| Chapter 1: | The New Astronomy |
Christian dogma, thanks to the intellectual prowess of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and earlier scholars. There it sat essentially unchallenged until the sixteenth century, when philosophers began to attend rigorously to the need for systematic quantification of phenomena through mathematics and to the provisionality of hypotheses to explain them.
The Heliocentric Universe
Nicholas Copernicus hailed from Ermland, which was a sovereign province under the protection of the Polish crown. After attending the University of Krakow, he studied law and medicine in Italy. At the University of Bologna, he came under the influence of Domenico Maria da Novara (1454–1504), who was a professor of Mathematics and Astronomy and an ardent defector from the camp of Ptolemaic astronomy. Under his tutelage, Copernicus escaped Plato's geocentric cave to see the Sun in a new light.
Upon his return to Poland, Copernicus served as a church administrator and continued to study the motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets. In 1543 he published his seminal De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (“On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs”), comprised of six books. Book 1 explains the essence of the heliocentric hypothesis in terms sufficiently simple for a literate layperson to get the gist of the argument. He made the Sun the center of the planetary orbits (as in sequence H), and only the Moon retained its old geocentric status (figure 1.4).
- H: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, stars.
Copernicus gave the Earth two motions—a daily rotation on its axis and an annual revolution about the Sun. He accepted the empirical facts that the rotation of the Earth, the revolution of the Moon around the Earth, and the revolution of planets around the Sun were clockwise when viewed from the direction of South to North. On this basis, to a first approximation, he explained all major apparent anomalies in their motions.
Aristotelian-Ptolemaic theory demanded that the observer be stationary at the center of everything, which necessarily imputed observed motions