Copernicus' Secret
How the Scientific Revolution Began
Preface
A flawed and complex man -- distant, obsequious, womanizing, but possessing a profoundly original and daring intellect -- started the scientific revolution. His name was Nicolaus Copernicus. He achieved this breakthrough when he published his seminal book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, the year that he died, aged seventy. The work provided the technical details for Copernicus's "heliocentric," or sun-centered, theory, the model of the universe that hypothesized that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun, and that the earth itself rotated once a day on its axis.
Prior to the publication of Copernicus's book, the Judeo-Christian world believed that a perfectly still earth rested in the center of God's universe, and that all heavenly bodies -- the sun, the other planets, the moon, and even the distant stars -- revolved around it. This conviction was based on the teachings of Aristotle and the writings of Claudius Ptolemy. The Church had long embraced the paradigm because it conformed to scripture a ... read full excerpt from: Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began ebook
