READ: Nicolaus Copernicus

Have you ever heard the expression “Renaissance man?” The phrase describes a well-educated person who excels in a wide variety of subjects or fields. The Renaissance is the name for a period in European history, the 14th through the 17th centuries, when the continent emerged from the “Dark Ages” with a renewed interest in the arts and sciences. European scholars were rediscovering Greek and Roman knowledge, and educated Europeans felt that humans were limitless in their thinking capacities and should embrace all types of knowledge.

Nicolaus Copernicus fulfilled the Renaissance ideal. He became a mathematician, an astronomer, a church jurist with a doctorate in law, a physician, a translator, an artist, a Catholic cleric, a governor, a diplomat, and an economist. He spoke German, Polish, and Latin, and understood Greek and Italian.

Nicolaus was born February 19, 1473 to wealthy parents who lived in the center of what is now Poland. His father, named Nicolaus Koppernigk, was a copper merchant from Krakow, and his mother, Barbara Watzenrode, was the daughter of a wealthy local merchant. Nicolaus was the youngest of four children; he had a brother and two sisters. His father died when he was 10 and his mother at about the same time. His mother’s brother adopted Nicolaus and his siblings and secured the future of each of them.

This maternal uncle, Lucas Watzenrode, was a wealthy, powerful man in Warmia, a small province in northeast Poland under the rule of a prince-bishop. Since 1466 Warmia had been part of the kingdom of Poland, but the king allowed it to govern itself. Watzenrode became the prince-bishop in Warmia when Copernicus was 16. Three years later he sent Copernicus and his brother to the University of Krakow, where Copernicus studied from 1492 to 1496. He was in his first year at the university when Columbus sailed to a continent that was then unknown in Europe. Copernicus changed his last name, Koppernigk, to its Latin version while at the university, since scholars used Latin as their common language.

At Krakow Copernicus studied mathematics and Greek and Islamic astronomy. After studying at Krakow, Copernicus’s uncle sent him to Italy, where he studied law at the University of Bologna for four years, and then medicine at the University of Padua for two years. These were two of the earliest and best European universities and Copernicus had to travel two months by foot and horseback to reach Italy.

At these universities, Copernicus began to question what he was taught. For example, his professors at Krakow taught about both Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s views of the Universe. However, Copernicus became aware of the contradictions between Aristotle’s theory of the Earth, the Sun and the planets as a system of concentric spheres and Ptolemy’s use of eccentric orbits and epicycles. Even though his professors believed that the Earth was in the center of the Universe and it did not move, Copernicus began to question those ideas. While at the University of Padua, there is some evidence that he had already developed the idea of a new system of cosmology based on the movement of the Earth.

Copernicus returned to Warmia in 1503, at age 30, to live in his uncle’s castle and serve as his secretary and physician. He stayed at this job, which gave him free time to continue his observations of the heavens, until 1510, two years before his uncle’s death.

Thanks to help from his uncle, Copernicus was elected in 1497 a canon of the cathedral in Frombork, a town in Warmia on the Baltic Sea coast. Canons were responsible for administering all aspects of a cathedral. Copernicus did not assume his position there until 1510, when he took a house outside the cathedral walls and an apartment inside a tower of the fortifications. He had many duties as canon, including mapmaking, collecting taxes and managing the money, serving as a secretary, and practicing medicine. He led a half-religious, half-secular life and still managed to continue his astronomical observations from his tower apartment. He conducted these with devices that looked like wooden yardsticks joined together, set up to measure the angular altitude of stars and planets and the angles between two distant bodies in the sky. He had a simple metal tube to look through, but no telescope had yet been invented.

By 1514 Copernicus had written a short report that he circulated among his astronomy-minded friends. This report, called the Little Commentary, expounded his heliocentric theory. He omitted mathematical calculations for the sake of brevity, but he confidently asserted that the Earth both revolved on its axis and orbited around the Sun. This solved many of the problems he found with Ptolemy’s model, especially the lack of uniform circular motion.

By 1531 the bishop-prince of Warmia believed that Copernicus had a mistress, Anna Schilling, whom he called his housekeeper. The next bishop-prince worked persistently to force Copernicus to give up his companion. Lutheran Protestantism was springing up nearby, as cities, dukes, and kings renounced their loyalty to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church responded by trying to enforce more obedience to its rules. However, Copernicus and Schilling managed to keep seeing each other, although not living together, until much later when she moved to the city of Gdansk.

By 1532 Copernicus had mostly completed a detailed astronomical manuscript he had been working on for 16 years. He had resisted publishing it for fear of the ensuing controversy and out of hope for more data. Finally, in 1541, the 68-year-old Copernicus agreed to publication, supported by a mathematician friend, Georg Rheticus, a professor at the University of Wittenberg, in Germany. Rheticus had traveled to Warmia to work with Copernicus, and then took his manuscript to a printer in Nuremberg, Johannes Petreius, who was known for publishing books on science and mathematics. Copernicus gave his master work the Latin title De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (translated to English as On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres).

In this work Copernicus began by describing the shape of the Universe. He provided a diagram to help the reader. In the diagram he showed the outer circle that contained all the fixed stars, much further away than previously believed. Inside the fixed stars were Saturn, then Jupiter and Mars, then Earth, Venus, and Mercury, all in circular orbits around the Sun in the center.

He calculated the time required for each planet to complete its orbit and was off by only a bit. Copernicus’s theory can be summarized like this.

Legend has it that Copernicus, in a sickbed when his great work was published, awoke from a stroke-induced coma to look at the first copy of his book when it was brought to him. He was able to see and appreciate his accomplishment, and then closed his eyes and died peacefully, on May 24, 1543. Thus he avoided both scorn and praise.

Copernicus was thought to be buried in the cathedral at Frombork, but no marker existed. Some of his bones were finally identified there, with a DNA match from a strand of his hair found in a book owned by him, and in 2010 he was given a new burial in the same spot, now marked with a black granite tombstone.

The Roman Catholic Church waited seven decades to take any action against On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. Why it waited so long has been the subject of much debate. In 1616 the Church issued a decree suspending On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres until it could be corrected and prohibiting any work that defended the movement of Earth. A correction appeared in 1620, and in 1633 Galileo Galilei was convicted of grave suspicion of heresy for following Copernicus’s position.

Scholars did not generally accept the heliocentric view until Isaac Newton, in 1687, formulated the Law of Universal Gravitation. This law explained how gravity would cause the planets to orbit the much more massive Sun and why the small moons around Jupiter and Earth orbited their home planets.

How long did it take for Copernicus’s ideas to reach the general public? Does anyone nowadays still believe the apparent evidence before their eyes that the Sun moves around the Earth to set and rise? Almost everyone learns in childhood that, despite appearances, the Earth moves around the Sun.

Copernicus’s model asked people to give up thinking that they lived in the center of the Universe. For him the thought of the Sun illuminating all of the planets as they rotated around it had a sense of great beauty and simplicity.