Who is copernicus and what was his theory?
Polish name: Mikolaj Kopernik. Polish astronomer and mathematician who, as a student, studied canon law, mathematics, and medicine at Cracow, Bologna, Rome, Padua, and Ferrara. Copernicus became interested in astronomy and published an early description of his “heliocentric” model of the solar system in Commentariolus (1512). In this model, the sun Eric Weisstein’s World of Astronomy was actually not exactly the center of the solar system, but was slightly offset from the center using a device invented by Ptolemy known as the equant point. The idea that the Sun Eric Weisstein’s World of Astronomy was the center of the solar system was not new (similar theories had been proposed by Aristarchus and Nicholas of Cusa), but Copernicus also worked out his system in full mathematical detail. Even though the mathematics in his description was not any simpler than Ptolemy’s, it required fewer basic assumptions. By postulating only the rotation of the Earth, Eric Weisstein’s World of Astronomy r
Early astronomers believed the sky to be a hollow globe with stars stuck to the inner surface like sparkling diamonds. Ptolemy viewed the earth as the center of the universe, whereas Copernicus believed the planets all revolved around a stationary sun . In the year 1543 Copernicus published a work in which he refuted the old idea that the sun and all the stars revolved around the earth as a center, as was then taught in all the universities. Though he was right, his theory was rejected. By the end of his schooling, Nicolaus Copernicus had become a doctor of canon law, a mathematician, and a medical doctor. He was also an expert in Greek, being the first person to translate a document from Greek directly into Polish.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) was the first European astronomer to formulate a modern heliocentric theory of the solar system in opposition to Ptolemy’s earlier geocentric theory. He was a Polish astronomer who proposed that the planets have the Sun as the fixed point to which their motions are to be referred; that the Earth is a planet which, besides orbiting the Sun annually, also turns once daily on its own axis; and that very slow, long-term changes in the direction of this axis account for the precession of the equinoxes.
