The work was not published in his lifetime. Sometime between 15, Copernicus wrote a short astronomical treatise commonly called the Commentariolus, or “Little Commentary,” which laid the basis for his sun-centered or heliocentric theory, a radical departure from the conventional wisdom of his era. Astronomers disagreed on the order of the planets from Earth, and it was this problem that Copernicus addressed at the beginning of the 16th century. The Ptolemaic system remained Europe’s accepted cosmology for more than 1,000 years, but by Copernicus’ day accumulated astronomical evidence had thrown some of his theories into confusion. These small circles he called epicycles, and by incorporating numerous epicycles rotating at varying speeds he made his celestial system correspond with most astronomical observations on record. In the second century, Ptolemy sought to resolve this problem by arguing that the sun, planets, and moon move in small circles around much larger circles that revolve around Earth. He was given the best education of the day and bred for a career in canon (church) law. Copernicus was born into a family of well-to-do merchants, and after his father’s death, his uncle–soon to be a bishop–took the boy under his wing. Nicolaus Copernicus was born on Februin Torun, a city in north-central Poland on the Vistula River. WATCH: Science and Technology Documentaries on HISTORY Vault Who Was Copernicus? In addition to correctly postulating the order of the known planets from the sun and estimating their orbital periods relatively accurately, Copernicus argued that Earth turned daily on its axis and that gradual shifts of this axis accounted for the changing seasons. Prior to the publication of his major astronomical work, “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,” in 1543, European astronomers argued that Earth lay at the center of the universe, the view also held by most ancient philosophers. He was the first European scientist to propose that Earth and other planets revolve around the sun, the heliocentric theory of the solar system.
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer and mathematician known as the father of modern astronomy.
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