Digging Up Copernicus

The scientist “who made the Earth a planet” is how the Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Owen Gingerich refers to Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). Copernicus’ path breaking book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,challenged the centuries-old belief that the Earth stood stationary at the center of the cosmos.

- Naomi Pasachoff

Gingerich has examined hundreds of the book’s original editions to see what readers wrote in the margins.

A Totally New Concept

By day, Copernicus, who had studied law and medicine, was an officer of the Catholic Church in northern Poland. At night, he studied the skies and made mathematical calculations that explained how the Sun was at the center of the cosmos, and the Earth, like the other planets,revolved around it.Worried that his conclusions were at odds with what the Church and most people believed, Copernicus delayed publishing his book. He believed he would be “hissed off the stage,” if the book appeared in print. But a younger scholar from Germany named Georg Joachim Rheticus paid a two-year-long visit to Copernicus and helped him prepare his book for publication. In March 1543, On  the Revolutions appeared in Nuremberg, Germany. Two months later, on May 24, as 70-year-old Copernicus lay on his deathbed, he saw the printed version for the first and last time.

Copernicus never knew that his book would set in motion the