Nicholas Copernicus was an incredibly intelligent man, having mastered the fields of economics, science, and math just to name a few.
He was born in 1473 in Royal Prussia, a region in Poland. He was born to a wealthy merchant, who passed away when he was 10. His uncle though, a Bishop named Lucas Watzenrode, took care of him, and swore to give him the best possible education.
He became a canon, an opportunity usually reserved for priests. This was beneficial for him since it allowed him to fund his scientific projects for as long as he liked.
But Nicholas Copernicus wasn’t known for his position in the church. What he is known for is his theory of the heliocentric model of the solar system, a model proved to be true during the scientific revolution.
His thoughts about the heliocentric model began a little before he became a canon. They had originated when he first started going to the University of Cracow, where his interest in the cosmos began.
While he was a canon, he took leave to go and study religious law in the university of Bologna in Italy. It is there that he met the astronomer Domenico Maria Novara, the building ground for his theory about the solar system.
Domenico was the first person that Nicholas had met that challenged the authority of Ptolemy in astronomy. The theory that Ptolemy had created about the solar system was hat of the Earth being in the center of the universe, which we now know to be false. Ptolemy called his theory the ‘geo-centric’ theory, or ‘Earth Centered’.
Nicholas proposed the ‘helio-centric’ theory. This meant that the sun was in the center, and that the Earth and all of the other planets in the solar system spun around it. He put a lot of mathematical and scientific evidence behind his theory, trying to prove that his theory was correct.
Well, imagine breaking a habit that you have had for centuries (presuming you could live that long). Well, that’s the same exact thing that happened when Nicholas introduced his theory. His book was banned from reading, not that it mattered to him anyway. He died from internal bleeding and paralysis not long after he released his book.
Galileo, another famous astronomer, was put under house arrest because he had believed in Nicholas’s theory. The church had believed that the two of them were heretics, since in the scriptures, is said that the Earth was in the center of the universe, and not the sun.
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