Nicolaus Copernicus.

In 1543, famed astronomer Nicholas Copernicus wrote to Pope Paul III, I can easily conceive, Most Holy Father, that as soon as some people learn that in this book, which I have written concerning the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, I ascribe certain motions to the earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected. Nicholas Copernicus was a mathematician and astronomer who proposed that the sun was stationary in the center of the universe and the earth revolved around it. Copernicus was bothered by the failure of Aristotle's geocentric model, which is to say that the earth is the center of the universe. Of all the theories that Aristotle proposed, on this particular one, he could not have been more wrong. An established church held the belief that the earth was the center of the universe for nearly 2,000 years. And because of this, sent numerous brilliant men and women into hiding, and they faced unnecessary persecution. The established church of that day held strong to such biblical passages, which we know today, for instance, as Psalm 93, verse 1. And it was for this reason that we on earth were a fixed entity, and therefore, science had to balance its findings with it. In retrospect, the established church, once again, had taken text out of context and introduced pretext, which is to say, error. Copernicus, through very elementary methods to support his theory, created a concept of a universe in which the distances of the planets from the sun bore a direct relationship to the size of their orbits. At the time, Copernicus' heliocentric idea was very controversial. Nevertheless, it was the start of a change in the way the world was viewed, and Copernicus came to be seen as the initiator of the scientific revolution. Galileo is given popular credit for defending the heliocentric model against the erroneous passion of the established church. However, it was Copernicus, over 50 years earlier, that explained the true patterns of certain orbits. And it most definitely was not around the earth.