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Nicolaus Copernicus was born on February 19, 1473 in what is now Poland. Happy Birthday, Copernicus!


The day job of Nicolaus Copernicus, the reluctant revolutionary, was canon of a cathedral. The last resting place of this man who turned astronomy on its head was unmarked. How did his student astronomy books help to identify his remains four and a half centuries after his death?

Copernicus - His Life

In the 16th century everyone knew that Earth was the center of the cosmos. But this made it impossible to predict the motions of heavenly bodies, even if they moved in elaborate circles within circles. Copernicus turned the idea on its head and put the Sun at the center. A revolution had begun!

Copernicus - the Revolution

Centuries after Copernicus, in countries with universal education, his revolution still hasn't quite taken hold.

A USA National Science Foundation survey included the question "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?" The report released in 2014 said that a quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around,

But let's be fair here. It wasn't only US citizens that were flummoxed. Here are the results from a few other places.

This gave me a little chuckle.

For over 1500 years, the cosmic view of Ptolemy was generally accepted. That was that the Earth stood still and everything revolved around it. However that meant that explaining the observed orbits of the planets needed some very complicated fiddling. Putting the Sun at the center, as Copernicus proposed, explained some of the oddities, but not all of them. Orbital calculations were still messy. The reason the Copernican system didn't actually work out neatly was that it continued to accept that orbits were circular.

Views of the universe: Ptolemy vs. Copernicus

But we've had centuries to work out a lot of the kinks in our view of the Solar System. The work of Kepler, Newton and space probes have contributed.