Copernicus' Studies
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
They believed that the Earth and universe could be measured alike. The Copernian system was eventually proven faulty; if the crystalline spheres existed, they would certainly smash apart when a comet came racing through. More than likely, he had been dying to publish it. Copernicus was indeed questioning the church, and displayed this clearly in the Revolutionibus and his forward to the Pope. Copernicus does away with the equant by having all the planets revolve around the sun; however, despite this correct analysis, he does not manage to explain away the epicycles. Copernicus did not create the heliocentric universe, but he did establish the idea that mathematics was as powerful a religion as Catholicism (Kuhn). Copernicus may not have dreamed of a heliocentric model of the universe before arriving in Bologna; he was a devout Catholic with a bishop for a guardian, and such thoughts were pure heresy. Thus as though seated on a royal throne, the Sun governs the family of planets revolving around it. Copernicus, under the tutelage of Novara read nearly every astronomical text available at that time (Sarton, 57) and by 1500, Copernicus was lecturing in Rome on astronomy, having learned enough astronomy at Bologna to become a noted scholar (Encarta). But it is indeed unfair to suggest that Copernicus had invented nothing new under the sun. Copernicus borrows heavily from Ptolemy, requiring the use of epicycles because of his adherence to Aristotle's crystalline spheres. What was the impact of the Commentariolus on the world viewpoint? Since the Commentariolus was never released to the public and surfaced completely only in the 18th century, none in the immediate sense, but its eventual presence helped to clarify Copernicus' mathematics of the solar-based rotations.
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