Nicholas Copernicus was never supposed to be a revolutionary in the field of revolutions. This Polish merchant's son, groomed to be a church canon, was not the sort of man to be running around changing the world; he was not even published until near his death, in 1543. Copernicus had been preceded by over a thousand years of contentment with the universal model, as Europe had been riding Ptolemy's system with the full support of the Catholic Church. Few people had given serious question to breaking Ptolemy's crystal spheres; in fact, they were so firmly established as the methods by which planets revolved around the earth that Dante had written about them in his Divine Comedy and John Milton, several years later, wrote them into his epic, Paradise Lost. Copernicus himself was quite loyal to the precise, circular motion set in place by Aristotle; the major difference between his system and the Ptolemaic is that the Earth revolves around the Sun and turns on its own axis. Because of this, some believe that Copernicus was not a revolutionary thinker, but "a thinker of revolutions" (Henry, 10). However, Copernicus himself harbored beliefs other than that of the Catholic Church, and this would prove to be the driving force behind his overwhelming discoveries. He would eventually get the last laugh, as his discoveries launched the Scientific Revolution.
             Nicholas Copernicus was born in 1473 in Thorn on the Vistula. His father died early, but Nicholas was tutored and protected by his maternal uncle, Lukasz Watzenrode, who eventually became bishop of Ermeland (Sarton, 55). He studied at the Krakow Academy in Poland for four years, reading several astronomical texts under the tutelage of Albert Brudzewski, which was as good an astronomical education as was available anywhere (Sarton, 57). Copernicus may have been dissatisfied with the Ptolemaic model even before he arrived in Bologna.
             Copernicus went to B...