Smokey and the Bandit

to Texarkana, Texas, and back again in 28 hours?"
Bandit: "It's only 900 miles here, 900 miles back!"
Snowman: Well, for your information...that ain't never been done before, not in no rig."
Bandit: "That's 'cause you and I ain't never done it in no rig; you got to stop being so negative, son! Course we can make it, we ain't never not made it YET, have we?"
Snowman: "No..."
Bandit: "Ya see?"
. Copernicus was honoured by Poland when the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, established 1945, was named after him. Snowman: "You mean to tell me, we're gonna drive from here.. Copernicus:. When we get home, the first thing I'm gonna do is punch your momma in the mouth!". Goethe:. that you came from my loins. His reasons for doing so lay in his dissatisfaction with the inadequacies of the geocentric model, in his strong belief in the truth of the solution to the problem that he developed, its elegance and relative simplicity, and its coincidence with observation and with the classical ideals to which he had subscribed since his youth.

NO WAY.. Although not holding ordained office within the Catholic Church, Copernicus was devout and unwilling to be openly defiant of the Church's teaching, but, in common with supporters of the Reformation, Copernicus was criticizing orthodox theory and belief. Justice: (to Junior) "There is no way.. Neo-Platonic and classical ideas formed the intellectual environment in which Copernicus worked. is a complete lack of respect for the law.". In this discussion of Copernicus' reasons for discarding such a long-held belief as the geocentric cosmology of Ptolemy, we can see that the Copernican revolution was simmering against a background revolution of theological thought — the Reformation. Justice: "What we're dealing with here.. His reverence for the sun can be seen in the most famous passage of de Revolutionibus:.

Make it fast, I'm in a goddamn hurry! Do you want anything son?"
Junior: "Hush puppies daddy."
Justice: "We don't have time for that crap!". As far as Copernicus was concerned, the Sun, a distinctive element in classical thought, held the central and most important position in the universe, gave added credence to his cosmology. Pepper. They might not have been ready to change to an understanding of the Bible as a source only of moral and spiritual, rather than scientific, wisdom. Justice: "Let me have a diablo sandwich, a Dr. For orthodox Catholics, the Copernican model of the universe might have seemed too radically different from the geocentric model, sustained as it was by its agreement with many scriptural references. Come on!"
Bandit: "Talk to me, good buddy."
Justice: (Over the CB) "You got trouble coming."
Bandit: "What's your handle son, and what's your 20?"
Justice: (Over the CB) "My handle's Smokey Bear, and I'm tail-grabbing your ass right now!". However, the lenient attitudes in Chelmno, where Copernicus carried out much of his work, began to change and might have contributed to Copernicus' isolation in the last years of his life.

(Bandit and Justice Meet For the First Time)
Justice: (Over the CB) "Breaker, breaker to the Bandit."
Bandit: "Come on back breaker."
Justice: "(Over the CB) Bandit, I got a smokey report for you. Both preferred, at least initially, to promote tolerance of differing views within the church rather than open discord, and both encouraged Copernicus' publication of his scientific beliefs. Justice look like a possum's pecker."
Junior: "Except that --"
Justice: "Shut your ass!". Copernicus seems to have been benefited from the attitude of the bishops who were his superiors in the church - Johann Dantiscus and Tiedmann Giese. Justice: "Nobody, nobody makes Sheriff Buford T. "Mathematics", he says, "is written for mathematicians". Carrie had run away from her wedding to Justice's son, Junior (Henry). In his own preface to his work, dedicated to Pope Paul III, Copernicus took care to point out that his motives for developing a cosmology that included a moving, rather than a stationary, Earth, were inspired by his dissatisfaction with the mathematical and astronomical descriptions of the geocentric model, and were not intended to defy the written Word.

Justice (Gleason). Not much more than a century later, Kepler had certainly despatched the circular orbits of the planets and replaced them with ellipses, but the Copernican heliocentric universe was still intact. Along the way, Bandit picks up Carrie "Frog" (Field), and finds himself being pursued by Sheriff Buford T. However, its consistency with the observed behaviour of the universe in a time before the telescope made more detailed observation and the gathering of more accurate measurements practicable, gave the Copernican model its strongest support. They were promised $80,000 from Big and Little Enos Burdett if they could make the run in 28 hours. In his unauthorized and anonymous preface to de Revolutionibus, Andreas Osiander was technically correct when he made reference to "the hypothesis of this work". Most of the movie centers around Cledus "Snowman" Snow (Reed) and Bo "Bandit" Darville (Reynolds) taking a shipment of Coors beer from Texarkana, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia (At the time Coors wasn't available in the eastern US, it was illegal to ship it east of Texas). Until 1543, the year that Copernicus died, and the year in which his de Revolutionibus was published, and for many years afterwards, Copernicus' description of the motion of the Earth was not ratified by empirical evidence.

The 3 movies introduced three generations of the Pontiac Trans Am (unlike the television movie version which the other Bandit drives the Dodge Stealth R/T Twin Turbo). Copernicus used the eccentrics, epicycles, and equants of Ptolemaic cosmology, but added three kinds of motion to describe the observed behaviour of the Earth:. Also, a television movie was loosely based on the film called The Bandit. Elegance was a consequence of the overall simplicity of Copernicus' cosmology and much of this seeming simplicity resulted from his retention of circular orbits for the planets around the central Sun. It would inspire several other trucking films including two sequels, Smokey and the Bandit II, and Smokey and the Bandit Part 3. Heraclides' description of the revolutions of Mercury and Venus around the Sun might have led Copernicus to consider that the other planets, including the Earth, did the same. Smokey and the Bandit was a 1977 movie starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jackie Gleason, Jerry Reed, Paul Williams, and Mike Henry. Aristarchus (3rd century BC) proposed an openly heliocentric model of the universe.

Some of the ideas expressed by Philolaus (5th century BC) and Heraclides (4th century BC), proposed cosmological models in which the Earth moved. He was acquainted with ideas espoused by other classical authors. Copernicus' mathematical experience engendered in his thought a desire for a simpler and more elegant model of the universe. His heliocentric universe theory accomplished this by dispensing with individual explanations for the motion of each planet, and replacing them with a description that applied to all the planets, including the Earth.

In Copernicus' view, Ptolemy's explanation failed to provide an accurate mathematical description of the universe. This characteristic of the Earth's movement is apparent only with observation over long periods of time. Precession is the phenomenon by which the Earth's axis "wobbles". Nor did the Ptolemaic model explain precession.

The Ptolemaic geocentric model was complicated and inconsistent in Copernicus' estimations and observations, including one in 1497 of the star Aldebaran, that did not coincide with predictions made by Ptolemy. The mathematical confusion that Copernicus said caused him to develop an alternative to the geocentric model derived from an inadequate reconciliation of the Aristotelian model and amendments to it by Ptolemy. An accurate calculation of the astronomical year was important to a clergyman, like Copernicus, allowing him to forecast properly the various festivals that comprised the liturgical calendar. It maintained that all planetary motion, and the motion of the Moon, the Sun, and the stars was circular, around a stationary Earth.

Ptolemy's model explained each planet's circular motion individually and was the first model of the universe to explain some of the eccentric behaviour of the planets. The Earth-centered Ptolemaic cosmology had been the accepted model of the universe since the 2nd century BC. There is evidence that his interest in these subjects continued after he had left Kraków. At the University of Kraków, which he attended in 1491 and 1492, Copernicus studied both mathematics and astronomy in common with all university students of that time.

He was well educated. Copernicus' lived in early 16th century Prussia and Poland, and was influenced by the cultural, religious, and social contexts of life at the time. More recent philosophers also have found Copernicanism to remain valid and retain valuable philosophical meaning. Immanuel Kant, for instance, caught the symbolic character of Copernicus' revolution (of which he put in evidence the transcendental rationalism) postulating that human rationality was the real legislator of observed phenomena.

Some say "the" revolution [1]. Copernicus' innovation was a scientific revolution. This contrasts with Aristotle's system, which placed much more value on knowledge gained from the senses. One of the consequences of Copernicanism is that scientific laws must not necessarily coincide with appearance.

Accordingly some find that Copernicanism demolished the foundations of mediaeval science and metaphysics. Immanentism also leads into subjectivism: the theory that perception creates reality, and that there is no underlying, true, reality that exists independent of perception. However, Copernicanism also opened a way to immanence, the view that the divine force, or the divine being, pervades through all things that exist, which has been developed further in modern philosophy. When his work was published, it contradicted then accepted religious dogma: the suggestion being that there is no need for an entity (God) that from outside could give a soul, a power and a life to the World and to Human beings when science can explain everything attributed to Him.

His academic standing is often compared with Galileo Galilei. His work cut across science and religion, dogmatism and freedom of scientific investigation. Many meanings have been seen in his theory, quite apart from its scientific value. Many authors suggest that only Euclid's geometry, Darwin's Evolution, or Newton's physics could have a similar influence on human culture in general and on science in particular.

Copernicus' theories have an extraordinary relevance in the history of human knowledge. The fifth and the sixth books contain the concrete exposition of the new system. The fourth book contains a similar description of the Moon and its orbital movements. The third book is mainly dedicated to the apparent movements of the Sun and to related phenomena.

The second book is mainly theoretical and reports the principles of spherical astronomy and a list of stars (as a basis for the arguments developed in the following books). The first book contains a general vision of the heliocentric theory, and a summarized exposition of his idea on the World. It was dedicated to Pope Paul III, and is divided into 6 books. The major work of Copernicus, "On the Revolution of Celestial Spheres" (1543), is the result of decades of labor.

Main article: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.. These propositions represent the exact contrary of what the dominant geocentric propositions stated. The Copernican system can be summarized in seven propositions, as Copernicus himself collected them in a Compendium of De revolutionibus that was found and published in 1878:. Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus produced, however, the first observational evidence for Copernicus' theory.

The system nevertheless had a large influence on scientists such as Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler, who adopted, championed and (especially in Kepler's case) improved the model. Furthermore, he badly underestimated the size of the solar system, like most of the astronomers of the time. Unfortunately, uniform circular motion is not what happens in the solar system, which runs on elliptical orbits; and this model was no more precise in predicting ephemerides than the then current tables based on Ptolemy's model. With this change his system had only uniform circular motions, correcting what seemed to be a defect in Ptolemy's system.

This is the main source of the statement that his system had even more epicycles than Ptolemy's. He also replaced Ptolemy's equant circles with epicycles. He added another motion to the Earth, by which the axis is kept pointed throughout the year at the same place in the heavens; from the time of Galileo it has been recognized that for it not to point to the same place would be a motion. He also gave a clear account of the cause of the seasons: that the Earth's axis is not perpendicular to the plane of its orbit.

He arrived at the correct order of the known planets and explained the precession of the equinoxes correctly by a slow change in the position of the Earth's rotational axis. Copernicus held that the Earth is another planet revolving around the fixed sun once a year, and turning on its axis once a day. This book marks the beginning of the shift from a geocentric (and anthropocentric) universe with the Earth at its center. Copernicus' major theory was published in the book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) in the year of his death 1543, even though he had arrived at it several decades earlier.

See also discussion about Copernicus' nationality. The search for the body of Copernicus will continue in 2005. They found, however, several interesting graves from various time periods. However, a group of archaeologists searching for the body of Copernicus in 2004 failed to find the corpse of the astronomer.

Copernicus was buried in the Frombork Cathedral. He allegedly awoke from his stroke induced coma, looked at his book, and died peacefully. Legend says that the first printed copy of De revolutionibus was put in Copernicus's hands the same day of his death, so that he could say goodbye to his opus vitae. Under the strong pressure from Rheticus, and having seen that the first general reception of his work had not been favorable, Copernicus finally agreed to give the book to his close friend Tiedemann Giese, (the bishop of Kulmerland Chelmno Land, to be delivered to Rheticus for printing at Nuremberg.

In 1542, in the name of Copernicus, Rheticus published a treatise on trigonometry (later included in the second book of De revolutionibus). Rheticus became a disciple of Copernicus' and stayed with him for two years, in which he wrote a book, Narratio prima, in which he included the essence of the theory. Philipp Melanchthon had arranged with several astronomers for Rheticus to visit and study with them. Copernicus was still completing his work (even if he was not convinced to publish it), when in 1539 Georg Joachim Rheticus, a great mathematician at Wittenberg, directly arrived in Frauenburg.

The cardinal Nicola Schoenberg of Capua wrote him asking him to communicate his ideas more widely and requested a copy for himself; "Therefore, learned man, without wishing to be inopportune, I beg you most emphatically to communicate your discovery to the learned world, and to send me as soon as possible your theories about the Universe, together with the tables and whatever else you have pertaining to the subject." Some have proposed that this note may have made Copernicus nervous of publication whereas others have suggested that the church wanted to ensure that his ideas were published. From many parts of the continent, Copernicus received invitations to publish it, but he felt quite apprehensive of persecution for his revolutionary work by the establishment of the time. In 1536 his work was already in a definitive form, and some rumours about his theory had reached the scientists of all Europe. In 1533 Albert Widmanstadt delivered a series of lectures in Rome outlining Copernicus' theory.

During the war between the Teutonic Order and the Kingdom of Poland (1519–1524) Copernicus successfully defended Allenstein (Olsztyn) on the head of royal troops besieged by the troops of Albert of Brandenburg. From there he continued gathering evidence for a more detailed work. In 1514 he made his "Commentariolus"—a short, handwritten text describing his ideas about the heliocentric hypothesis—available to his friends. During these years he also travelled extensively on government business and as a diplomat, on the behalf of the Prince-Bishop of Warmia.

It was at this time that Copernicus came up with one of the earliest iterations of the theory now known as Gresham's Law. Copernicus worked for years with Prussian diet on monetary reform and published some studies about the value of money; as a governor of Ermland, he administered taxes and dealt out justice. Throughout his lifetime he made astronomical observations and calculations, but always in his spare time and never as a profession. Some time before his return to Warmia, he had received a position at the Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross in Wrocław, Silesia, which he held for many years until he resigned a few years prior to his death, when he progressively became ill.

Having left Italy at the end of his studies, he came to live and work in Frombork. His collection of observations and ideas on the theory started in 1504. It has been supposed that it was in Padua that he gained access to those passages of Cicero and Plato about the opinion of Ancients on the movement of the Earth, having the first intuition of his theory. As soon as he reached this town, he asked and obtained permission to return to Italy to complete his studies in Padua (with Guarico and Fracastoro) and in Ferrara (with Bianchini), where in 1503 received his doctoral degree in canon law.

He would have then visited Frombork only in 1501. Copernicus went to Rome, where he could observe a lunar eclipse and where he gave some lessons of astronomy or mathematics (unfortunately, nothing of this remains to us). In 1497 his uncle was ordained the bishop of Warmia and Copernicus was named a canon in the Frombork cathedral, but he waited in Italy for the great Jubilee of 1500. The first observation Copernicus made in 1497 together with Domenico Novara, are recorded in De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.

He followed his lessons and became a disciple and assistant. However, while studying canon and civil law at Ferrara, he met his teacher Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara, a famous astronomer. His uncle financed his education and wished for him to become a bishop as well. After four years and a brief stay in Toruń, he moved to Italy, where he studied law and medicine at the universities of Bologna and Padua.

This science soon fascinated him, as his books (stolen by Swedes during The Deluge, and now in the Uppsala University Library) show. In 1491 Copernicus entered the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and here he encountered astronomy for the first time, thanks to his teacher Albert Brudzewski. A sister, Barbara, became a Benedictine nun and the other sister, Katharina, married a businessman and city councillor, Barthel Gertner. His brother Andrew became canon in Frombork (German: Frauenburg).

His maternal uncle, Lucas Watzenrode, a church canon and later the Prince-Bishop governor of Warmia (German: Ermland ), raised him and his three other siblings after the death of Copernicus' father. Little is known of his mother, Barbara Watzenrode, but she appears to have predeceased her husband. He was ten years of age when his father, a wealthy businessman and copper trader, died. His father Nikolas, a citizen of Cracow (at that time the capital of Poland), moved there in 1460 and became a respected citizen of Toruń as well, once the war with the Teutonic Knights was over.

Copernicus was born in 1473 in the city of Toruń (German: Thorn) in Polish Royal Prussia. . His theory affected many other aspects of human life as well, opening the door to young astronomers everywhere to challenge the dogmas and never take anything at face value. His theory about the Sun as the center of the solar system, turning over the traditional geocentric theory (that placed Earth at the center of the Universe), is considered one of the most important discoveries ever, and is the fundamental starting point of modern astronomy and modern science itself (it inaugurated the scientific revolution).

Astronomy was actually a byproduct, a hobby of his. His main occupations and services rendered were in Royal Prussia as church canon, governor and administrator, jurist, astrologer and as a doctor. Nicolaus Copernicus (in Latin; Polish Mikołaj Kopernik, German Nikolaus Kopernikus); February 19, 1473 – May 24, 1543) was a Polish astronomer, mathematician and economist who developed the heliocentric (Sun-centered) theory of the solar system in a form detailed enough to make it scientifically useful. Precession — the axial wobble mentioned earlier that explains why the position of the fixed stars seems to change over long periods of time.

Daily rotation — the motion around a tilted axis that results in day and night. Annual motion — the yearly orbit around the Sun. These movements of the Earth and of the other planets around the Sun, can explain the stations, and all the particular characteristics of the planets' movements. The Earth (together with its Moon, and just like the other planets) moves around the Sun, so the movements that the Sun seems to be making (its apparent moving during daytime, and its annual moving through the Zodiac) are nothing else than effects of the Earth's real movements.

The daytime movement of the Sun is only apparent, and represents the effect of a rotation that the Earth makes every 24 hours around its axis, always parallel to itself. The distance between the Earth and the Sun, compared with the distance between the Earth and the fixed stars, is very small. (Copernicus was never certain whether the Sun moved or not, claiming that the center of the World is 'in the Sun, or near it.'). All the planets move along orbits whose center is the Sun, therefore the Sun is the center of the World.

The center of the Earth is not the center of the Universe, but only the center of the Earth's mass and of the lunar orbit. Orbits and celestial spheres do not have a unique, common, center.