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De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
Nicolaus Copernicus
(February 19, 1473 – May 24, 1543) was an astronomer who provided the first modern formulation of a heliocentric (sun-centered) theory of the solar system in his epochal book,
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
(On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres). Copernicus was born in 1473 in the city of Toruń in Royal Prussia, an autonomous province of the Kingdom of Poland. He was educated in Poland and Italy, and spent most of his working life in Frombork, Warmia, where he died in 1543.
Copernicus was born in 1473. When he was ten years old, his father, a wealthy businessman, copper trader, and respected citizen of Torun, died. Little is known of Copernicus' mother, Barbara Watzenrode, who appears to have predeceased her husband. Copernicus' maternal uncle, Lucas Watzenrode, a church canon and later Prince-Bishop governor of the Archbishopric of Warmia, reared him and his three siblings after the death of his father. His uncle's position helped Copernicus in the pursuit of a career within the church, enabling him to devote time to his astronomy studies. Copernicus had a brother and two sisters.
In 1491, Copernicus enrolled at the Kraków Academy (today the Jagiellonian University), where he probably first encountered astronomy, taught by his teacher, Albert Brudzewski. This science soon fascinated him, as shown by his books, which would later be carried off as war booty by the Swedes, during "The Deluge", to the Uppsala University Library. After four years at Krakow, followed by a brief stay back home at Torun, he went to Italy, where he studied law and medicine at the universities of Bologna and Padua
The book marks the beginning of the shift away from a geocentric (and anthropocentric) universe with the Earth at its center. Copernicus held that the Earth is another planet revolving around the fixed sun once a year, and turning on its axis once a day. He arrived at the correct order of the known planets and explained the precession of the equinoxes correctly by a slow change in the position of the Earth's rotational axis. He also gave a clear account of the cause of the seasons: that the Earth's axis is not perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. He added another motion to the Earth, by which the axis is kept pointed throughout the year at the same place in the heavens; since Galileo Galilei, it has been recognized that for the Earth
not
to point to the same place would have been a motion.
Poland is still proud of Nicolaus Copernicus so his figure often appears on polish currency.
Nicolaus Copernicus
on bank note 1000zł from 1982
Nicolaus Copernicus
on coins 10zł in the time of PRL
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
Copernicus' major work,
(Six books) On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
(first edition 1543 in Nuremberg, second ed. 1566 in Basel), was the result of decades of labor. It opened with an originally anonymous preface by Andreas Osiander, a theologian friend of Copernicus, who urged that the theory, which was considered a tool that allows simpler and more accurate calculations, did not necessarily have implications outside the limited realm of astronomy.
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