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Copernicus: the birth of the new scientific worldviewBack in the sixteenth century there were no such thing as scientists, but a few people were starting to think in a scientific way. It was a dangerous business, though. The church was quick to see the threat and didn't hesitate to publicly humiliate anyone who came up with a big idea that contradicted ecclesiastical doctrine. The punishment for heresy was excommunication and that would mean losing your reputation, your job and your livelihood. One of the first scientific theories that came into direct conflict with the teachings of the church was the idea that the sun, not the earth, is the centre of the universe. At the heart of the medieval view of the world was the image of a perfectly round universe with the earth at the centre. Man was made in God's image and placed at the centre of everything. At the beginning of the sixteenth century one man from Germany dared to suggest that the neat idea of an earth-centred universe didn't quite fit the facts. This man was not a scientist in a white coat working in a white office at a university, nor was he a revolutionary. He was a low-profile priest who was fascinated by the stars and curious enough to spend long nights gazing up at the heavenly bodies to record their movements. His name was Copernicus (1473-1543). Actually his real surname was Koppernigk. At university, students came from all four corners of Europe and spoke together in the international language of the time: Latin. They all knew the latest Latin songs and it seemed hip and trendy to change their names to Latin-sounding ones. "Copernicus" sounded much more cool than "Koppernigk". Copernicus wouldn't have come up with his theory if he had just gazed up at the night sky. His other hobby played a crucial role: old books. It was only relatively recently that people in Latin-speaking Europe had managed to get their hands on books from ancient Greece. They got them first from the Arabs (translated into Arabic, which was then translated into Latin) and then, some 200 years later, they got them in the original Greek from scholars coming over to Italy to flee the Turkish invasion in 1453. These books were hot stuff and Copernicus must have got a real buzz from reading such lively books. One of his favourite books must have been a big one by Ptolemy (from Alexandria in Egypt in the 2nd century AD) which gave the definitive presentation of the Greek view of astronomy. Although the book was 1,300 years old it presented the best theory that Europe had at the end of the fifteenth century. Copernicus' theory didn't come out of thin air. It came out of a careful study of the Greek theory and a slow realisation that that theory had to be mistaken. The Greek theory actually went back at least as far as Pythagoras in the 6th century BC, who advocated the idea that the earth was a sphere (it just had to be a sphere because that was the most perfectly regular 3-dimensional figure) around which the sun and the stars revolved in perfect circles at a perfectly even rate. Although the Greek view had a beautiful and persuasive simplicity in the beginning, it became very difficult to make it fit the observations. When people looked carefully at the planets they saw that they didn't move at a constant speed as the theory said they ought to. There was no doubt that they seemed to speed up and slow down. To try to explain this the Ptolemaic system became extremely complicated and thoroughly unattractive to anyone who had a Pythagorian taste for mathematical simplicity. Copernicus said: Look, let's assume that Pythagoras was right and the planets do move in circles at steady speeds. We can easily explain the fact that they seem to us to speed up and slow down if we assume that we are revolving with the other planets around the sun. To back the argument up he collected together a huge number of observations many of which he did on his own with new instruments he had developed himself.
Was it an overnight success?
What about the Protestants, they didn't like the Catholics so they must have loved Copernicus.
Other people were unhappy about the idea of the earth whizzing through space at such a frightening speed. They were afraid it would break into pieces. In his book, though, Copernicus was careful to point out that if the earth was still, then the stars would have to revolve around us once a day, and because they are so much further away they would be travelling so much faster. They would be even more likely to disintegrate. It is interesting that although the first scientific breakthroughs came into such direct conflict with the church, the first two really big names in that scientific progress - Copernicus and Galileo - were both devout Catholics.
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