Nicolaus Copernicus

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicolaus 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, and an armillary sphere. These were primitive instruments modeled on ancient ones. With them he conducted over half of his more than 60 registered astronomical observations. The man at those instruments held a doctorate in canon law, not a chair in astronomy. He was a church canon, a physician, a diplomat, an economist, and a translator of Greek. Yet the book he wrote moved the Earth out of the center of the universe and put the Sun there instead. Legend says he was handed the final printed pages of that book on the day he died, the 24th of May 1543, awoke from a stroke-induced coma to look at it, and then died peacefully at age 70. How did a canon in a remote Prussian cathedral arrive at an idea that would trigger the Copernican Revolution? Why did he resist publishing it for decades? And why, when the book finally appeared, did the first attacks come not from where you might expect? The answers run through Italian universities, a powerful uncle, a debased currency, and a quarrel over whether mathematics could describe the real world.

• 2. The Uncle Who Made Him

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  Lucas Watzenrode the Younger was once called "the devil incarnate" by the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order. He was Copernicus's maternal uncle, and after Copernicus's father died around 1483, when the boy was 10, Watzenrode took the child under his wing and saw to his education and career. Six years later, in 1489, Watzenrode was elected Bishop of Warmia, against the preference of King Casimir IV, who had hoped to install his own son in that seat. The quarrel that followed lasted until the king's death three years later. Watzenrode then formed close relations with three successive Polish monarchs: John I Albert, Alexander Jagiellon, and Sigismund I the Old. He became a friend and key advisor to each ruler. His wealth, connections, and influence let him secure his nephew's path to a canon's stall at Frombork Cathedral. Copernicus served as his uncle's secretary and physician from 1503, residing in the bishop's castle at Lidzbark, where he began work on his heliocentric theory. He accompanied Watzenrode to sessions of the Royal Prussian diet and into a complex diplomatic game played, in the words of two historians, "between hostility to the Order and loyalty to the Polish Crown." When Watzenrode died on the 29th of March 1512, Copernicus had already begun a life of service that would keep him tied to Warmia for forty years.

• 3. An Italian Education

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  In the winter semester of 1491-92, a student registered at the University of Kraków as "Nicolaus Nicolai de Thuronia." He matriculated alongside his brother Andrew during the heyday of the Kraków astronomical-mathematical school. There he absorbed arithmetic, geometry, geometric optics, cosmography, and the writings of Aristotle. He left without taking a degree, probably in the fall of 1495. By late 1496 Copernicus had arrived in Bologna, where he signed himself into the register of the university's "German nation." He devoted himself less to canon law than to the humanities and to astronomy. In Bologna he met the astronomer Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara and became his disciple and assistant. On the 9th of March 1497 the two observed the occultation of Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus, by the Moon. The jubilee year 1500 found Copernicus in Rome, where he observed a lunar eclipse on the night of the 5th to the 6th of November and, by a later account, delivered public lectures as a "Professor Mathematum." He then studied medicine at the University of Padua, famous as a seat of medical learning. On the 31st of May 1503, at Ferrara, having passed the obligatory examinations, he was granted the degree of Doctor of Canon Law. Soon after, at latest in the fall of 1503, he left Italy for good. The 30-year-old returned to Warmia to live out his remaining forty years.

• 4. The Heliocentric Idea

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  Some time before 1514, Copernicus made available to friends a manuscript known as the Commentariolus, the "Little Commentary." It was a succinct description of his heliocentric mechanism, without mathematical apparatus, and he never intended it for printed distribution. He made only a very few copies for his closest acquaintances. The Commentariolus listed the assumptions on which his theory rested. There is no one center of all the celestial circles. The center of the Earth is not the center of the universe, but only the center toward which heavy bodies move and the center of the lunar sphere. All the spheres surround the Sun as if it were in the middle of them all. The Earth performs a complete rotation on its fixed poles in a daily motion. What appear as motions of the Sun arise from the motion of the Earth, with which we revolve about the Sun like any other planet. The apparent retrograde motion of the planets arises not from their motion but from the Earth's. Copernicus was not the first to move the Earth. A similar heliocentric model had been developed eighteen centuries earlier by Aristarchus of Samos, though Copernicus likely arrived at his independently. Philolaus had placed a Central Fire, different from the Sun, at the center. Heraclides Ponticus proposed that the Earth rotates on its axis. A tradition criticizing Ptolemy had also developed within Islamic astronomy, climaxing with Ibn al-Haytham of Basra's "Doubts Concerning Ptolemy." Copernicus used what is now known as the Urdi lemma and the Tusi couple, and cited al-Battani, Thabit ibn Qurra, al-Zarqali, Averroes, and al-Bitruji in his great work.

• 5. The Long Reluctance

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  At about 1532, Copernicus had basically completed the manuscript of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. He resisted publishing it, not wishing, as he confessed, to risk the scorn "to which he would expose himself on account of the novelty and incomprehensibility of his theses." Rumors of his theory had already reached educated people all over Europe. In 1533, Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter delivered lectures in Rome outlining the theory; Pope Clement VII and several cardinals heard them and were interested, and the Pope gave Widmannstetter a valuable gift. On the 1st of November 1536, Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg, Archbishop of Capua, wrote to Copernicus from Rome. He entreated the "most learned sir" to communicate his discovery to scholars and to send his writings on the sphere of the universe. The breakthrough came in 1539, when Georg Joachim Rheticus, a Wittenberg mathematician, arrived in Frombork. Rheticus became Copernicus's pupil, stayed for two years, and wrote Narratio prima, the First Account, outlining the essence of the theory. Under strong pressure from Rheticus, Copernicus finally agreed to give the manuscript to his close friend Tiedemann Giese, bishop of Chełmno, to be delivered for printing by Johannes Petreius at Nuremberg. Rheticus supervised the printing but had to leave before it was completed. He handed the task to a Lutheran theologian, Andreas Osiander, who added an unauthorized and unsigned preface arguing that the hypotheses "need not be true nor even probable."

• 6. Coins, Medicine, And Duty

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  In 1526, Copernicus wrote a study on the value of money titled "Monetae cudendae ratio." In it he formulated an early version of the principle that bad, debased coinage drives good coinage out of circulation, several decades before Thomas Gresham, after whom Gresham's law is named. He had already, in 1517, set down a quantity theory of money, a principal concept in modern economics. For years he advised the Royal Prussian sejmik on monetary reform, and his recommendations were widely read by leaders of both Prussia and Poland. During 1516-1521, Copernicus resided at Olsztyn Castle as economic administrator. He wrote a manuscript, Locationes mansorum desertorum, aiming to populate deserted fiefs with industrious farmers. When Olsztyn was besieged during the Polish-Teutonic War, Copernicus directed the defense by Royal Polish forces and later represented the Polish side in peace negotiations. Copernicus the physician treated his uncle, his brother, and other chapter members, and later attended the elderly bishops of Warmia. In the spring of 1541, Duke Albert, the former Grand Master of the Teutonic Order who had converted his realm into the Lutheran Duchy of Prussia, summoned Copernicus to Königsberg to attend a counselor, George von Kunheim, who had fallen seriously ill. Copernicus went willingly; the two had many intellectual interests in common. In about a month the patient recovered. Copernicus's life was not all sky and study: from at least 1531 until 1539, his relations with Anna Schilling, a live-in housekeeper, were seen as scandalous by two bishops of Warmia, and she was banished from Frombork in spring 1539.

• 7. The First Attacks

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  The immediate result of the 1543 publication was only mild controversy. The first attacks on Copernicus came from Protestants. Wilhelm Gnapheus, a Dutch refugee in Elbląg, wrote a Latin comedy, Morosophus, The Foolish Sage, caricaturing Copernicus as a haughty, aloof man rumored to have written a large work moldering in a chest. Philipp Melanchthon wrote that it was absurd to extol "so crazy a thing, like that Polish astronomer who makes the earth move and the sun stand still," adding that "wise governments ought to repress impudence of mind." Martin Luther, during dinner on the 4th of June 1539, reportedly remarked that whoever wants to be clever must overturn the whole of astronomy, but that he believed the Holy Scriptures, "for Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth." The sharpest scriptural conflict concerned the Battle of Gibeon in the Book of Joshua, where Joshua's prayers caused the Sun and Moon to stand still. The Catholic Church took no official action for six decades. The first notable Catholic to move against the theory was the Dominican Giovanni Maria Tolosani, who obtained a copy of De revolutionibus in 1544 and denounced it the next year in an appendix to an unpublished work. Tolosani argued that Copernicus had assumed the motion of the Earth but offered no physical theory for it, and that he had reasoned backwards. He charged that Copernicus "is expert indeed in the sciences of mathematics and astronomy, but he is very deficient in the sciences of physics and logic." Tolosani's work remained unpublished, a "dormant" viewpoint. Catholic opposition only commenced seventy-three years after publication, occasioned by Galileo, when the Roman Inquisition prohibited the work in 1616.

• 8. Slow To Catch On

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  Sixty years after the publication of On the Revolutions, scholars hold that only around 15 astronomers across all of Europe espoused Copernicanism. They included Thomas Digges and Thomas Harriot in England, Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei in Italy, Diego Zuniga in Spain, Simon Stevin in the Low Countries, and the largest group in Germany, among them Rheticus, Michael Maestlin, and Johannes Kepler. The intellectual climate remained dominated by Aristotelian philosophy and Ptolemaic astronomy. There was little reason to accept the new theory except for its mathematical simplicity, achieved by avoiding the equant. Tycho Brahe even devised a competing system in which the Earth stood still, the Sun revolved about the Earth, and the other planets revolved about the Sun. Substantial evidence for Copernicanism appeared only a half-century later. It began when Galileo formulated the principle of inertia, which helped explain why everything would not fall off a moving Earth. The heliocentric view was generally accepted only after Isaac Newton, in his 1687 Principia, formulated the universal law of gravitation and unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics. The man himself lay long undisturbed. For over two centuries, searchers hunted in vain for his remains beneath Frombork Cathedral. In 2004, a team led by Jerzy Gąssowski began a new search; in August 2005 they found bones they believed were his. DNA from the grave matched hair samples found in a book Copernicus had owned, kept at the University of Uppsala. On the 22nd of May 2010, Copernicus was given a second funeral. His black granite tombstone names him the founder of the heliocentric theory and a church canon, and bears a golden Sun encircled by six of the planets.