Nicolaus Copernicus

Copernicus was born in Toruń in 1473 and raised by an uncle who became a bishop, an advantage that secured him a canonry at Frombork and the freedom to study. He read law and medicine in Italy, learned Greek, and returned north to a life divided between church administration, medicine, and astronomy.

Working from his own observations and from the records of ancient astronomers, he came to distrust the tangled system of epicycles that kept the Earth at the center. In De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, published in the year of his death, he set out a model in which the Earth turns daily on its axis and travels yearly around the Sun.

He was cautious, and the book appeared with a preface — added by a Lutheran theologian — describing the model as a convenience for calculation rather than a claim about the world. Kepler and Galileo read it as the latter, and the center of the universe began to move.

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