Curated category
Copernican Revolution
- Nicolaus CopernicusNicolaus Copernicus spent his final years in a small tower at Frombork, on the Baltic coast of Royal Prussia, watching the sky with a quadrant, a triquetrum…
- Galileo GalileiGalileo Galilei was born in Pisa on the 15th of February 1564, the first of six children of a leading lutenist. He died on the 8th of January 1642, aged 77…
- Copernican heliocentrismIn the 3rd century BCE, Aristarchus of Samos proposed what was, so far as is known, the first serious model of a heliocentric Solar System.
- Newton's laws of motionNewton's laws of motion are three physical laws describing how an object moves in relation to the forces acting on it. A body left alone stays at rest or…
- Galilean moonsThe Galilean moons are four worlds circling Jupiter, each one large enough to rank among the biggest objects in the Solar System.
- GeocentrismIn the 6th century BC, Anaximander proposed a cosmology where Earth stood as a section of a pillar at the center of everything.
- De revolutionibus orbium coelestiumDe revolutionibus orbium coelestium arrived in print in 1543, in Nuremberg, just before its author died. Nicolaus Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543…
- Johannes KeplerAt age six, Johannes Kepler was taken by his mother to a high place to look at the Great Comet of 1577. Three years later, in 1580, he was called outdoors to…
- Thomas DiggesThomas Digges entered the world around 1546. His father Leonard Digges worked as a mathematician and surveyor. Bridget Wilford served as his mother.
- Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia MathematicaPhilosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica arrived in the summer of 1687, and the world it entered would not survive it intact.
- Tycho BraheTycho Brahe was born on the 14th of December 1546, into one of Denmark's most powerful noble families, and he died having mapped the sky more precisely than…
- Kepler's laws of planetary motionJohannes Kepler stared at his calculation and could barely accept what it told him. "I first believed I was dreaming," he wrote, before steadying himself.