|
 NICOLAUS
COPERNICUS was the son of poor parents, perhaps serfs, and
was born in Thorn, a Polish town ceded in 1311 to the Teutonic
Order, but resumed by Poland in 1466. One of his uncles, who
afterwards befriended him, was Bishop of Warmia, and attached
to the cathedral of Frauenburg, near the mouth of the Vistula.
Copernicus was educated at home, and afterwards graduated Doctor
of Medicine at Cracow University. For some years (about 1500
A.D.) he made astronomical observations, and taught mathematics
at Bologna and Rome. Soon, however, he returned home as canon
at Frauenburg, and spent the rest of his life in church duty,
medical work amongst the poor, and astronomical research. His
astronomical instruments were poor, and he regretted his inability
to take better observations. He was struck with the complexity
of the so-called Ptolemaic system, and found in ancient authors
abundant suppositions tending to simplify the theory of the heavenly
bodies. One of these, the work of Aristarchus, he took and used
with success. His book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
begins with a remarkable epistle to the Pope, Paul III, in which
he refuses to argue of the truth of his theories; these he says
he puts forth merely as leading to results of calculation which
agree with observations. The phrase "Copernican System"
suggests that our debts to Copernicus are greater than in truth
they are. For it was not till Kepler, Galileo,
Newton, and Bradley (to say
nothing of others) had lent their aid, that the system could
be said to be finally established. Without denying Copernicus'
claim to be a great mathematician, a truth-seeker singularly
free from contemporary trammels, and a successful discoverer,
it is important to understand clearly that his view of the solar
system remained at his death a brilliant conjecture merely, against
which very strong objections could be urged. He was not free
from the metaphysical illusions of his age; maintaining, for
instance, that the sphere is the most perfect figure, as a ground
for inferring the spericity of the universe; and he accounts
for the rectilinear fall of a stone, and the supposed circular
motion of the planets, by the statement that wholes move with
circular motion, and parts separated from wholes in rectilinear
motion. Also, owing to his acceptance of the circle instead of
the ellipse as the path of planetary orbits, the alleged simplicity
of the system as presented by him proves, on close examination,
to be much exaggerated. Copernicus was not a mere speculator:
he was a diligent and conscientious observer of the heavens,
though working with very imperfect instruments. The periodic
inequalities of planetary motions were as obvious to him as they
had been to Ptolemy. Therefore, on the assumption of circular
motions, he was compelled to resort, though not to the same extent
as the older astronomers, to the devices of epicycles and eccentrics;
the eccentricity of the sun varying in the case of each planet.
While admitting all this, it remains none the less true that
three fundamental facts of astronomy, (1) the apparent diurnal
rotation of the sky, (2) the apparent stations and retrogradation
of the planets, (3) the precession of the equinoxes, became far
more easy to conceive on his hypothesis than on the accepted
view. Taking the last point only, it was needful, on the Ptolemaic
system, to suppose not merely that the sky revolved round the
earth in 24 hours, but that it was endowed with an additional
motion of an opposite kind, taking place in 250 centuries. For
Copernicus it was only needful to conceive the earth's axis as
slightly varying its direction, describing a cone in the course
of the period in question, and thus pointing every year to a
slightly different part of the sky.
The shock to received ideas--not in astronomy only, but in
man's view of his place in Nature--that would follow from the
general acceptance of his views was foreseen by him, and he was
evidently anxious to avert it. It was with great reluctance that
he consented to the publication of his book, which he had kept
in manuscript for many years. He avowedly regarded his view as
a conjecture merely; destined, like other hypotheses, to assist
astronomical research. So long as the new doctrine was confined
to the learned, the Church did not care to interfere with it.
More than seventy years passed before the work of Copernicus
was placed upon the Index.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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