It is now commonly accepted, that the
Earth moves around the
The Sun . For thousands of years, however, this was not the case.
The first man to work out the mathematics to show how the planets in our solar system are actually arranged was Nicolaus Copernicus.

Copernicus was born in Thorn on the Vistula in Poland in 1473. His father was a merchant who had moved there from Krakow. He had three siblings, Andreas, Barbara, and Katharina. Their father died when Nicholas was ten years old. They were then raised by his maternal uncle, Lucas Waczenrode (Bishop of Ermeland). Copernicus attended the University of Krakow in 1491. In 1494 he went on to Bologna to study, at his uncle's insistence, for a life as a Canon in the Roman Catholic Church. Copernicus was trained in law and medicine there, but he had a heart for astronomy and excelled at mathematics.

In 1497 the Chapter of Frauberg named him a Canon of the Church and in the spring of 1500 he went to Rome to celebrate the Jubilee of the Church. While there he was also reportedly giving lectures on astronomy. After leaving Rome he studied further in law and medicine and was awarded a Doctorate in Canon Law. Copernicus spoke and read several languages and in 1509 he set his mind to translating the Greek letters of Theophylactus.

From 1504 until his uncle died in 1512 he often accompanied his uncle to the Royal Prussian Diet
¹
where he got involved in the political wrangling between Poland, Prussia and The Grand Duchy of Moscow . He may also have attended a coronation in 1507 of a Polish King².

He then moved to Heilsburg where he practised medicine for six years.

In 1514 Copernicus had been asked by a papal council³ to state his views on revising the calendar, but being the cautious person he was simply said that he didn’t have enough information to make a recommendation. According to the records at the Nicolaus Copernicus Museum in Frombork, Poland, Copernicus returned to observing the planets after a gap of several years in 1518.

In those years the kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were united into one empire and Copernicus spent time drawing maps of the area. In 1520 he was part of the Polish Embassy to the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights⁴ requesting he give back the town of Braniewo which his forces had taken. Then the next year after that, Copernicus was appointed commissioner of Warmia to negotiate on behalf of their land.
Now in his mid-forties astronomy was just an avocation for him. He held positions as administrator in the diocesan castle of Allenstein and after that administered the diocese of Frauenburg. This work led him to study finance and in the year 1522 he wrote a memorandum on monetary reforms which in 1528 got him a nomination for Deputy Councillor on the financial regulations of Prussia.

His Astronomical Theory

The key point in his theory is that all the planets revolve around the Sun. Despite the fact that Greek Aristarchus had once proposed the same thing, it was the model set forth by Ptolemy placing the earth at the centre which for more than a millennia had been the accepted view.

Ptolemy was also supported by the writings of Aristotle which insisted that the visible universe was finite and if so then were the earth not at the centre we would see the stars change position in relation to one another as they were viewed from opposite sides of the Sun.
Aristotle's view was self-evident to a world that had no conception of how far away the stars really were. If the Sphere on which he believed all the stars were mounted was indeed as close as was thought, his logic would have been entirely valid. This also suited a world view in which the leaders of the church considered man the 'Crown of Creation' and had assumed that the maker of all things would have placed him in the centre of creation: A view that even coloured their interpretation of holy scripture.

Popes in the 1800s and 1900s would realize the fallacy of this view but in the 1500s they were not going to challenge what the church had taught for over 1000 years. Copernicus, on the other hand, was more concerned with what his own eyes, and his own mathematics told him than he was with doctrine.

For some years, Copernicus had watched the sky from a turret above the Frombork Cathedral where he was a Canon. He calculated the motion of the planets and by 1530 had convinced himself that Ptolemy and Aristotle were wrong; that the earth was not the centre of the universe. It would be another decade however before his calculations would see print.

One of Copernicus' pupils Georg Joachim von Lauchen Rheticus, staying with him in his final years, wrote a book, Narratio Prima (First Account), outlining the essence of Copernicus' theory. In 1542 he published a treatise on trigonometry by Copernicus (later included in the second book of De Revolutionibus) and was a driving force in getting Copernicus to publish the book for which he would be remembered: De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium.

After securing a publisher, and having to return to the University of Leipzig to teach, Rheticus allowed the supervision of this matter to fall to a man by the name of Andreas Osiander.
Osiander kept Copernicus as author of the work, but replaced the preface with one of his own making, attempting to downplay the veracity of the theory.

For at least three decades Copernicus had continued to teach and profess that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe, but one of six (known) planets that all revolve around the Sun. Copernicus had the approval of the Pope to make his views known, and was even advised as early as 1536 by a Cardinal
of the Catholic Church⁵ to publish the work but did not do so. Copernicus had meticulously worked out the orbits by means of trigonometry and shared this information with his followers.
He worked out the relative scale of their orbits with Mercury closest to the Sun, followed by Venus, then Earth, then Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. This was all done before the invention of the telescope.

Since his calculations were based on perfect circles rather than ellipses they were less accurate at describing the orbits. This may be one reason that the Church did not feel threatened by his findings. Only when Kepler started using ellipses and Galileo started using telescopic sightings, including the moons of Jupiter, did Pope Paul V issue an order that 'heliocentric ideas could not be defended'.

Final Resting Place

He died 24 May, 1543, at age 70, probably from a stroke. His bones were at rest long before the 1616 edict from the Vatican that decreed his perception of the solar system to be heresy. His book sat on the Vatican's banned list until 1835.
As later astronomers credited him for his work his fame spread, the ban was revoked, and monuments were built -first at Warsaw in 1830 and then in Torun in 1853.

For over five hundred years his bones sat in an unmarked grave beneath a cathedral in the city of Frombork, 180 miles north of the capital, Warsaw, Poland. In 2005 remains suspected of being his were unearthed; and some sent to be identified. In 2008 DNA was matched and a forensic model made to make sure that it was him. Finally in 2010 the remains were re-interred with honour and a tombstone was installed.
On the tombstone is a model of the solar system, showing the Sun being circled by six of the planets.

On the Moon

There is a 93km (58 mile) wide crater on the moon. With the exception of Tycho, it is perhaps the most visible crater on the entire moon. It was named after Copernicus during the 1600s by Giovanni B Riccioli. Some have speculated that Riccioli placed it squarely in the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) because of his own personal opposition to the heliocentric theory.

In the Music World

A musical project also bears his name -
Project Copernicus.

Project Copernicus is a professional chamber orchestra and ensemble based in Miami, Florida. We take our inspiration from the vision and courage of the great astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. In the same way that Copernicus the astronomer realigned our perception of the physical universe, Copernicus the project strives to realign the musical paradigm
-My Space- about Project Copernicus.