Copernican Revolution

For other uses, see The Copernican Revolution (disambiguation).
Copernican Revolution
1543 – c. AD 1835
Aristotelian-Ptolemaic Universe Static Universe
Galileo before the Holy Office, a 19th-century painting by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury
Durationc. 300 years
LocationEurope
Leader(s)Proponents: Nicolaus Copernicus, Thomas Digges, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, John Wilkins, Pierre Gassendi
Opponents: Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Tommaso Caccini, Pope Paul V, Cardinal Bellarmine, Pope Urban VIII, Vincenzo Maculani, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Pope Alexander VII
Key events

In astronomy, the Copernican Revolution refers to the transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism. For Christianity and Western culture, the term may refer to the dismantling of the human-centric medieval cosmology and its cultural consequences. Within the philosophy of science, the Revolution is both an archetype and first historic example of a paradigm shift in science. Finally, the term is sometimes used by English speakers as a metaphor for any radical intellectual upheaval that fundamentally reorders or reshapes our understanding of the world.

The Copernican Revolution is named for the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who in the 16th century proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Driven by a desire for a more perfect (i.e. circular) description of the cosmos than the prevailing Ptolemaic model - which posited that the Sun circled a stationary Earth - Copernicus instead advanced a heliostatic model where a stationary Sun was located near, though not precisely at, the center of the heavens.

Heliocentrism

Main articles: Heliocentrism and Copernican heliocentrism

The Almagest

Main articles: Ptolemaic model and Almagest

The idea of heliocentrism - a Sun-centered Universe - can be traced back to Aristarchus of Samos, a Hellenistic author writing in the 3rd century BC, who may in turn have been drawing on even older concepts in Pythagoreanism. Ancient heliocentrism was, however, eclipsed by the geocentric model presented by Ptolemy in the Almagest[1] and accepted in Aristotelianism.

Martianus Capella (5th century CE) expressed the opinion that the planets Venus and Mercury did not go about the Earth but instead circled the Sun.[2] Capella's model was discussed in the Early Middle Ages by various anonymous 9th-century commentators[3] and Copernicus mentions him as an influence on his own work.[4] Macrobius (420 CE) described a heliocentric model.[5] John Scotus Eriugena (815-877 CE) proposed a model reminiscent of that from Tycho Brahe.[5]

European scholars were well aware of the problems with Ptolemaic astronomy by the 13th century. The debate was precipitated by the reception by Averroes's criticism of Ptolemy, and it was again revived by the recovery of Ptolemy's text and its translation into Latin in the mid-15th century.[a] Otto E. Neugebauer in 1957 argued that the debate in 15th-century Latin scholarship must also have been informed by the criticism of Ptolemy produced after Averroes, by the Ilkhanid-era (13th to 14th centuries) Persian school of astronomy associated with the Maragheh observatory (especially the works of Al-Urdi, Al-Tusi and Ibn al-Shatir).[7]

The state of the question as received by Copernicus is summarized in the Theoricae novae planetarum by Georg von Peuerbach, compiled from lecture notes by Peuerbach's student Regiomontanus in 1454 but printed only in 1472. Peuerbach attempts to give a new, mathematically more elegant presentation of Ptolemy's system, but he does not arrive at heliocentrism. Regiomontanus himself was the teacher of Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara, who was in turn the teacher of Copernicus.

There is a possibility that Regiomontanus already arrived at a theory of heliocentrism before his death in 1476, as he paid particular attention to the heliocentric theory of Aristarchus in a later work, and mentions the "motion of the Earth" in a letter.[8]

Purging the Equant

Main article: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

Copernicus studied at Bologna University during 1496–1501, where he became the assistant of Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara. He is known to have studied the Epitome in Almagestum Ptolemei by Peuerbach and Regiomontanus (printed in Venice in 1496) and to have performed observations of lunar motions on 9 March 1497. An early short work, Commentariolus, written some time before 1514, circulated in a limited number of copies among his acquaintances.[9][10]

In De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, published in 1543, Copernicus attempted to align his work as closely as possible with Ptolemaic tradition. A comparison of his work with the Almagest shows that he followed Ptolemy's methods[11] and even his order of presentation.[12] Yet, in order to purge astronomy of the equant - which violated the theological and philosophical ideal that all celestial motion must be perfect and uniform[13] - Copernicus challenged Ptolemy’s geocentrism, an orthodoxy that had prevailed for over a millennium. Copernicus' heliostatic model (with a stationary Sun located near, though not precisely at, the mathematical center of the heavens[14][15][16]) retained several false Ptolemaic assumptions such as the planets' circular orbits, epicycles, and uniform speeds,[17] but also included accurate ideas such as:

  • The Earth is one of several planets revolving around the Sun in a determined order.
  • The Earth has three motions: daily rotation, annual revolution, and annual tilting of its axis.
  • Retrograde motion of the planets is explained by the Earth's motion.
  • The distance from the Earth to the Sun is small compared to the distance from the Sun to the stars.

In The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler wrote that De revolutionibus orbium coelestium "was and is an all-time worst-seller."[18] Discovering a first edition of De revolutionibus that had been extensively annotated by the leading teacher of astronomy in Europe in the 1540s - which seemed to contradict Koestler - astronomer and science historian Owen Gingerich spent three decades tracking down and personally examining all existing first and second editions of Copernicus' major work. He not only established that De revolutionibus was widely read by 16th century astronomers but also what they thought of it:

Reinhold and his many followers admired Copernicus for a quite different aesthetic idea, the elimination of the equant. Copernicus devoted the great majority of De revolutionibus to showing how this could be done. While he had eliminated all of Ptolemy's major epicycles, merging them all into the Earth's orbit, he then introduced a series of little epicycles to replace the equant, one per planet. Because this made the motion uniform in each Copernican circle, the anti-equant aesthetic was satisfied. My Copernican census eventually helped to establish that the majority of sixteenth-century astronomers thought eliminating the equant was Copernicus' big achievement, because it satisfied the ancient aesthetic principle that eternal celestial motions should be uniform and circular or compounded of uniform and circular parts.[19]

Copernicus' challenge reached 16th-century astronomers but failed to displace the dominance of Ptolemy's geocentrism, which only fell out of favor among astronomers after Galileo's telescopic observations of 1610.[20] But Copernicanism did gain a handful of supporters in the 16th century. Thomas Digges[21] and Giordano Bruno[22] used Copernicus' new estimate of the distance to the stars to argue for an indefinitely extended or even infinite universe in opposition to the ancient orthodoxy of celestial spheres. William Gilbert also argued (correctly) that Copernicus was right about the Earth rotating on its axis (instead of an outer "shell" of rotating stars) while also arguing (incorrectly) that the mechanism of the Earth's rotation is magnetism.[23]

Protestant Attacks

Further information: Nicolaus Copernicus § Protestant attacks on the Copernican system

Copernicus was a canon, a lifelong official of the Catholic Church. Even before his death in 1543 and during the following 70 years (until 1610), his model faced withering criticism from Protestant leaders who were locked in combat with the Church, were often animated by a fierce anti-clericalism and typically adopted a literalist approach to Scripture. Protestant leaders Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon both attacked Copernicus. Luther famously cited the Book of Joshua to prove the sun moves and reportedly called Copernicus a "fool."[24] His colleague Melanchthon urged governments to repress the "absurd" theory.[25] Meanwhile, the Catholic Church indirectly used Copernican mathematics in its reform of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 and otherwise, until 1610, remained officially silent on either the merits or demerits of Copernicanism.[26]

The Telescope

Main articles: Astronomy § Early telescopic, and Galileo Galilei § Phases of Venus
In 1610 Galileo Galilei observed with his telescope that Venus showed phases, despite remaining near the Sun in Earth's sky (first image). This proved that it orbits the Sun and not Earth, as predicted by Copernicus' heliostatic model and disproved the then conventional geocentric model (second image).

Galileo Galilei, sometimes referred to as the "father of modern observational astronomy,"[27] developed his own telescope with enough magnification to allow him to study Venus and discover that it has phases like a moon. His improvements to the telescope, astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism were all integral to the Copernican Revolution.

Based on the designs of Hans Lippershey, Galileo designed his own telescope which, in the following year, he had improved to 30× magnification.[28] Using this new instrument, Galileo made a number of astronomical observations which he published in the Sidereus Nuncius in 1610. In this book, he described the surface of the Moon as rough, uneven, and imperfect. He also noted that "the boundary dividing the bright from the dark part does not form a uniformly oval line, as would happen in a perfectly spherical solid, but is marked by an uneven, rough, and very sinuous line, as the figure shows."[29] These observations challenged Aristotle's claim that the Moon was a perfect sphere and the larger idea that the heavens were perfect and unchanging.

Galileo's next astronomical discovery would prove to be a surprising one. While observing Jupiter over the course of several days, he noticed four stars close to Jupiter whose positions were changing in a way that would be impossible if they were fixed stars. After much observation, he concluded these four stars were orbiting the planet Jupiter and were in fact moons, not stars.[30] This was a radical discovery because, according to Aristotelian cosmology, all heavenly bodies revolve around the Earth and a planet with moons obviously contradicted that popular belief.[31] While contradicting Aristotelian belief, it supported Copernican cosmology which stated that Earth is a planet like all others.[32]

In 1610, Galileo observed that Venus had a full set of phases, similar to the phases of the moon we can observe from Earth. This was explainable by the Copernican or Tychonic systems which said that all phases of Venus would be visible due to the nature of its orbit around the Sun, unlike the Ptolemaic system which stated only some of Venus's phases would be visible. Due to Galileo's observations of Venus, Ptolemy's system became highly suspect and the majority of leading astronomers subsequently converted to various heliocentric models, making his discovery one of the most influential in the transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism.[33]

The Trials of Galileo

Main article: Galileo affair

A panel of the Roman Inquisition condemned Galileo's work in defense of heliocentrism in 1616. A second trial in 1632 led to Galileo's house arrest and a ban on his books.[34]

The profane universe

Main article: The Copernican Revolution (book)

"In its extrascientific consequences," writes science historian Thomas Kuhn, "the Copernican theory is not typical: few scientific theories have played such a large role in non-scientific thought."[35] The Copernican Revolution began as a narrowly technical revision of classical astronomy[36] but ended by altering the Western World's relation to both the Universe and God. By reimagining the Earth not as the unique and focal center of God’s creation and attention[37] but instead as just an unremarkable planet, circulating purposelessly around an ordinary star, no different from an uncountable number of others, the Revolution became an enormous cultural upheaval that shattered the long-standing synthesis of Aristotelian physics and Christian theology. A Universe where the physical location of human beings had easily understood spiritual significance[38] gave way to a cosmic scheme where human existence appeared neither unique nor privileged.[39]

The end of the human-centered cosmos was eventually part of a complete replacement of a qualitative world by a quantitative one. That replacement appeared to leave human beings alone in a silent, infinite universe where existence was no longer a reflection of divine values but merely a neutral fact of mathematics. The science historian Alexandre Koyré memorably identified this unintended outcome - the stripping of hierarchical order, purpose and meaning from the universe — as the "utter devalorization of being."[40] Stripping away the religious logic that had undergirded Western culture up to Copernicus, the Revolution forced a significant fraction of humanity to find alternative sources for identity and meaning, a transition which is arguably still ongoing.[41]

Paradigm shift in science

Main articles: Paradigm shift and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn characterized the Copernican Revolution as the first historical example of a paradigm shift in human knowledge.[42][43] Herbert Butterfield,[44] Arthur Koestler[45], Otto Neugebauer[46] and David Wootton,[47] on the other hand, all disagreed with Kuhn about how revolutionary Copernicus' work should be considered.

Metaphorical usage

Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1787 edition) drew a parallel between the Copernican hypothesis and the epistemology of his new transcendental philosophy.[48] Kant's comparison is made in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (published in 1787; a heavy revision of the first edition of 1781). Kant argues that, just as Copernicus moved from the supposition of heavenly bodies revolving around a stationary spectator to a moving spectator, so metaphysics, "proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis", should move from assuming that "knowledge must conform to objects" to the supposition that "objects must conform to our [a priori] knowledge".[b] Scholars have argued that Kant's analogy is flawed, however, because it essentially reverses Copernicus' logic.[50] Tom Rockmore also notes Kant himself never used the specific phrase.[51]

Following Kant, the phrase "Copernican Revolution" in the 20th century came to be used as a metaphor for intellectual upheaval.[52][53]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Averroes' criticism of Ptolemaic astronomy precipitated this debate in Europe. [...] The recovery of Ptolemy's texts and their translation from Greek into Latin in the middle of the fifteenth century stimulated further consideration of these issues."[6]
  2. ^ In an English translation: "Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus's primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the intuition of objects."[49]

References

  1. ^ Kuhn, Thomas S. (1992). The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 72–73. ISBN 978-0-674-17103-9. ...Ptolemy's contribution is the outstanding one...His Almagest, the book that epitomizes the greatest achievements of ancient astronomy, was the first systematic mathematical treatise to give a complete, detailed, and quantitative account of all the celestial motions.
  2. ^ William Stahl, trans., Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, vol. 2, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, 854, 857, New York: Columbia Univ. Pr, 1977, pp. 332–333
  3. ^ Eastwood, Bruce S. (2007), Ordering the Heavens: Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance, Leiden: Brill, pp. 244–259, ISBN 978-90-04-16186-3
  4. ^ Eastwood, Bruce S. (1982), "Kepler as Historian of Science: Precursors of Copernican Heliocentrism according to De revolutionibus I, 10", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 126: 367–394.
  5. ^ a b Carman, Christián C. (2017-12-23). "The first Copernican was Copernicus: the difference between Pre-Copernican and Copernican heliocentrism". Archive for History of Exact Sciences. 72 (1): 1–20. doi:10.1007/s00407-017-0198-3. hdl:11336/72174. ISSN 0003-9519.
  6. ^ Osler (2010), p. 42
  7. ^ George Saliba (1979). "The First Non-Ptolemaic Astronomy at the Maraghah School", Isis 70 (4), pp. 571–576.
  8. ^ Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, Penguin Books, 1959, p. 212.
  9. ^ Koyré, Alexandre (1973). The Astronomical Revolution: Copernicus – Kepler – Borelli. Translated by Maddison, R. E. W. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-0504-1.
  10. ^ Gingerich, Owen. The Book Nobody Read (Walker & Company, 2004). pp.54-55. ISBN 0-8027-1415-3
  11. ^ "... there was not a single proof or mathematical procedure in the De Revolutionibus which did not have its exact replica in the Almagest. ... Copernicus again and again demonstrated by numerical computation that his model agreed with Ptolemy's." Neugebauer, Otto (1968). "On the Planetary Theory of Copernicus". Vistas in Astronomy. 10: 103.
  12. ^ "Copernicus admired Ptolemy enormously; in organizing his book, ordering the different chapters and choosing the sequence in which various topics were introduced, he followed Ptolemy's Almagest. Cohen, Bernard. The Birth of New Physics (W. W. Norton & Company, 1985). p.35. ISBN 9780393019940
  13. ^ "All movement within it (outside of the immediate vicinity of the Earth) is determined by the fundamental principle that heavenly movement is circular and therefore unchanging. Ptolemy, Copernicus thought, had betrayed this principle not...by adding epicycles to deferents in order to explain why the planets sometimes appear to move backwards in the sky, but by introducing the equant in order to speed them up and slow them down." Wootton, David. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Penguin, 2015). p.152. ISBN 0-06-175952-X
  14. ^ "The man who had deposed the earth from its proud position as the centre of the universe and had recognized it to be merely one of the planets, had yet felt compelled to give it quite an exceptional position in his new system. Though he had said 'in the midst of all stand the sun,' he had in his planetary theories assumed the centre of all movements to be the centre of the earth's orbit, where the sun was not." Dreyer, J.L.E. A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler, (Dover Publications, 1953). p.343. ISBN 9780486600796
  15. ^ "It was a disadvantage of [Copernicus'] system that it was not quite heliocentric after all - the Earth did not describe an exact circle with the sun at its centre, and, in fact, all the movements of the skies were reckoned not from the sun itself, but from the centre of the earth's orbit, which came somewhat to the side." "Butterfield, Herbert. The Origins of Modern Science (The Free Press, 1957). p.40.
  16. ^ "Copernicus's universe is different from Ptolemy's in that the sun, not the Earth, lies at (or rather, to be exact, very close to) its centre." Wootton, David. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Penguin, 2015). p.152. ISBN 0-06-175952-X
  17. ^ Kuhn, Thomas S. (1985). The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-17103-9.
  18. ^ Arthur Koestler The Sleepwalkers, The Macmillan Company 1959. p. 194
  19. ^ Gingerich, Owen. The Book Nobody Read (Walker & Company, 2004). pp.54-55. ISBN 0-8027-1415-3
  20. ^ "It is easy to show that conventional Ptolemaic astronomy was thriving until 1610 [when Galileo observed the phases of Venus with a telescope] and went into crisis immediately afterwards...The evidence is clear: Ptolemaic astronomy was unaffected by Copernicus; it went into crisis briefly with the new star of 1572, but by the end of the sixteenth century it had fully recovered. The telescope, on the other hand, brought about its immediate and irreversible collapse." Wootton, David. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Penguin, 2015). p.152. ISBN 0-06-175952-X
  21. ^ Hellyer, Marcus, ed. (2008). The Scientific Revolution: The Essential Readings. Blackwell Essential Readings in History. Vol. 7. John Wiley & Sons. p. 63. ISBN 9780470754771. The Puritan Thomas Digges (1546–1595?) was the earliest Englishman to offer a defense of the Copernican theory. ... Accompanying Digges's account is a diagram of the universe portraying the heliocentric system surrounded by the orb of fixed stars, described by Digges as infinitely extended in all dimensions.
  22. ^ Bruno, Giordano. "Third Dialogue". On the infinite universe and worlds. Archived from the original on 27 April 2012.
  23. ^ Gilbert, William (1893). "Book 6, Chapter III". De Magnete. Translated by Mottelay, P. Fleury. (Facsimile). New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-26761-X. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  24. ^ Donald H. Kobe (1998). "Copernicus and Martin Luther: An Encounter Between Science and Religion". American Journal of Physics. 66 (3): 190. Bibcode:1998AmJPh..66..190K. doi:10.1119/1.18844.
  25. ^ Miłosz, Czesław (1983). The history of Polish literature (2 ed.). University of California Press. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-520-04477-7.
  26. ^ Kuhn, Thomas S. (1992). The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 191. ISBN 978-0-674-17103-9. For sixty years after Copernicus' death there was little Catholic counterpart for the Protestant opposition to Copernicanism. Individual Catholic clergymen expressed their incredulity or abhorrence of the new conception of the earth, but the Church itself was silent...Reinhold's Prutenic Tables, based on Copernicus' mathematical system, were used in the reformation of the calendar promulgated for the Catholic world in 1582 by Gregory XIII...The De Revolutionibus was itself a product of the latitude allowed to Churchmen in matters of science and secular philosophy...
  27. ^ Singer (1941), p. 217
  28. ^ Drake (1990), pp. 133-134
  29. ^ Galileo, Helden (1989), p. 40
  30. ^ Drake (1978), p. 152
  31. ^ Drake (1978), p. 157
  32. ^ Osler (2010), p. 63
  33. ^ Thoren (1989), p. 8
  34. ^ Blackwell (1991, p. 2). Blackwell (1991, p. 50) dates the start of the Galileo affair to 1610. Finocchiaro (1989, p. 1) puts it a few years later, in 1613.
  35. ^ Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. (Harvard University Press, 1957). p.4. ISBN 0-674-17103-9
  36. ^ Gingerich, Owen (2004). The Book Nobody Read: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Walker & Company. p. 55. ISBN 0-8027-1415-3. My Copernican census eventually helped to establish that the majority of sixteenth-century astronomers thought eliminating the equant was Copernicus' big achievement, because it satisfied the ancient aesthetic principle that eternal celestial motions should be uniform and circular or compounded of uniform and circular parts.
  37. ^ Kuhn, Thomas S. (1992). The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 113. ISBN 978-0-674-17103-9. Man's location, too, is intermediate: the earth's surface is close to its debased and corporeal center but within sight of the celestial periphery which surrounds it symmetrically. Man lives in squalor and uncertainty, and he is very close to Hell. But his central location is strategic, for he is everywhere under the eye of God.
  38. ^ Calvin, John (2001) [First published 1554]. McGrath, Alister; Packer, J. I. (eds.). Genesis. Crossway Classic Commentaries. Vol. 25. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. After the world was created, man was placed in it as a theater that he, beholding above him and beneath him the wonderful works of God, might reverently adore their author.
  39. ^ Copernicus' "planetary theory and his associated conception of a sun-centered universe were instrumental in the transition from medieval to Western society, because they seemed to affect man's relation to the universe and to God. Initiated as a narrowly technical, highly mathematical revision of classical astronomy, the Copernican theory became one focus for the tremendous controversies in religion, in philosophy, and in social theory, which, during the two centuries following the discovery of America, set the tenor of the modern mind. Men who believed that their terrestrial home was only a planet circulating blindly about one of an infinity of stars evaluated their place in the comic scheme quite differently than had their predecessors who saw the earth as the unique and focal center of God's creation. The Copernican Revolution was therefore also part of a transition in Western man's sense of values." Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. (Harvard University Press, 1957). p.2. ISBN 0-674-17103-9
  40. ^ Koyré, Alexander (1957). From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press. p. 29. ISBN 978-0801803475. This scientific and philosophical revolution...can be described roughly as bringing forth the destruction of the Cosmos, that is the disappearance, from philosophically and scientifically valid concepts, of the conception of the world as a finite, closed and hierarchically ordered whole (a whole in which the hierarchy of value determined the hierarchy and structure of being, rising from the dark, heavy and imperfect earth to the higher and higher perfection of the stars and heavenly spheres), and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe...and the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  41. ^ Delegating "the construction of cosmologies to specialists, primarily to astronomers...can be devastating. The astronomer may on occasions destroy, for reasons lying entirely within his specialty, a world-view that had previously made the universe meaningful for the members of a whole civilization, specialist and nonspecialist alike." Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. (Harvard University Press, 1957). p.7. ISBN 0-674-17103-9
  42. ^ Kuhn, Thomas (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
  43. ^ Kuhn noted that Copernicus' work was only the catalyst of the Revolution "...measured in terms of its consequences, [De Revolutionibus] is a relatively staid, sober, and unrevolutionary work. Most of the essential elements by which we know the Copernican Revolution - easy and accurate computations of planetary position, the abolition of epicycles and eccentrics, the dissolution of the spheres, the sun a star, the infinite expansion of the universe - these and many others are not to be found anywhere in Copernicus' work. In every respect except the earth's motion the De Revolutionibus seems more closely akin to the works of ancient and medieval astronomers and cosmologists than to the writings of the succeeding generations who based their work upon Copernicus' and who made explicit the radical consequences that even its author had not seen in his work. The significance of De Revolutionibus lies, then, less in what it says itself than in what it caused others to say. The book gave rise to a revolution that it had scarcely enunciated. It is a revolution-making rather than a revolutionary text." Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. (Harvard University Press, 1957). p.135. ISBN 0-674-17103-9
  44. ^ "[Copernicus] closes an old epoch much more clearly than he opens any new one. He is himself one of those individual makers of world-systems, like Aristotle and Ptolemy, who astonish us by the power which they showed in producing a synthesis so mythical - and so irrelevant to the present day - that we should regard their work almost as a matter of aesthetic judgement alone." "Butterfield, Herbert. The Origins of Modern Science (The Free Press, 1957). p.44.
  45. ^ "The figure of Copernicus, seen from the distance, is that of an intrepid, revolutionary hero of thought. As we come closer, it gradually changes into that of a stuffy pendant, without the flair, the sleepwalking intuition of the original genius; who, having got hold of a good idea, expanded it into a bad system, patiently plodding on, piling more epicycles and deferents into the dreariest and most unreadable among the books that made history....The Copernican system is not a discovery...but a last attempt to patch up an out-dated machinery by reversing the arrangement of its wheels. As a modern historian put it, the fact that the earth moves is 'almost an incidental matter in the system of Copernicus which, viewed geometrically, is just the old Ptolemaic pattern of the skies, with one or two wheels interchanged and one or two of them taken out.'" Koestler, Arthur (1959). The Sleepwalkers. The Macmillan Company. p. 205 & p. 214
  46. ^ "Modern historians, making ample use of the advantage of hindsight, stress the revolutionary significance of the heliocentric system and the simplifications it had introduced. In fact, the actual computation of planetary positions follows exactly the ancient pattern and the results are the same. The Copernican solar theory is definitely a step in the wrong direction for the actual computation as well as for the underlying cinematic concepts. The cinematically elegant idea of secondary epicycles for the lunar theory and as substitute for the equant - as we now know, methods familiar to a school of Islamic astronomers - does not contribute to make the planetary phenomena easier to visualize. Had it not been for Tycho Brahe and Kepler, the Copernican system would have contributed to the perpetuation of the Ptolemaic system in a slightly more complicated form but more pleasing to philosophical minds." Neugebauer, Otto (1968). Beer, Arthur (ed.). "On the Planetary Theory of Copernicus". Vistas in Astronomy. 10. Pergamon Press: 103.
  47. ^ "It used to be thought that Copernicus initiated an intellectual revolution - indeed Thomas Kuhn called his first book The Copernican Revolution (1957). But in this Kuhn was mistaken." Wootton, David (2015). The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution. p.145
  48. ^ Ermanno Bencivenga (1987), Kant's Copernican Revolution.
  49. ^ Immanuel Kant (1929) [1787]. "Preface". Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-1194-0. Archived from the original on 2009-04-16. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  50. ^ For an overview see Engel, M., Kant’s Copernican Analogy: A Re-examination, Kant-Studien, 54, 1963, p. 243. According to Victor Cousin: "Copernicus, seeing it was impossible to explain the motion of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that these bodies moved around the earth considered as an immovable centre, adopted the alternative, of supposing all to move round the sun. So Kant, instead of supposing man to move around objects, supposed on the contrary, that he himself was the centre, and that all moved round him." Cousin, Victor, The Philosophy of Kant. London: John Chapman, 1854, p. 21
  51. ^ Tom Rockmore, Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx (2002), p. 184.
  52. ^ "By defining hysteria as an illness whose symptoms were produced by a person's unconscious ideas, Freud started what can be called a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in the understanding of mental illness — which put him into opposition both to the Parisian Charcot and to the German and Austrian scientific community." José Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis (2001), p. 32.
  53. ^ "Jacques Lacan's formulation that the unconscious, as it reveals itself in analytic phenomena, ‘is structured like a language’, can be seen as a Copernican revolution (of sorts), bringing together Freud and the insights of linguistic philosophers and theorists such as Roman Jakobson." Ben Highmore, Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (2006), p. 64.

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  • Media related to Copernican Revolution at Wikimedia Commons
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