed a simpler, and therefore more harmonious, universal order. On these grounds, he boldly proclaimed that the earth truly described an annual orbit around the sun and turned once a day on its axis. The observed daily and annual motions of the sun were mere appearances resulting from the true motion of the earth."
  14. ^ Koestler 1959, p. 194.
  15. ^ Gingerich 2004, pp. 54–55.
  16. ^ a b c Wootton 2015, p. 228. "It is easy to show that conventional Ptolemaic astronomy was thriving until 1610 [when Galileo observed the phases of Venus with a telescope] and went into crisis immediately afterwards...The evidence is clear: Ptolemaic astronomy was unaffected by Copernicus; it went into crisis briefly with the new star of 1572, but by the end of the sixteenth century it had fully recovered. The telescope, on the other hand, brought about its immediate and irreversible collapse."
  17. ^ Hellyer 2008, p. 63: "The Puritan Thomas Digges (1546–1595?) was the earliest Englishman to offer a defense of the Copernican theory. Accompanying Digges's account is a diagram of the universe portraying the heliocentric system surrounded by the orb of fixed stars, described by Digges as infinitely extended in all dimensions."
  18. ^ Hetherington 2014, p. 419: "Bruno (from the mouth of his character Philotheo) in his De l'infinito universo et mondi (1584) claims that 'innumerable celestial bodies, stars, globes, suns and earths may be sensibly perceived therein by us and an infinite number of them may be inferred by our own reason.'"
  19. ^ Gilbert 1893.
  20. ^ Hall, A. Rupert (1970) [1954]. The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude (2nd ed.). Boston: Beacon Press. p. 63. ISBN 0-8070-5093-8. Apart from his one great innovation, all Copernicus' astronomical thought is thoroughly medieval.
  21. ^ Butterfield 1957, p. 44: "[Copernicus] closes an old epoch much more clearly than he opens any new one. He is himself one of those individual makers of world-systems, like Aristotle and Ptolemy, who astonish us by the power which they showed in producing a synthesis so mythical - and so irrelevant to the present day - that we should regard their work almost as a matter of aesthetic judgement alone."
  22. ^ Koestler 1959, pp. 205, 214: "The figure of Copernicus, seen from the distance, is that of an intrepid, revolutionary hero of thought. As we come closer, it gradually changes into that of a stuffy pedant, without the flair, the sleepwalking intuition of the original genius; who, having got hold of a good idea, expanded it into a bad system, patiently plodding on, piling more epicycles and deferents into the dreariest and most unreadable among the books that made history. The Copernican system is not a discovery but a last attempt to patch up an out-dated machinery by reversing the arrangement of its wheels. As a modern historian put it, the fact that the earth moves is 'almost an incidental matter in the system of Copernicus which, viewed geometrically, is just the old Ptolemaic pattern of the skies, with one or two wheels interchanged and one or two of them taken out.'"
  23. ^ Neugebauer 1968, p. 103: "Modern historians, making ample use of the advantage of hindsight, stress the revolutionary significance of the heliocentric system and the simplifications it had introduced. In fact, the actual computation of planetary positions follows exactly the ancient pattern and the results are the same. The Copernican solar theory is definitely a step in the wrong direction for the actual computation as well as for the underlying cinematic concepts. The cinematically elegant idea of secondary epicycles for the lunar theory and as substitute for the equant - as we now know, methods familiar to a school of Islamic astronomers - does not contribute to make the planetary phenomena easier to visualize. Had it not been for Tycho Brahe and Kepler, the Copernican system would have contributed to the perpetuation of the Ptolemaic system in a slightly more complicated form but more pleasing to philosophical minds."
  24. ^ Wootton 2015, p. 145: "It used to be thought that Copernicus initiated an intellectual revolution - indeed Thomas Kuhn called his first book The Copernican Revolution (1957). But in this Kuhn was mistaken."
  25. ^ Kobe 1998, p. 190.
  26. ^ Melanchthon 1549, p. 19: "Et sapientes gubernatores deberent coercere talem petulantiam ingeniorum. (And wise rulers should restrain such petulance of mind.)"
  27. ^ Kuhn 1957, p. 191: "For sixty years after Copernicus' death there was little Catholic counterpart for the Protestant opposition to Copernicanism. Individual Catholic clergymen expressed their incredulity or abhorrence of the new conception of the earth, but the Church itself was silent...Reinhold's Prutenic Tables, based on Copernicus' mathematical system, were used in the reformation of the calendar promulgated for the Catholic world in 1582 by Gregory XIII...The De Revolutionibus was itself a product of the latitude allowed to Churchmen in matters of science and secular philosophy..."
  28. ^ Applebaum 2005, p. 110: "Copernicus was a devout Catholic and a member of the governing body of his cathedral. His radical ideas on the structure of the universe raised no objections from his Church, and in 1536 he was even urged by a cardinal aware of those ideas to publish his results. There were some negative comments by a Church official immediately after the publication but the Church took no official position."
  29. ^ Sokal, Alan D.; Bricmont, J. (Jean) (1998). Fashionable nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. Internet Archive. New York: Picador USA. pp. 76 n.91. ISBN 9780312195458. Ever since antiquity, it was observed that Venus is never very far from the Sun in the sky. In Ptolemy's geocentric cosmology, this was explained by supposing ad hoc that Venus and the Sun revolve more or less synchronously around the Earth (Venus being closer). It follows that Venus should be seen always as a thin crescent, like the "new moon". On the other hand, the heliocentric theory accounts naturally for the observations by supposing that Venus orbits the Sun at a smaller radius than the Earth. It follows that the Venus should, like the Moon, exhibit phases ranging from "new" (when Venus is on the same side of the Sun as the Earth) to almost "full" (when Venus is on the far side of the Sun). Since Venus appears to the naked eye as a point, it was not possible to distinguish empirically between these two predictions until telescopic observation by Galileo and his successors clearly established the existence of the phases of Venus. While this did not prove the heliocentric model (other theories were also able to explain the phases), it did give significant evidence in its favor, as well as strong evidence against the Ptolemaic model.
  30. ^ Singer, C. (1941). A Short History of Science to the Nineteenth Century. Clarendon. p. 217.
  31. ^ Drake, S. (1990). Galileo: Pioneer Scientist. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press. pp. 133–134. ISBN 978-0-8020-2725-2.
  32. ^ van Helden, A. (1989). "Galileo, telescopic astronomy, and the Copernican system". In Taton, R.; Wilson, C. (eds.). Planetary astronomy from the Renaissance to the rise of astrophysics Part A: Tycho Brahe to Newton. Cambridge University Press. p. 40. ISBN 978-0-521-35158-4.
  33. ^ Drake 1978, p. 152.
  34. ^ Drake 1978, p. 157.
  35. ^ Osler 2010, p. 63.
  36. ^ Sokal, Alan D.; Bricmont, J. (Jean) (1998). Fashionable nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. Internet Archive. New York : Picador USA. pp. 76 n.91. ISBN 9780312195458. Ever since antiquity, it was observed that Venus is never very far from the Sun in the sky. In Ptolemy's geocentric cosmology, this was explained by supposing ad hoc that Venus and the Sun revolve more or less synchronously around the Earth (Venus being closer). It follows that Venus should be seen always as a thin crescent, like the "new moon". On the other hand, the heliocentric theory accounts naturally for the observations by supposing that Venus orbits the Sun at a smaller radius than the Earth. It follows that the Venus should, like the Moon, exhibit phases ranging from "new" (when Venus is on the same side of the Sun as the Earth) to almost "full" (when Venus is on the far side of the Sun). Since Venus appears to the naked eye as a point, it was not possible to distinguish empirically between these two predictions until telescopic observation by Galileo and his successors clearly established the existence of the phases of Venus. While this did not prove the heliocentric model (other theories were also able to explain the phases), it did give significant evidence in its favor, as well as strong evidence against the Ptolemaic model.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
  37. ^ Thoren, V. E. (1989). "Tycho Brahe". In Taton, R.; Wilson, C. (eds.). Planetary astronomy from the Renaissance to the rise of astrophysics Part A: Tycho Brahe to Newton. Cambridge University Press. p. 8. ISBN 978-0-521-35158-4.
  38. ^ Applebaum 2005, p. 111: "In the letter to the Grand Duchess, Galileo pointed out that there are passages in the Bible that clearly cannot be taken literally, as in references to God having feet and hands, forgetting past events, and feeling repentance...Galileo, with prescience, warned that once heliocentrism was decisively and indisputably proven, its condemnation by the Church would reflect badly on it. Theologians, ignorant of astronomy, should stick to what they know."
  39. ^ Brooke, John Hedley (2014). Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Canto Classics. Cambridge University Press. p. 107. ISBN 978-1-107-66446-3. ...Galileo was trying to protect his Church from condemning a theory that, by its evident truth, would prove an embarrassment if not embraced.
  40. ^ Finocchiaro, Maurice A. (2009). Cohen, Rober S.; Renn, Jürgen; Gavroglu, Kostas; Glick, Thomas F.; Grünbaum, Adolf; Schweber, Sylvan S.; Stachel, John J.; Wartofsky, Marx W. (eds.). Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Vol. 280. University of Nevada, Las Vegas: Springer Science+Business Media. p. 140. doi:10.1007/978-90-481-3201-0. ISBN 9789048132003.
  41. ^ Shea, William R.; Artigas, Mariano (2004). Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius. Oxford University Press. p. 74. ISBN 9780195177589.
  42. ^ Finocchiaro, Maurice A. (2009). Cohen, Rober S.; Renn, Jürgen; Gavroglu, Kostas; Glick, Thomas F.; Grünbaum, Adolf; Schweber, Sylvan S.; Stachel, John J.; Wartofsky, Marx W. (eds.). Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Vol. 280. University of Nevada, Las Vegas: Springer Science+Business Media. p. 71. doi:10.1007/978-90-481-3201-0. ISBN 9789048132003.
  43. ^ Sharratt, M. (1994). Galileo: Decisive Innovator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 127–131. ISBN 978-0-521-56671-1.
  44. ^ McMullin, E. (2005a). The Church's Ban on Copernicanism, 1616. pp. 150–190.
  45. ^ Finocchiaro, Maurice A. (1989). The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History. pp. 148–149. ISBN 0-520-06662-6.
  46. ^ Finocchiaro, Maurice A. (2009). Cohen, Rober S.; Renn, Jürgen; Gavroglu, Kostas; Glick, Thomas F.; Grünbaum, Adolf; Schweber, Sylvan S.; Stachel, John J.; Wartofsky, Marx W. (eds.). Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Vol. 280. University of Nevada, Las Vegas: Springer Science+Business Media. p. 142. doi:10.1007/978-90-481-3201-0. ISBN 9789048132003.
  47. ^ * Finocchiaro, Maurice A. (1989). The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-06662-6.
  48. ^ Kuhn 1957, p. 4.
  49. ^ Gingerich 2004, pp. 55: "My Copernican census eventually helped to establish that the majority of sixteenth-century astronomers thought eliminating the equant was Copernicus' big achievement, because it satisfied the ancient aesthetic principle that eternal celestial motions should be uniform and circular or compounded of uniform and circular parts."
  50. ^ Kuhn 1957, p. 113: "Man's location, too, is intermediate: the earth's surface is close to its debased and corporeal center but within sight of the celestial periphery which surrounds it symmetrically. Man lives in squalor and uncertainty, and he is very close to Hell. But his central location is strategic, for he is everywhere under the eye of God."
  51. ^ Calvin, John (2001) [First published 1554]. McGrath, Alister; Packer, J. I. (eds.). Genesis. Crossway Classic Commentaries. Vol. 25. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. After the world was created, man was placed in it as a theater that he, beholding above him and beneath him the wonderful works of God, might reverently adore their author.
  52. ^ Kuhn 1957, p. 2: "Copernicus' "planetary theory and his associated conception of a sun-centered universe were instrumental in the transition from medieval to Western society, because they seemed to affect man's relation to the universe and to God. Initiated as a narrowly technical, highly mathematical revision of classical astronomy, the Copernican theory became one focus for the tremendous controversies in religion, in philosophy, and in social theory, which, during the two centuries following the discovery of America, set the tenor of the modern mind. Men who believed that their terrestrial home was only a planet circulating blindly about one of an infinity of stars evaluated their place in the cosmic scheme quite differently than had their predecessors who saw the earth as the unique and focal center of God's creation. The Copernican Revolution was therefore also part of a transition in Western man's sense of values."
  53. ^ Sagan, Carl (1980). Cosmos. Random House. p. 193. ISBN 978-0-394-50294-6. Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
  54. ^ Lewis, C. S. (1964). The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge University Press. pp. 99–100. ISBN 978-0-521-47735-2. Because the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety. Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest—trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The 'space' of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  55. ^ Pascal, Blaise (May 27, 2006) [1670]. Pensées. Translated by Trotter, W. F. Project Gutenberg. §206. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. (Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.)
  56. ^ Koyré, Alexander (1957). From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press. p. 29. ISBN 978-0801803475. This scientific and philosophical revolution...can be described roughly as bringing forth the destruction of the Cosmos, that is the disappearance, from philosophically and scientifically valid concepts, of the conception of the world as a finite, closed and hierarchically ordered whole (a whole in which the hierarchy of value determined the hierarchy and structure of being, rising from the dark, heavy and imperfect earth to the higher and higher perfection of the stars and heavenly spheres), and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe...and the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  57. ^ Kuhn 1957, p. 7: "Delegating "the construction of cosmologies to specialists, primarily to astronomers...can be devastating. The astronomer may on occasions destroy, for reasons lying entirely within his specialty, a world-view that had previously made the universe meaningful for the members of a whole civilization, specialist and nonspecialist alike."
  58. ^ John Paul II (14 September 1998). "81". Fides et Ratio: On the Relationship between Faith and Reason. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. One of the most significant aspects of our current situation, it should be noted, is the "crisis of meaning". Perspectives on life and the world, often of a scientific temper, have so proliferated that we face an increasing fragmentation of knowledge. This makes the search for meaning difficult and often fruitless. Indeed, still more dramatically, in this maelstrom of data and facts in which we live and which seem to comprise the very fabric of life, many people wonder whether it still makes sense to ask about meaning.
  59. ^ Peacock, John A. (1998). Cosmological Physics. Cambridge University Press. p. 66. ISBN 978-0-521-42270-3.
  60. ^ Rowan-Robinson, Michael (1996). Cosmology (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 62–63. ISBN 978-0-19-851884-6.
  61. ^ Clarkson, C.; Bassett, B.; Lu, T. (2008). "A General Test of the Copernican Principle". Physical Review Letters. 101 (1) 011301. arXiv:0712.3457. Bibcode:2008PhRvL.101a1301C. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.011301. PMID 18764099. S2CID 32735465.
  62. ^ Kuhn, Thomas S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 153–154. ISBN 978-0-226-45808-3.
  63. ^ Kuhn 1957, p. 135.
  64. ^ Borradori, Giovanna (1994). The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, Kuhn. University of Chicago Press. pp. 153–168. ISBN 978-0-226-06647-9.
  65. ^ Kuhn, T. S. The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-45798-2
  66. ^ J. Conant; J. Haugeland, eds. (2000). The Road Since Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 98–99. (A collection of Kuhn’s last philosophical essays.)
  67. ^ Ermanno Bencivenga (1987), Kant's Copernican Revolution.
  68. ^ Immanuel Kant (1929) [1787]. "Preface". Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-1194-0. Archived from the original on 2009-04-16. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  69. ^ For an overview see Engel, M., Kant’s Copernican Analogy: A Re-examination, Kant-Studien, 54, 1963, p. 243. According to Victor Cousin: "Copernicus, seeing it was impossible to explain the motion of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that these bodies moved around the earth considered as an immovable centre, adopted the alternative, of supposing all to move round the sun. So Kant, instead of supposing man to move around objects, supposed on the contrary, that he himself was the centre, and that all moved round him." Cousin, Victor, The Philosophy of Kant. London: John Chapman, 1854, p. 21
  70. ^ Tom Rockmore, Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx (2002), p. 184.
  71. ^ "By defining hysteria as an illness whose symptoms were produced by a person's unconscious ideas, Freud started what can be called a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in the understanding of mental illness — which put him into opposition both to the Parisian Charcot and to the German and Austrian scientific community." José Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis (2001), p. 32.
  72. ^ "Jacques Lacan's formulation that the unconscious, as it reveals itself in analytic phenomena, ‘is structured like a language’, can be seen as a Copernican revolution (of sorts), bringing together Freud and the insights of linguistic philosophers and theorists such as Roman Jakobson." Ben Highmore, Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (2006), p. 64.

References

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Further reading

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  • Bala, Arun (2006). The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-60121-5. OCLC 191662056.
  • Gillies, Donald. (2019). Why did the Copernican revolution take place in Europe rather than China?. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332320835_Why_did_the_Copernican_revolution_take_place_in_Europe_rather_than_China
  • Gingerich, Owen. "From Copernicus to Kepler: Heliocentrism as Model and as Reality". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117, no. 6 (December 31, 1973): 513–22.
  • Huff, Toby E. (2017). The Rise of Early Modern Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781316417805.
  • Huff, Toby E. (Autumn–Winter 2002). "The Rise of Early Modern Science: A Reply to George Saliba". Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS). 4, 2.
  • Kunitzch, Paul. "The Arabic Translations of Ptolemy's Almagest". Qatar Digital Library, July 31, 2018. https://www.qdl.qa/en/arabic-translations-ptolemys-almagest.
  • Lawson, Russell M. Science in the Ancient World: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004.
  • Lin, Justin Y. (1995). The Needham Puzzle: Why the Industrial Revolution Did Not Originate in China. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 43(2), 269–292. Retrieved from JSTOR 1154499.
  • Metzger, Hélène (1932). Histoire des sciences. Revue Philosophique De La France Et De L'Étranger, 114, 143–155. Retrieved from JSTOR 41086443.
  • Redd, Nola (May 2012). "Johannes Kepler Biography". Tech Media Network. Retrieved October 23, 2013.
  • Rushkin, Ilia. "Optimizing the Ptolemaic Model of Planetary and Solar Motion". History and Philosophy of Physics 1 (February 6, 2015): 1–13.
  • Saliba, George (Autumn 1999). "Seeking the Origins of Modern Science?". Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS). 1, 2.
  • Saliba, George (Autumn–Winter 2002). "Flying Goats and Other Obsessions: A Response to Toby Huff's "Reply"". Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS). 4, 2.
  • Swetz, Frank J. "Mathematical Treasure: Ptolemy's Almagest". Mathematical Treasure: Ptolemy's Almagest | Mathematical Association of America, August 2013. https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-ptolemy-s-almagest.
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  • Wiktionary logo The dictionary definition of Copernican Revolution at Wiktionary
  • Wikimedia Commons logo Media related to Copernican Revolution at Wikimedia Commons
  • The Heliocentric Model and Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion on YouTube - The development of the Heliocentric model with the contributions of Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler
  • Comparison between the systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Descartes and Tycho-Bahé,[archives] on the Digital Library of the Paris Observatory