Copernicus: The Man Who Made A God

[Applause] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] there is a story often told about nicholas copernicus as much theological myth as folk history you might call it the founding myth of the scientific revolution it unfolds something like this prior to the modern era man lived in blinkered thrall to his own majesty confident of his place in a cosmos gifted him by divine right the center of the universe favored of the gods his eyes blinded by theology and philosophy unable to see the truth standing starkly before him then after thousands of years of darkness a new light emerged a mind unburdened by the primitive shackles of godly rites and human ego a mind who could finally reveal the truth that man had for so long willfully ignored he was not the center of god's cosmos in fact his place was so insignificant as to all but render him redundant in a cold black cavernous universe but despite this new mind named copernicus revealing the truth to the world religious and scientific authorities shunned the new reality in favor of their own and punished those who followed in his light by snuffing out their eyes and lives it is a compelling tale bold stark pugnacious and wrong in every particular the story of mankind's transition from an earth-centered to a sun-centered universe is long complex and not reducible to a single tired conflict narrative and it starts long before copernicus it is fair to say that as a species we have always been aware of the sun it is rather hard to miss even chimpanzees have been caught marveling at a beautiful sunset but historically our relationship with the sun is less straightforward than you might think while solar imagery pervades practically every religion ever conceived outright sun worship is surprisingly rare those obvious exceptions you're thinking of right now are pretty much all of them the great monuments of prehistoric northern europe such as newgrange lock crew and of course stonehenge are arrayed toward the sun at its solstice but without an oral tradition we can never know why was it in veneration or simply a means to mark the times when rights were to be performed solar myths often portray their subject as an addition a compliment to an already existing cosmos one preoccupied by gods or even humans in the best known creation myth of all genesis the light that god lets be at the start is not the light of the sun god doesn't place the sun into the heavens until day four after the vegetation quote let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times and days and years here the sun's value is as a timepiece not as a giver of life and nourishment in the theogony hesiod's account of the greek gods creation the sun helios is barely mentioned at the very end of the text almost as an afterthought day on the other hand appears right at the start once again showing independence from the lowly sun famously helios was depicted riding a chariot which his son phyton attempted to write himself only to die in the attempt the solar chariot can be seen across the indo-european religious spectrum appearing in baltic slavic and norse myths as well as the modern incarnation of the indo-european pantheon hinduism where he appears as surya though again his cult saura is one of the smallest of the hindu traditions he is also worshipped in the smarter tradition but only as one among equals in the mesopotamian tradition the sun called utu by the sumerians and shamash by the babylonians was the son of the moon and co-equal with his sister inanna the planet venus several native american tribes as well as the khoisan of the kalahari tell of a council of elders called to deal with the lack of light and the decision to create a sun in the case of the khoisan the sun was an unfortunate fellow with light shining from his armpits once the tribe realized that the higher he was the farther he lit they sneaked into his house while he slept and hurled him into the sky the navajos speak of the first man and the first woman conspiring with coyote born of water to forge the sun out of two entities turquoise boy and white shell girl among the iroquois the sky woman thrown to earth by her enraged husband fashions the sun and moon when she arrives on land oftentimes the sun is seen as a foe to be vanquished among the hopi tales are told of the rabbit who tormented by a capricious sun shoots it with an arrow ensuring it rises more cautiously forever more a similar myth occurs in china in which there were originally ten suns each rising on subsequent days but they were wild and mischievous and nearly burnt the world with their antics the great archer hao yi is forced to smite all but one of them in one of my favorite myths maui the polynesian trickster hero captures the sun and beats seven shades of frosting out of it until it agrees to slow its passage across the sky allowing humans more time to hunt and work all of these myths portray the sun not as a god to be worshipped but as a tool to be used and occasionally abused it would be remiss of me not to mention those obvious exceptions historically the great centers of sun worship were mesoamerica egypt japan and the inca empire of these it's fair to say that the mesoamericans particularly the aztecs carried the idea to its absolute extreme the great temple at the heart of tenochtitlan the aztec capital was dedicated to huizilla pochle god of the sun fire and war and his equal plaloch god of rain whitsilopochtli was also the god of the aztecs themselves and sacrifices which usually involved cutting people's hearts out on top of said temple had to be made to ensure not only the continued triumph of the empire but the dawn of each new day among the inca inti the sun god and god of farming was considered the ancestor of the royal family whose mummified corpses were laid in his temple in a striking cultural parallel the imperial family of japan is believed to be descended from amaterasu the sun goddess and founder of agriculture but no culture took sun worship as seriously for longer than egypt from the fifth dynasty in 2500 bc to the rise of christianity in the fourth century eighteen worship of the sun god ra who made his daily journey across the sky on his barge and then his nightly journey across the perilous underworld remained a cornerstone of egyptian culture even akhenaten the heretic emperor who for reasons of reform vanity or simple insanity attempted to usurp egypt's entire priestly class and replace them with a single church with himself as the head chose the sun disc or aten as the face of his one true god monotheism has since then gained a taste for solar imagery sulli invictus an early roman experiment with monotheism recast the sun as a war god and the artistic motifs we call halos are in fact preserved from depictions of greco-roman sun gods and are derived from the greek word halos meaning the sun disk the long battle to understand exactly what the sun was began somewhat meanderingly in ancient china one of the oldest surviving texts in chinese the e ching describes quote a star seen within the sun suggesting an observation of a sunspot as early as 1200 bc while the chinese observed solar eclipses they didn't understand them seeing them more as portents of heaven's displeasure with the concurrent emperor the book of han records an emperor's dowager lamenting this is on my account upon seeing an eclipse in ancient greece thales the philosopher whom carl sagan called the first scientist was able to predict an eclipse possibly by employing the 223-month eclipse cycle already known in mesopotamia though he too was unaware of why they occurred the first person on record to correctly determine the nature of eclipses was the ancient greek philosopher annex sagaris who lived during the 5th century bc his adoption of naturalistic causes made him an early exemplar of the scientific method but also got him tried and convicted in absentia for atheism not only did annex sagaris realize that eclipses were caused by the moon passing in front of the sun he also understood that the moon shone by reflecting the sun's light that said he also believed that the sun was a giant rock heated by its rapid spin and that meteorites were bits of it that had flown off which at least is comprehensive according to legend his tombstone read quote here lies annex sagaris whose picture of the order of the universe came closest to truth which at the time was arguably true unfortunately annex sagaris's philosophy would not be that which would carry into the future that honor belonged to plato and aristotle who unlike annex sagaris and his ilk soffit entwine the divine into their cosmology but their invocation of the divine was not as modern folk tradition conceives following an earlier philosopher named aneximonies they envisioned the universe as a series of interlocking spheres with the outermost sphere a shell studied with an array of fixed stars each sphere would connect to the other providing motion for each planet circling the earth for aristotle nothing could move without a force therefore beyond the final sphere there must exist a prime mover an entity that maintains the constant motion of the cosmos for future monotheisms the necessity of this prime mover would prove convenient to plato and aristotle circularity was the purest of motions as quote its extremities are equidistant from its center the figure of all figures most like itself the final sphere the bottom sphere was earth itself down from everywhere at once to aristotle the universe was starkly divided into two realms the higher realm of the heavens where all natural motions were perfect and divine and the lower realm of earth a place of death decay change and corruption where the only natural emotions are straight lines light things rose heavy things fell so fire moved up and earth moved down as the universe was a sphere there was no farther the earth could fall than the center and so there it lay inert and mortal the grounds at the bottom of the cosmic cup conversely the heavens were composed of ether the fifth element its proper motion circular without beginning without end to plato and aristotle the earth was the sepurating filth choked antithesis to the divine heavens alive during a time of war and destruction they could not envision positive change to them all change was entropy it was this denigration of the physical and the earthly not the collective gratification of the human ego that defined the geocentric understanding of the universe even into the middle ages to aristotle fire pure than vile earth cannot go down so dante has his hell forged of ice as one medieval thinker put it we inhabited quote the excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world the worst and least part of the universe in the lowest part of the house most removed from the heavenly arch earth was not the center of the universe it was at the center that is not to say that this morose cosmology was never challenged several greek philosophers such as nisitas and philileus had suggested that the earth rotated explaining the daily motions of the sun moon and fixed stars in one motion philileus a follower of pythagoras was also one of the first to suggest that the earth itself was moving though not around the sun but a vaguely defined concept called the central fire which no greek could see because it was supposedly always facing the opposite side of earth but no one carried the idea of the moving earth farther than aristarchus who was the first to suggest the sun not the earth was the center of the universe and that the earth revolved around it surprisingly aristarchus was not burned or stoned or even poisoned for his beliefs in fact he was regarded as one of the greatest natural philosophers of his time he had correctly calculated the distance to the moon made of failed though mathematically correct attempt to measure the size of the sun and even attempted to measure its distance from earth his belief in earth's motion was simply a philosophical eccentricity easily disproven by the simplest of observations if the earth moved why did the air or indeed anything not on the ground move with it why did objects when dropped from great heights land directly below their points of origin instead of slightly away from them these were not rhetorical straw man arguments they were legitimate scientific objections to the heliocentric model that would not be resolved for 2 000 years but aristotle's vision of the universe with its puzzle of interlinked spheres moving in perfect circular motions did not match observations either thanks to contact with babylon the greeks had access to hundreds of years of astronomical data and it made puzzling reading the planets were not obediently following their prescribed circular paths sometimes they moved one way sometimes another and sometimes they appear to pause as if in thought and change the direction often times they would appear brighter in the sky as if approaching earth while others they would appear dimmer these observations show that aristotle's vision of pure circular motions had to be wrong or at least incompletely right enter claudius ptolemy not to be confused with the royal ptolemies the last dynasty to rule egypt before it became a roman province though many people did for centuries claudius ptolemaeus was actually born about a century later and likely took his name from a town named for them we know next to nothing about ptolemy savor the works he left behind though they are certainly legacy enough his corpus is substantial and covers everything from psychology to geography to music from the scientific method to astrology but his best known works the ones for which people would paint him with a crown on his head a thousand years later were those on astronomy it is impossible to overstate the importance of ptolemy's mathematical syntaxis other than euclid's elements it was probably the most widely read textbook before the modern era and would remain the standard text in astronomy for over a thousand years so revered was it that later arabic scholars would call it al majesti the greatest today we call it the almagest written sometime around 150 a.d at the height of the roman empire yet still resolutely greek the almagest was a systematic attack on aristotle's perfect universe an almighty mathematical wrangle that hogtied and wrestled the cosmos until it made sense unifying babylonian arithmetic and observations with greek geometry the almagest used a small number of mathematical tricks to explain every observational oddity up to that point in the case of the sun ptolemy had to explain two primary motions its daily revolution east to west could be explained as the daily motion of all the heavens the second was its annual motion north to south as the year advances the sun gradually reaches its highest point in the sky called the summer solstice at this point the sun appears to stand still solstice means sun stand still and then slowly retreat to its lowest point the winter solstice this could be easily explained by an annual circular motion around the earth in the case of the planets however things get a lot more complicated and ptolemy could not resolve their emotions without a price that price was the abandonment of aristotle's vision of uniform circular motion to start while ptolemy still placed the earth at the center of the universe he realized that there was no reason for every orbit to be centered on the earth so he introduced an offset to the orbits of the five planets called the equinet that explained their unequal motions the second modification was the introduction of the epicycle a secondary orbit around a point on the primary orbit called the deferent this allowed ptolemy to explain such vagaries as planets moving backwards for its time when the best astronomical instruments available were astrolabes and your naked eyes the almagest was a work of transformative genius it answered every question the observations raised and provided a systematic mathematical model that fit the observed reality karl popper would have been proud such was the dominance of ptolemy's work that no one saw fit to question it for 13 centuries and then historians love to speak of the deeds of great men titans who forged new orders through blood and iron uber mentioned who reshaped reality through sheer force of will it is fair to say that niklas koepernick known today by his latin style copernicus was not one of those people a classic introverted nerd who saw no better goal in life than being well educated copernicus lived his life as one of those diligent attentive administrators upon whom civilization has always depended born in 1473 to german-speaking parents in the polish town of torun he would relocate to what he called his obscure corner of the earth the town of thrallenburg now from book on the baltic coast where barring his education he would spend the rest of his life while the polls have rightly claimed copernicus as one of their own his native tongue was german hence the german name niklas rather than the polish mikolai and he identified as german in his studies joining the german student union to the university of bologna given that copernicus spoke latin greek italian and even some hebrew it is generally assumed that he spoke polish as well as polish was becoming the language of the aristocracy though the vast majority of copernicus's correspondence was in latin as befits a lifelong scholar of the time it is important to remember that while copernicus was a subject of the kingdom of poland that political entity had little to do with the state that bears that name today in fact by the time of copernicus's birth poland had unified with the grand duchy of lithuania to create a sprawling empire that encompassed most of eastern europe including sorry vlad much of modern ukraine after losing his father at the age of 10 copernicus was adopted by his maternal uncle lucas watson rodi an ambitious cleric of the local diocese of varmia who likely saw in his bright nephew a chance to mold a scion in his own image as a canon or non-ordained administrator of the local cathedral he determined that copernicus should be won as well and to that end saw to his extensive education first to krakow university and then at the university of bologna bologna was in modern terms a party school most of its students were older and already in employment so they could hold the professors in check copernicus appears to have been one of the exceptions to this while officially there to study canon law he undertook studies of astronomy and even aided the university's astronomy professor dominico maria navarra in his observations notably novara was an outspoken critic of ptolemy and claimed that his own observations disprove the ptolemaic system the sources are vague as to exactly why copernicus then spent some years at padua the medical school where galileo would one day teach and where he gained would ultimately be his most personally useful skill despite never obtaining a medical degree copernicus's main value to his superiors throughout his career was as a personal physician you may wonder what about medicine would attract two of the greatest astronomical thinkers of the post-medieval world but at the time medicine was still largely magic and guesswork and an ability to cast decent horoscopes was considered a vital qualification for medical practice in 1503 copernicus at last assumed the duties of a cannon a job for which he'd been receiving a pre-bend for much of the previous decade his uncle lucas had been appointed bishop of varmia in 1489 and copernicus became his secretary and personal doctor as such he was required to attend local prussian parliaments and once even the coronation of the polish king sigismund in 1506 for the most part however copernicus's job was to see to the financial affairs of the diocese of varmia which was less a church than an independent princeton under the king of poland this involved settling disputes between peasants granting charity to those deemed in need and redistributing the lands of peasants who had been hanged or run away the fact that copernicus was less than enthusiastic about this job can be inferred both from the seven years he took to obtain his canon law degree and by the fact that his secretarial notes included sketches of a solar eclipse and a grand conjunction of jupiter and saturn regardless copernicus proved to be a savant at finance after his works on astronomy arguably his greatest accomplishment was formulating what we now call gresham's law a rule of economics that states that debasing currencies by clipping or decreasing purity causes actually valuable coinage to fall from circulation despite his recommendations the noble class obsessed with minting cheap money to fight their wars didn't listen he also performed a sensitive mathematical calculation to determine the precise method of maintaining the price of bread at the quote just price of a penny a loaf in both lean times and good in 1512 when copernicus was 40 lucas died and copernicus returned permanently to frauenberg despite many chances to move to more comfortable quarters copernicus stayed in his outer tower which could act as an observatory his passion for astronomy seemed only to have increased in the intervening years he added to his observatory at his own expense including an armillary sphere a spherical asteroid better known today as that thing in the game of thrones title sequence and in 1514 copernicus was confident enough to tentatively and quietly elucidate his most peculiar fantastical and outlandish idea one that had doubtless been stewing in his mind since his university days his commentariolus literally little notebook but usually translated as brief sketch was a short its english printed version runs just 17 pages handwritten text initially circulated solely between close friends and colleagues but it contained one of the most daring visions of the universe ever conceived in it copernicus vented his frustrations with the ptolemaic system perhaps passed down from ferrara in particular with the equine quote for those theories were not adequate unless certain equines were also conceived then it appeared that a planet moved uniform velocity neither upon its deferent nor upon the center of the epicycle hence a system of this sort seemed neither sufficiently absolute nor sufficiently pleasing to the mind unquote copernicus appeared furious at ptolemy for destroying the aesthetically pleasing universe of aristotle epicycles were one thing but you can't have uniform circular motion with an equine if the planets were offset from the earth then by definition they must cover longer distances in the same times and therefore had to change their velocity this may have been circular motion but it certainly wasn't uniform copernicus then cites quote the pythagoreans presumably a reference to philileus as having previously pondered an alternate construction of the cosmos one in which the earth moved why he mentioned the oddball ideas of philalius not the more straightforward vision of aristarcus of which we know he was also aware is unknown he then laid out a series of postulates that collectively turned the universe inside out all planets revolve around the sun as their midpoint he said and therefore the sun is the center of the universe whatever motion appears in the firmament arises not from the motion of the firmament but from the earth's motion what appear to us as emotions of the sun arise not from its motion but from the motion of the earth the apparent retrograde and direct motion of the planets arises not from their motion but from earth's but perhaps the most mind-bending postulates were the first two there is no one center of all the celestial circles or spheres the center of the earth is not the center of the universe but only of gravity and of the moon's orbit in aristotle's universe there was only one down and earth was it copernicus anticipating the revolution of isaac newton over a century later envisioned a universe not of one down but of many downs to preserve aristotle's perfect circles copernicus abandoned aristotle's reality and here's the kicker it wasn't necessary in 1247 the persian astronomer nasir aldine altusy developed what we now call the 2c couple a perfect circle rolling along the inside of another perfect circle that could mimic the effect of a straight line and thus remove the need for an equinet more bizarrely still there is evidence that copernicus was at least aware of something resembling a tucey couple in his own mathematical work so did he just not make the connection at this point it becomes necessary to step out of copernicus's cloistered life and examine the greater world in which he found himself it is perhaps not a coincidence that copernicus happened to live at one of those moments in history in which reality finds itself on a fulcrum twenty years before his birth the fall of constantinople to islam led to a flood of refugee greek scholars entering europe bringing with them their reams of preserved greek philosophical and scientific texts that same year saw the death of johannes gutenberg whose printing press made the mass dissemination of knowledge possible when copernicus was at university columbus returned from the new world and while he was attending to his canonical duties the magellan expedition circumnavigated the globe but it was one particular paradigm shift that would have the most direct impact on copernicus both personally as a professional cleric and in his decision to disseminate his controversial ideas in 1517 a choleric german preacher named martin luther nailed 95 disputations with the clergy on the door of all saints church in wittenberg an act that would within 20 years shatter christianity in northern europe german-speaking regions quickly turn to this new religion but poland remained and remains staunchly catholic for the german-speaking copernicus the schism would doubtless have been very personal we know next to nothing about copernicus's religious beliefs an awkward admission in a biography of a career clergyman but nonetheless true if copernicus had theological opinions he did not danger share them with the world he was a cannon a position that required a vow of celibacy but despite many opportunities to do so never took full orders to become a priest the decision that doubtless frustrated his uncle lucas who likely wanted to see him follow in his footsteps nonetheless his life was awash with catholicism his best friend and colleague was tita mangiza the bishop of kun who had been a canon with copernicus for 30 years we can get some idea of copernicus's reaction to the reformation through antilogicon flosculorum luthenorum a treatise that he urged giza to publish in it giza strikes a markedly conciliatory tone quote oh if the lutherans were filled with the christian spirit towards the romans and the romans filled with christian spirit toward the lutherans the tragedy would not have taken place in our churches unfortunately the then bishop of varmia mauritius ferber and his successor johannes dantiscus did not share copernicus's liberal convictions they saw the rise of protestantism as a plague to be stamped out and not only banned all protestants from varmia but believed that the foundations of their church had to be strengthened and hounded their canons including copernicus for their refusal to take higher orders they were particularly peave with the supposedly celibate cannons engaging in shameless coupling to the point of raising entire legitimate families copernicus was not above suspicion his relationship with his housekeeper anna schilling was under constant scrutiny and he was ordered more than once to get rid of her eventually he did by moving her into a nearby house this was the only dispute with the church copernicus triggered in his entire life thankfully ferber was also gout ridden and copernicus's skills as a physician made him too useful to exile this was the world into which copernicus's brief sketch was released it is unknown how far it circulated or whether in 1539 it directly inspired a 25 year old professor of mathematics named joachim ereticus to make the 800 kilometer journey from wittenberg to frahenberg to see copernicus both reticus and wittenberg were staunchly protestant but his fascination with copernicus's ideas trumped any sectarian reservations he may have had frauenberg was the last station on a kind of astronomical pilgrimage reticus had undertaken that had also seen him learn from peter appian the man who proved that comet's tales were caused by the sun copernicus must have looked on reticus's of rival with something like horror protestants were still barred from varmia and taking him in would have been a crime wasn't as if protestants had been all that receptive to his ideas martin luther himself had scoffed at copernicus citing the book of joshua in which god makes the sun stand still as scriptural evidence against it copernicus's own church conversely had been strikingly positive his old friend bishop giza had prompted him to publish his ideas for years and while ferber and dantiscus may have chided copernicus for his supposed indiscretions neither raised any objections to his heliocentrism copernicus's reluctance to publish his work had more to do with fear of ridicule than persecution in his dedication to pope paul iii he wrote quote the contempt which i have to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work i had begun somehow despite this ocean of ambivalence copernicus and reticus struck up a close friendship and stayed together for two years reticus's fascination with copernicus's ideas appears to have been largely astrological in 1496 in his book disputations against divinatory astrology the italian philosopher giovanni pico de la marandola had argued that since astrologers couldn't determine the relative positions of mercury and venus they could never be certain of their predictions from a geocentric perspective both mercury and venus appear to take roughly a year to orbit the earth but in copernicus's world mercury and venus have fixed relative positions reticus sold copernicus's work on how it would impact astrology and even employed it to make astrological predictions how ironic that astrologers never took him up on it copernicus's own attitude toward astrology is uncertain the word appears only once in his writings but as a medical practitioner he'll most certainly cast horoscopes another aspect of copernicus's vision that attracted ureticus is that it provided a simple explanation for precession precession is a phenomenon first noted by the gifted greek astronomer hipparchus in about 150 bc from a geocentric perspective as the sphere of fixed stars spins unknowably fast every day it also appears to rock very slowly backwards by about one degree every century this causes the sun's orbit to slowly shift constellations over time because the year was and still is measured from the spring equinox the shift is usually marked by the location of the sun at the spring equinox the solution to the precession of the equinoxes a term coined by copernicus was to add another starless sphere beyond the sphere of the fixed stars but there were two problems with this one it flatly contradicted aristotle who claimed his prime mover which later christians called god was the only thing beyond the fixed stars and second while ptolemy mentions precession in the almagest he does not suggest a solution to it copernicus's solution was absurdly simple and as it happens right just as the day was created by the earth spin on its axis and the year by its orbit around the sun so precession was caused by an epically slow wobble in the earth's spin similar to the wobble you see as a spinning top winds down only revolving once every twenty six thousand years it was reticus who would ultimately convince copernicus now 68 and nearing death to finally publish his world shaking idea the revolutionary orbium celestium or on the revolution of the heavenly spheres was the final summation of copernicus's heliocentrism deliberately modeled on ptolemy's almagest it not only quoted him but relied extensively on his data by all accounts copernicus was not a good astronomer he is recorded as making just 70 astronomical observations one of which was off by the diameter of the moon although his previous little sketch had relied on just 34 circles to explain all motions rather than the 40 or so that had gradually piled onto ptolemy de revolutionibus upped that number to 48 meaning his alternate vision was neither simpler than ptolemy's nor less cumbersome so intent was copernicus in saving aristotle's blushes by preserving perfect uniform circular motion that he was blind to the true simplicity at the core of heliocentrism johannes kepler the man who would eventually unlock that simplicity by showing that planets orbited in ellipses not perfect circles chided that quote copernicus was content to interpret ptolemy rather than nature in response to the inevitable objections to his heliocentric view in particular how the motion of the earth does not disturb the motion of the air he wrote if anyone believes that the earth rotates surely he will hold that its motion is natural not violent but what is in accordance with nature produces effects contrary to those resulting from violence since things to which force or violence is applied must disintegrate and cannot long endure on the other hand that which is brought into existence by nature is well ordered and preserved in its best state this statement is essentially true and would be seen as such once newton was vindicated in the 18th century but it reads like a cop out and so it was never taken all that seriously with the manuscript hot in his hands reticus traveled to protestant nuremberg but the local hostility to copernicus's ideas forced him to flee to leipzig where he handed the job of publishing the book to a protestant clergyman named andreas ostiander so a book written by a catholic canon and dedicated to the pope ultimately found a publisher in a dedicated protestant but oceander will not let the work out into the world untamed before publication he swapped out copernicus's own introduction with a disclaimer stating that the work was not intended to be taken literally but was simply a useful simplification reticus's response upon seeing the disclaimer was to draw a massive red x through it upon its publication the response to dev revolutionipus was non-existent the book didn't sell well and wouldn't see a reprint for 26 years its one intended reader paul iii died before its publication and so never saw it even copernicus barely lived to see it published legend has him clutching the book with his dying hands his mind wandering in and out of consciousness nonetheless copernicus's astronomical tables kept his name alive while his heliocentric universe was not a functional improvement over ptolemy's many did find its lack of an equine made it easier to use it was only with time and the continued rise of protestantism that the catholic church's view of copernicus's ideas began to shift protestantism has always been a flexible faith and adapted to copernicus's universe very quickly catholicism's response was to dig in in 1616 143 years after the book's initial publication and smack dab in the middle of its confrontation with galileo the vatican finally placed de revolutionimus on its list of banned books it would not be removed until 1835. once the work of kepler newton and haley finally overturned the geocentric system a strange process of deification began copernicus's role in history was uprooted replanted and rewritten from a modest dedicated cleric with an odd idea copernicus became a sort of messiah of insignificance a living embodiment of how nature undoes the folly of man's arrogance according to science writer mano singham this was because once mankind became aware of the true awesomeness and power of the sun its place became special and that specialness was retroactively applied to the geocentric world because they thought the sun was special they assumed that the ancients thought the earth was special when they did not as we have seen most early religions did not view the sun as particularly special either it was a functional object a necessary but highly remarkable adjunct to our world and yet because we know the sun for the monstrous titan it really is we gravitate to those few religions like the aztecs inca and egyptians that held the sun in high esteem because to us they make sense as a modern technological society we have become ever more aware that we exist at the whim of the sun from worries about global warming to the hole in the ozone layer to what nightmares could unfold if a particularly bad flare knocked out our satellite network we live in unspoken awe and terror of the sun one of the many books i read for this video called copernicus the man who dethroned god the title the pious man would likely have bristled at but in the nod way by placing this new sun in our minds copernicus may have inadvertently created a god instead [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

2022-06-23 09:57

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