Copernican Revolution
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The Copernican Revolution refers to the paradigm shift away from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which placed Earth at the center of the Universe. It was one of the starting points for the Scientific Revolution of the 16th Century.
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[edit] Historical overview
Nicolaus Copernicus, in his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), demonstrated that the motion of the heavens can be explained without the Earth being in the geometric center of the system, so the assumption that we are observing from a special position can be dispensed with. Although Copernicus initiated the revolution, he certainly didn't complete it. He continued to believe in the celestial spheres and could provide little in the way of direct observational evidence that his theory was superior to Ptolemy's.
The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, while remaining a geocentric, contributed to the revolution by showing that the heavenly spheres were at best mathematical devices rather than physical objects, since the great comet of 1577 passed through the spheres of several planets, and, moreover, the spheres of Mars and the Sun passed through each other. Tycho and his assistants also made the numerous and painstaking observations which allowed Johannes Kepler to derive his laws of planetary motion. Kepler's revised heliocentric system gave a far more accurate description of planetary motions than the Ptolemaic one.
Starting with his first use of the telescope for astronomical observations in 1610, Galileo Galilei provided strong support for the Copernican system by observing the phases of Venus (predicted by Copernicus but not Ptolemy) and the moons of Jupiter (which showed that the apparently anomalous orbit of the Moon in Copernicus' theory was not unique). Galileo also wrote the classic defense of the heliocentric system, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), which lead to his trial and house arrest by the inquisition.
In the same period, a number of writers inspired by Copernicus, such as Thomas Digges and Giordano Bruno, argued for an infinite or at least indefinitely extended universe, with other stars as distant suns. Although opposed by Copernicus and Kepler (with Galileo agnostic), by the middle of the 17th century this became widely accepted, partly due to the support of René Descartes.
The Copernican revolution was arguably completed by Isaac Newton whose Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) provided a consistent physical explanation which showed that the planets are kept in their orbits by the familiar force of gravity. Newton was able to derive Kepler's laws as good approximations and to get yet more accurate predictions by taking account of the gravitational interaction between the planets.
[edit] Metaphoric Use
The philosopher Immanuel Kant used the expression "Copernican revolution" to describe the effect that his critical method would have on traditional metaphysics.[1] The conditions and qualities he ascribed to the subject of knowledge placed man at the centre of all conceptual and empirical experience, and overcame the rationalism-empiricism impasse, characteristic of the 17th and 18th centuries. See also Subject-object problem.
[edit] Impact
For over a millennia, the Catholic church had been at the head of not just religion, but also politics and science. The church emphasized geocentrism, which was overturned by heliocentrism. This, in turn, caused the people to doubt the church's teachings, and begin studying science on their own.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
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This article or section includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations. You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations. |
- Thomas Kuhn (1957). The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Harvard University Press.
- Alexandre Koyré (1957). From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Arthur Koestler (1959). The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. Hutchinson.
