There is also an enlightened and bright period in the history of humanity, which fears new knowledge and discovery and acts with dogmatic truths: the Renaissance. A bright age in which the greatest developments in art and science were experienced. Of course, there are also the creators of this period, where the greatest works and inventions in many fields such as astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics, chemistry, anatomy, engineering, painting, sculpture, architecture were found: Kepler, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Michelangelo, Galileo, many more. and Copernicus, which is the subject of our article.
Despite all the difficulties of the period in the field of astronomy, he continued his studies without giving up, handled science from other dimensions, shed light on the astronomical discoveries to be made in the future thanks to his studies, and inspired many scientists. Who is Copernicus, what studies did he do, what are his works? Let’s take a closer look.
Who is Nicolaus Copernicus?
Nicolaus Copernicus, who was born in 1473 in the 15th century Renaissance; Catholic bishop was a Polish astronomer who majored in mathematics, astronomy, cartography, and languages, known as the father of modern astronomy, and majored in the acceptance of the heliocentric model of the universe. He was born in the Thorn region of the Kingdom of Poland, as the fourth and youngest child of a wealthy merchant father and a wealthy mother. Nicolaus Copernicus, who had to go to his uncle after losing his father at a young age, started his education life in Poland; His uncle, Lucas Watzenrode, stood by Copernicus in all his educational and career needs.
In the 15th century, when Copernicus lived, the terms astrology, astronomy, and mathematics were used almost interchangeably; its main purpose was to provide the theoretical tool and movement integrity for describing the sky order. This method generally referred to anyone who studied the sky using mathematical techniques.
Giovanni Pico’s attack on the foundations of astrology formed the background of Copernicus’ research, as well as basic historical considerations. The second longstanding dispute that Pico didn’t mention had to do with the status of planetary models. At the same time, since ancient times, astronomical modeling and surveys of the sky have been made as planets move with angular advances on them using fixed radii at a fixed distance from their centers of motion. European astronomers argued that the Earth was at the center of the universe, that is, the Ptolemaic geocentric system, and this view was also adopted by most ancient philosophers and Bible writers, despite the contradictory work of Aristarchus and Biruni.
What studies did Nicolaus Copernicus do?
Copernicus argued that all the planets in the Milky Way, including the earth, move in the orbit of the sun. According to Copernicus, the earth rotates daily around its own axis as well as the sun axis, and due to the gradual shifts in this axis, the seasons were formed. wrote a short astronomical treatise. In the review, he accurately revealed the order of all known planets, including Earth, relative to the sun, and predicted their orbits relatively accurately.
This heliocentric theory replaced the Ptolemaic (Earth-centered) theory, which suggested that the sun and other planets revolved around the earth. After Copernicus’ trip to Italy, he argued that the Ptolemaic system was not sufficient to study all aspects of nature. This method was not mathematically suitable. But at the time of Copernicus, the Church was adopting the Ptolemaic geocentric theory. Because that was the biblical definition of the cosmos.
However, his treatise “Minor Commentary” was not published until the end of Copernicus’s life, 1543. Because the information he obtained caused new problems as well as solutions. Since the earth was considered the center of the universe, heavy objects were always assumed to fall to the ground, Copernicus did not know how to adapt this to a heliocentric system. So he retained the old belief that circles ruled the heavens, but his evidence showed that even in a heliocentric universe, planets and stars do not orbit the sun in circular orbits. This thesis had the obvious disadvantage of not being able to explain changes in the apparent brightness of planets, since their distance from the center is always the same. So the disadvantage was that it observed the planets as giant transparent spheres and did not deal with the concept of gravity.
This theory in the 17th century. Early on, Galileo and Kepler developed and popularized it. However, since it was a period in which scientific research was met with punishment, Galileo was sentenced in exchange for developing this theory. Despite the clergy of that period, of course, information could not be chained, and in the 17th century. Later, after Newton’s studies in celestial mechanics and his publication “Principia Mathematica” (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), Copernican Theory was accepted by academics. First, it spread rapidly in non-Catholic countries, and at the end of the 18th century, the Solar System (Heliocentric) universe model was accepted by almost the whole world.
Works of Copernicus:
- On The Revolutions
- Commentarilous
- Three Treatises on Copernican Theory
- Das neue Weltbild
- Nicolai Copernici Torinesnsis De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri VI
- On The Revolutions: Manuscript
- Monetae Cudendae Ratio (9800970) Das Neue Weltbild: Drei Tecte: Lateinich-Deutsch
Names that influenced his university life and ideas:
Educational life undertaken by his uncle, after his father’s death Copernicus continued at the liberal arts department at the “University of Krakow” in Krakow. He studied astronomy and astrology in this department, but like many students of that time, he dropped out without graduating. He went to his uncle, who was in Italy and had a doctorate in law at the University of Bologna, and continued his education at the University of Bologna like his uncle. Although his academic period here did not last long, he lived in the same house with the university’s chief astronomer, Domenico Maria de Novara. Novara was publishing annual astrological prophecies for the city; He made predictions that included all social groups but concentrated on the fate of Italian princes and their enemies. Copernicus was an assistant and witness in these broadcasts; His involvement in the production of Novara’s annual forecasts meant that he was intimately familiar with the practice of astrology.
Novara, having studied Copernicus astronomy, introduced him to two books surrounding the problem of the future: “Epitoma in Almagestum Ptolemaei” by Johann Müller and “Disputationes inverse astrologinm divinatricenm” by Giovanni Pico Against Divination Discussion . Written by Johann Müller, the book was a summary of the foundations of Ptolemy’s astronomy and was concerned with corrections and critical expansions of some of the major planetary models. This was the book that would lead Copernicus to turn to and gain insight into the heliocentric hypothesis. What Giovanni Pico wrote was a skeptical attack on the foundations of astrology and the destructive attitude that reflected back to the 17th century. There were accusations in Pico’s criticism that astronomers and astrologers disagreed on the arrangement of the planets and that astrologers were unsure of the strength of the planets.
Only 27 observations of Copernicus recorded during his lifetime are known; many of them are about eclipses, alignments, and the intersections of planets and stars. Copernicus made his first recorded observation in Bologna on March 9, 1497, with his “De revolutionibus”. In his book, he recorded the lunar eclipse and the star Aldebaran, known as “the brightest star in the bull’s eye.” When he published this observation in 1543, he had fully confirmed the apparent size of the moon’s diameter, making it the basis of a theoretical claim. But he was using this method in 1947 to check the phases of the moon derived from the Alfonsine charts to aid Novara’s 1498 divination. Copernicus’ views on the fundamental structure of the universe transformed into a new philosophy during the reign of Kepler and Galileo.
The death of Copernicus: His ideas survived his death
Nicolaus Copernicus in a way that would cause great controversy and save him from the anger of some religious leaders who would condemn his observations as heresy. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Frombork, Poland, in May 1543. Legend has it that when he was on his deathbed, he saw a published copy of his work. He was not wrong, his work was published a year after his death, and he offered resources to shed light on future scientists and evolve into today’s solar system.
Copernicus, whose name was not even on his tombstone when he died, was reburied in 2010 with a black granite tombstone in a cathedral in Poland. Before its 500th anniversary, in 1972, NASA launched its satellite “Copernicus” into space, and the satellite studied interstellar matter during its 8-year operation.
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