Nicolaus Copernicus

Today on The Daily Dose, Nicholas Copernicus. After studying astronomy and astrology at the University of Padua in 1503, polyglot and polymath Nicholas Copernicus received his doctoral degree in canon or ecclesiastical law from the University of Ferrara, returning to his Polish homeland to become a church administrator and a doctor. His passion for astronomy soon brought him notoriety within the Catholic Church, where in 1514 he was consulted by church officials in their effort to reform the Julian calendar. Dating back to ancient times, philosophers clung to the belief that the heavens were arranged in circles, despite the fact that many observers recorded planetary movements that sometimes appeared to in a retrograde path across the sky. In response to some of these dogging inconsistencies, in the 2nd century AD, Alexandrian geographer and astronomer Ptolemy proposed a more refined Earth-centric universe, arguing that the known planets moved about the Earth in small circles or epicycles of varying speeds. More than a thousand years later, in 1514, Copernicus wrote a short astronomical treatise which translates to the little commentary setting forth the foundations of his heliocentric or sun-centered universe, where he correctly noted the order of the known planets. A second body of works known as the Six Books, most notably On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, was published in 1543, the year of his death, which saved Copernicus from later charges of heresy by the Catholic Church during the Inquisition's 1616 banning of his works. In his largely academic and unreadable Revolutions, Copernicus correctly postulated that the Earth and other known planets in the universe revolved around the Sun at varying rates of speed, while the Earth in turn spun on its axis, rotating around the Sun in one-year intervals. While his failure to conceptualize the reality of elliptical orbits and the impact of gravity on celestial bodies, his work was later embraced by 17th century thinkers such as Galileo and Johannes Kepler, which resulted in Galileo's trial and conviction of heresy before living out the remainder of his life in comfortable house arrest. After Isaac Newton's insights into celestial mechanics late in the 17th century, acceptance of a sun-centered Copernican theory began to spread throughout non-Catholic countries until its near universal acceptance by the late 18th century, making Nicholas Copernicus an early disruptor in man's ongoing search for celestial truths. And there you have it, Nicholas Copernicus, today on The Daily Dose.