Abstract
By long and intense study I finally found that if the motions of the other planets are correlated with the orbiting of the Earth, not only do their phenomena follow therefrom but also the order and size of all planets and spheres, and Heaven itself is so linked together that in no portion of it can anything be shifted without disturbing the remaining parts and the Universe as a whole.
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Notes
- 1.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1543) De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Libri VI, translation by Edward Rosen (referred to as De Rev., Rosen). Also used are the translations by Ch. Glenn Wallis, and by J.F. Dobson & S. Brodetsky (Chap. I only), given by Milton K. Munitz (referred to as MKM). Of at least equal importance here are the Three Copernican Treatises: Commentariolus (c. 1514), Rheticus’ Narratio Prima (1540), Letter against Werner (1524), translated with Introduction and Notes by E. Rosen, who gives a biography, plus a bibliography which contains 1092 entries solely from 1939 to 1958.
- 2.
Arthur Koestler (1963) in his Sleepwalkers provides a highly-readable but misleading account of the life of the “Timid Canon.” His description of De Revolutionibus as “the book nobody read” is a large overstatement. He is particularly difficult to follow when he pictures Copernicus as unconscious of the revolutionary character of his own theory. He is thoroughly demolished by E. Rosen’s Copernicus as a Man and Contributor to the advancement of Science, Vistas in Astronomy 17 (1975).
- 3.
For instance The Instrument for Observing parallaxes is described in De Revolutionibus, IV, 1. About the observatory, see e.g. the biography given by Rosen, Three Treatises, p. 340 ff.
- 4.
De Rev., Rosen, 16; MKM, 167. About Martianus Capella and his Encyclopaedia, see Dreyer 1909, 127.
- 5.
De Rev., MKM, 173. The reference to Aristotle is De Caelo, II, 14. Arenarius was to be printed only in 1544; still, Copernicus might have seen a manuscript (Koyré 1961, III, Note 22)
- 6.
Koestler, systematically hostile to Copernicus, suggests (p. 205) that he was “confusing the trail” by not being more explicit about the only ancient system that had truly anticipated his own, but this appears unlikely.
- 7.
Narratio Prima, Rosen, 146. As a consequence, Copernicus obtains for the relative planetary distances almost the modern figures, an impressive achievement; let us give only the maximum distances, extracted from Table 8, p. 59 of A. Van Helden (1985):
Planet Copernicus Actual
Mercury 0.490 0.488
Venus 0.761 0.741
Earth 1.000 1.041
Mars 1.665 1.647
Jupiter 5.458 5.492
Saturn 9.700 9.987
However his absolute distances remained just as wrong as those of Ptolemy, because he simply adopted the solar distance of the Almagest, which is 20 times too small. No other course was possible before the telescopic era
- 8.
De Rev., Rosen, 28; MKM, 165. When he attributes to Plato the idea that planets merely reflect sunlight, Copernicus may be alluding to a particularly obscure passage of Timaeus (p. 81). Plato first stresses that all planets “had been generated as living creatures”; next “God kindled a light which we now call the Sun, to the end that it might shine throughout the whole Heaven, and that all the living creatures entitled thereto might participate in Number, learning it from the revolution of the Same and the Similar.”
- 9.
- 10.
As recalled in the Notes, many texts in various languages are now available in fac-simile and a large number in world-processor form) from Gallica.bnf.fr, and other WEB sites. They are indicated by ∗ for Gallica, ° for Google Books and + for others.
Bibliography
As recalled in the Notes, many texts in various languages are now available in fac-simile and a large number in world-processor form) from Gallica.bnf.fr, and other WEB sites. They are indicated by ∗ for Gallica, ° for Google Books and + for others.
Ancient Authors
∗Copernicus, N. (1543) De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, +translation by E. Rosen (1978), Polish Scientific Publications, Warsaw. Other translation: Ch. Gl. Wallis (1962), Great Books of Western World (GBWW), Vol. 16.
°∗Kepler, J. (1609) Astronomia Nova, translated by William H. Donahue (1992) as Johannes Kepler New Astronomy, Cambridge University Press.
Historians and Modern Authors
°Dreyer, J.L.E. (1905) History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler, Cambridge University Press; reprint by Dover (1953).
Gingerich, O. (1992) The great Copernicus Chase, Cambridge University Press; and (1979) American Scholar, 48, p. 81–8.
Johnson, F.R. (1937) Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England, Johns Hopkins University Press; reprint by Octagon Books, New York (1968).
°Koestler, A. (1963) The Sleepwalkers, Universal Library, New York.
Koyré, A. (1961) La Révolution Astronomique, Hermann, Paris; translated by R.E.W. Maddison (1992) as °The Astronomical Revolution, Dover.
Kuhn, T. (1959) The Copernican Revolution, Vintage Books, New York.
Mac Colley, G. (1936) The Seventeenth-Century Doctrine of a Plurality of Worlds, Annals of Science, I, 4, 385–430.
Oberman, H.A. (2009) John Calvin and the Reformation of the Refugees, edited by Peter Dykema, Librairie Droz, Geneva.
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Connes, P., Lequeux, J. (2020). Nicolaus Copernicus: Earth No Centre. In: Lequeux, J. (eds) History of the Plurality of Worlds. Historical & Cultural Astronomy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41448-1_7
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