Copernicus: Founder of Modern Astronomy

             Nicholas Copernicus is often considered one of the founders of modern astronomy. His discovery's led him to the conclusion that the Earth rotates on its axis and that it, like all the other planets, revolves around the sun. His discovery's influenced those scientists and astrologers thatcame after him, such as Galileo, Newton and Kepler. .

             Nicholas Copernicus was born on February 19, 1473, in Thorn, Poland. His maternal uncle raised him after his father's death. This enabled him to attend the university of Krakow where he studied Mathematics and Optics. He later attended the university at Bologna where he studied liberal arts and, the university at Padua where he studied medicine, and at the university at Ferrari where he studied canon law. Through his uncles reputation and influence he was elected a canon at the cathedral in Frauenberg, Poland, where he continued his studies of the stars and the heavens quietly, on his own time. .

             Nicholas's Most famed work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ( On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres ) opposed the beliefs of the catholic church and completely countered the Ptolemaic theory and the works of Aristotle, the beliefs that the Earth was the center of the Universe and that everything revolved around it. The latter required a complex combination of cycles upon cycles, akin to the meshing of larger and smaller gears ( think of the interior of a watch ), to account for these motions. Copernicus's theory proposed that a rotating Earth, along with the other planets, around a stationary Sun accounted for these phenomena, but in a simpler way. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium is based on varius aspects by the Pythagoreans and the Aristarchus of Samos, and also by the Muslim astronomer Ibn al-Shatir. It includes both radical and conservative elements, such as the fact that he held every part of the Aristotelian physics of motion.

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