Copernicus LIFE

Copernicus Life

Nicolaus Copernicus was born on February 19, 1473 in Torun, Poland. Circa 1508, Copernicus developed his own celestial model of a heliocentric planetary system. Around 1514, he shared his findings in the Commentariolus. His second book on the topic, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was banned by the Roman Catholic Church decades after his May 24, 1543 death in Frombork.

In May of 1543, 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, 1543 in Frombork, Poland.

In a book called On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies (that was published as Copernicus lay on his deathbed), Copernicus proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the Solar System. Such a model is called a heliocentric system. The ordering of the planets known to Copernicus in this new system is illustrated in the following figure, which we recognize as the modern ordering of those planets.

The Catholic Church, which initially failed to take an official stand on the theory, rejected it as potentially dangerous to the accepted model of the world after the Council of Trent. In 1616 the Congregation of the Index issued a decree condemning Copernicus’s work. However, it was removed from Index Librorum Prohibitorum only in 1758.

(as Copernicus’s demonstration and work were referred to) rejected the presupposition dominating over centuries and shifted towards the old heliocentric model, proposed by Aristarchus of Samos. The goal was to develop sufficient scientific evidence to support the theory, as comprehensive and precise as possible within the limits of the existing knowledge.