Nicolaus Copernicus

Copernicus was honoured by Poland when the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, established 1945, was named after him. It is this idea that made his thought particularly important in Romanticism, though Rousseau himself is sometimes regarded as a figure of The Enlightenment. Copernicus:. Hence, to go back to nature means to restore to man the forces of this natural process, to place him outside every oppressing bond of society and the prejudices of civilization. Goethe:. Nature thus signifies interiority and integrity, as opposed to that imprisonment and enslavement which society imposes in the name of progressive emancipation from coldhearted brutality. 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. Later he took nature to mean the spontaneity of the process by which man builds his egocentric, instinct based character and his little world.

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. In his main writings Rousseau identifies nature with the primitive state of savage man. Neo-Platonic and classical ideas formed the intellectual environment in which Copernicus worked. John Darling's 1994 book Child-Centred Education and its Critics argues that the history of modern educational theory is a series of footnotes to Rousseau. 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. He placed a special emphasis on learning by experience. His reverence for the sun can be seen in the most famous passage of de Revolutionibus:. He minimizes the importance of book-learning, and recommends that a child's emotions should be educated before his reason.

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. Only a healthy child can be the rewarding object of any educational work. 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. In Emile he differentiates between healthy and "useless" crippled children. 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. Rousseau's ideas about education have profoundly influenced modern educational theory. 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. The second important principle is freedom, which the state is created to preserve.

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. When a state fails to act in a moral fashion, it ceases to function in the proper manner and ceases to exert genuine authority over the individual. Copernicus seems to have been benefited from the attitude of the bishops who were his superiors in the church - Johann Dantiscus and Tiedmann Giese. One of the primary principles of Rousseau's political philosophy is that politics and morality should not be separated. "Mathematics", he says, "is written for mathematicians". He argued that the goal of government should be to secure freedom, equality, and justice for all within the state, regardless of the will of the majority (see democracy). 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. Rousseau also questioned the assumption that the will of the majority is always correct.

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. Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the institution of private property, and therefore is often considered a forebearer of modern socialism and communism (see Karl Marx, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings). 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. Subsequently, writers such as Benjamin Constant and Hegel sought to blame the excesses of the Revolution and especially the Reign of Terror on Rousseau, but the justice of their claims is a matter of controversy. In his unauthorized and anonymous preface to de Revolutionibus, Andreas Osiander was technically correct when he made reference to "the hypothesis of this work". Rousseau's ideas were influential at the time of the French Revolution although since popular sovereignty was exercised through representatives rather than directly, it cannot be said that the Revolution was in any sense an implementation of Rousseau's ideas. 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. Rousseau attempted to defend himself against critics of his religious views in his Letter to Christophe de Beaumont (the Archbishop of Paris).

Copernicus used the eccentrics, epicycles, and equants of Ptolemaic cosmology, but added three kinds of motion to describe the observed behaviour of the Earth:. This was one of the reasons for the book's condemnation in Geneva. 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. In the Social Contract he claims that true followers of Jesus would not make good citizens. 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. His view that man is good by nature conflicts with the original sin doctrine by Paul of Tarsus and his theology of nature expounded by the Savoyard Vicar in Emile led to the condemnation of the book in both Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris. Aristarchus (3rd century BC) proposed an openly heliocentric model of the universe. Rousseau was most controversial in his own time for his views on religion.

Some of the ideas expressed by Philolaus (5th century BC) and Heraclides (4th century BC), proposed cosmological models in which the Earth moved. The boy must work out how to follow his social instincts and be protected from the vices of urban individualism and self-consciousness. He was acquainted with ideas espoused by other classical authors. The book is based on Rousseau's ideals of healthy living. Copernicus' mathematical experience engendered in his thought a desire for a simpler and more elegant model of the universe. At this point, Emile finds a young woman to complement him. 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. Second, from 10 or 12 to about 15, when reason starts to develop, and finally from the age of 15 onwards, when the child develops into an adult.

In Copernicus' view, Ptolemy's explanation failed to provide an accurate mathematical description of the universe. The growth of a child is divided into three sections, first to the age of about 12, when calculating and complex thinking is not possible, and children according to his deepest conviction live like animals. This characteristic of the Earth's movement is apparent only with observation over long periods of time. The aim of education, Rousseau says, is to learn how to live, and this is accomplished by following a guardian who can point the way to good living. Precession is the phenomenon by which the Earth's axis "wobbles". He brings him up in the countryside, where, he believes, humans are most naturally suited, rather than in a city, where we only learn bad habits, both physical and intellectual. Nor did the Ptolemaic model explain precession. Rousseau set out his views on education in Emile, a semi-fictitious work detailing the growth of a young boy of that name, presided over by Rousseau himself.

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. Much of the subsequent controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free. 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. It has been argued that this would prevent Rousseau's ideal state being realized in a large society, though in modern times, communication may have advanced to the point where this is no longer the case. 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. Rather, they should make the laws directly. It maintained that all planetary motion, and the motion of the Moon, the Sun, and the stars was circular, around a stationary Earth. Rousseau was bitterly opposed to the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly.

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 government is charged with implementing and enforcing the general will and is composed of a smaller group of citizens, known as magistrates. The Earth-centered Ptolemaic cosmology had been the accepted model of the universe since the 2nd century BC. Whilst Rousseau argues that sovereignty should thus be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between sovereign and government. There is evidence that his interest in these subjects continued after he had left Kraków. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law. 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. According to Rousseau, by joining together through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free.

He was well educated. This double pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom. Copernicus' lived in early 16th century Prussia and Poland, and was influenced by the cultural, religious, and social contexts of life at the time. In the degenerate phase of the state of nature, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men while at the same time becoming increasingly dependent on them. More recent philosophers also have found Copernicanism to remain valid and retain valuable philosophical meaning. Building on his earlier work, such as the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau claimed that the state of nature eventually degenerates into a brutish condition without law or morality, at which point the human race must adopt institutions of law or perish. 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. Published in 1762 it became one of the most influential works of abstract political thought in the Western tradition.

Some say "the" revolution [1]. Perhaps Rousseau's most important work is The Social Contract, which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order. Copernicus' innovation was a scientific revolution. At the end of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau explains how the desire to have value in the eyes of others, which originated in the golden age, comes to undermine personal integrity and authenticity in a society marked by interdependence, hierarchy, and inequality. This contrasts with Aristotle's system, which placed much more value on knowledge gained from the senses. Rousseau's own conception of the social contract can be understood as an alternative to this fraudulent form of association. One of the consequences of Copernicanism is that scientific laws must not necessarily coincide with appearance. This original contract was deeply flawed as the wealthiest and most powerful members of society tricked the general population, and so cemented inequality as a permanent feature of human society.

Accordingly some find that Copernicanism demolished the foundations of mediaeval science and metaphysics. The resulting state of conflict led Rousseau to suggest that the first state was invented as a kind of social contract made at the suggestion of the rich and powerful. 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, the development of agriculture and metallurgy, private property and the division of labour led to increased interdependence and inequality. 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. Rousseau associated this new self-awareness with a golden age of human flourishing. 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. As humans were forced to associate together more closely, by the pressure of population growth, they underwent a psychological transformation and came to value the good opinion of others as an essential component of their own well being.

His academic standing is often compared with Galileo Galilei. He also argued that these primitive humans were possessed of a basic drive to care for themselves and a natural disposition to compassion or pity. His work cut across science and religion, dogmatism and freedom of scientific investigation. He suggested that the earliest human beings were isolated semi-apes who were differentiated from animals by their capacity for free will and their perfectibility. Many meanings have been seen in his theory, quite apart from its scientific value. His subsequent Discourse on Inequality, tracked the progress and degeneration of mankind from a primitive state of nature to modern society. 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. He concluded that material progress had actually undermined the possibility of sincere friendship, replacing it with jealousy, fear and suspicion.

Copernicus' theories have an extraordinary relevance in the history of human knowledge. He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful and had crushed individual liberty. The fifth and the sixth books contain the concrete exposition of the new system. Moreover, the opportunities they created for idleness and luxury contributed to the corruption of man. The fourth book contains a similar description of the Moon and its orbital movements. In "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" Rousseau argued that the arts and sciences had not been beneficial to humankind, because they were advanced not in response to human needs but as the result of pride and vanity. The third book is mainly dedicated to the apparent movements of the Sun and to related phenomena. Rousseau was not the first to make this distinction; it had been invoked by, among others, Vauvenargues.

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). In contrast, amour-propre is not natural but artificial and forces man to compare himself to others, thus creating unwarranted fear and allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others. The first book contains a general vision of the heliocentric theory, and a summarized exposition of his idea on the World. Amour de soi represents the instictive human desire for self-preservation, combined with the human power of reason. It was dedicated to Pope Paul III, and is divided into 6 books. Society's negative influence on otherwise virtuous men centers, in Rousseau's philosophy, on its transformation of amour de soi, a positive self-love, into amour-propre, or pride. The major work of Copernicus, "On the Revolution of Celestial Spheres" (1543), is the result of decades of labor. He viewed society as artificial and held that the development of society, especially the growth of social interdependence, has been inimical to the well-being of human beings.

Main article: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.. Rousseau contended that man was good by nature, a "noble savage" when in the state of nature (the state of all the "other animals", and the condition humankind was in before the creation of civilization and society), but is corrupted by society. These propositions represent the exact contrary of what the dominant geocentric propositions stated. Rousseau saw a fundamental divide between society and human nature. 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:. In 2002, the Espace Rousseau was established at 40 Grand-Rue, Geneva, Rousseau's birthplace. Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus produced, however, the first observational evidence for Copernicus' theory. In 1834, the Genevan government reluctantly erected a statue in his honor on the tiny Ile Rousseau in Lake Geneva.

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. The tomb was designed to resemble a rustic temple, to recall Rousseau's theories of nature. Furthermore, he badly underestimated the size of the solar system, like most of the astronomers of the time. His remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris in 1794, sixteen years after his death. 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. Rousseau was initially buried on the Ile des Peupliers. With this change his system had only uniform circular motions, correcting what seemed to be a defect in Ptolemy's system. While taking a morning walk on the estate of the Marquis de Giradin at Ermenonville (28 miles northeast of Paris), Rousseau suffered a hemorrhage and died on July 2, 1778.

This is the main source of the statement that his system had even more epicycles than Ptolemy's. Because of his partially-justified paranoia, he did not seek attention or the company of others. He also replaced Ptolemy's equant circles with epicycles. In order to support himself through this time, he returned to copying music. 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. In 1776 he completed Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques and began work on the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. 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. In 1772, he was invited to present recommendations for a new constitution for Poland, resulting in the Considerations on the Government of Poland, which was to be his last major political work.

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. Rousseau continued to write until his death. Copernicus held that the Earth is another planet revolving around the fixed sun once a year, and turning on its axis once a day. In 1771 he was forced to stop this, and this book, along with all subsequent ones, was not published until after his death in 1782. This book marks the beginning of the shift from a geocentric (and anthropocentric) universe with the Earth at its center. As a condition of his return, he was not allowed to publish any books, but after completing his Confessions, Rousseau began private readings. 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. In 1768 he married Thérèse, and in 1770 he returned to Paris.

See also discussion about Copernicus' nationality. Rousseau returned to France under the name "Renou," although officially he was not allowed back in until 1770. The search for the body of Copernicus will continue in 2005. Facing criticism in Switzerland – his house in Motiers was stoned in 1765 – Rousseau in January of 1766 took refuge in with the philosopher David Hume in Great Britain, but after 18 months he left because he believed Hume was plotting against him[1]. They found, however, several interesting graves from various time periods. While in Motiers, Rousseau wrote the Constitutional Project for Corsica (Projet de Constitution pour la Corse). However, a group of archaeologists searching for the body of Copernicus in 2004 failed to find the corpse of the astronomer. Rousseau was forced to flee arrest and made stops in both Bern and Motiers in Switzerland.

Copernicus was buried in the Frombork Cathedral. Both books criticized religion and were banned in both France and Geneva. He allegedly awoke from his stroke induced coma, looked at his book, and died peacefully. In 1762 he published two major books, first The Social Contract (Du Contrat Social) in April and then Emile, or On Education in May. 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. Rousseau in 1761 published the successful romantic novel Nouvelle Heloise (The New Heloise). 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. Beginning with this piece, Rousseau's work found him increasingly in disfavor with the French government.

In 1542, in the name of Copernicus, Rheticus published a treatise on trigonometry (later included in the second book of De revolutionibus). In 1755 Rousseau completed his second major work, the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. 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. In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva, where he reconverted to Calvinism and regained his official Genevan citizenship. Philipp Melanchthon had arranged with several astronomers for Rheticus to visit and study with them. This inspiration, however, did not cease his interest in music and in 1752 his opera Le Devin du village was performed for King Louis XV. 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. Rousseau claimed that during the carriage ride to visit Diderot, he had experienced a sudden inspiration on which all his later philosophical works were based.

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. Rousseau's response to this prompt, answering in the negative, was his 1750 "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences", which won him first prize in the contest and gained him significant fame. 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 1749, on his way to Vincennes to visit Diderot in prison, Rousseau heard of an essay competition sponsored by the Académie de Dijon, asking the question whether the development of the arts and sciences has been morally beneficial. In 1536 his work was already in a definitive form, and some rumours about his theory had reached the scientists of all Europe. Soon after, his friendship with Diderot and the Encyclopedists would become strained. In 1533 Albert Widmanstadt delivered a series of lectures in Rome outlining Copernicus' theory. His most important contribution was an article on political economy, written in 1755.

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. While in Paris, he became friends with Diderot and beginning in 1749 contributed several articles to his Encyclopédie, beginning with some articles on music. From there he continued gathering evidence for a more detailed work. In his defense, Rousseau explained that he would have been a poor father, and that the children would have a better life at the foundling home. In 1514 he made his "Commentariolus"—a short, handwritten text describing his ideas about the heliocentric hypothesis—available to his friends. As a result of his theories on education and child-rearing, Rousseau has often been criticized by Voltaire and modern commentators for putting his children in an orphanage as soon as they were weaned. During these years he also travelled extensively on government business and as a diplomat, on the behalf of the Prince-Bishop of Warmia. After this, he returned to Paris, where he befriended and lived with Thérèse Lavasseur, an illiterate seamstress who bore him five children.

It was at this time that Copernicus came up with one of the earliest iterations of the theory now known as Gresham's Law. From 1743 to 1744, he was secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, whose republican government Rousseau would refer to often in his later political work. 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. In 1742 Rousseau moved to Paris in order to present the Académie des Sciences with a new system of musical notation he had invented, which was rejected as useless and unoriginal. Throughout his lifetime he made astronomical observations and calculations, but always in his spare time and never as a profession. In 1736 he enjoyed a last stay with de Warens near Chambéry, which he found idyllic, but by 1740 he had departed again, this time to Lyon to tutor the young children of Gabriel Bonnet de Mably. 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. As well, he spent much time travelling and engaging in a variety of professions; for instance, in the early 1730s he worked as a music teacher in Chambéry.

Having left Italy at the end of his studies, he came to live and work in Frombork. Rousseau spent a few weeks in seminary and beginning in 1729 six months at the Annecy Cathedral choir school. His collection of observations and ideas on the theory started in 1504. Under the protection of de Warens, he converted to Catholicism. 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. He then met Françoise-Louise de Warens, a French Catholic baroness who would later became Rousseau's lover, even though she was twelve years his elder. 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. Rousseau left Geneva on March 14, 1728, after several years of apprenticeship to a notary and then an engraver.

He would have then visited Frombork only in 1501. His childhood education consisted solely of reading Plutarch's Lives and Calvinist sermons. 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). His mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, died a week later due to complications from childbirth, and his father Isaac abandoned him in 1722. 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. Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and throughout his life described himself as a citizen of Geneva. 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. His legacy as a radical and revolutionary is perhaps best demonstrated by his most famous line, from his most important work, The Social Contract: "Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.". However, while studying canon and civil law at Ferrara, he met his teacher Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara, a famous astronomer. Rousseau's political ideas influenced the French Revolution, the development of communist and socialist theory, and the growth of nationalism. His uncle financed his education and wished for him to become a bishop as well. Jean Jacques Rousseau (June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778) was a Franco-Swiss philosopher, writer, political theorist, and self-taught composer of The Age of Enlightenment. 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.