Goddu's Copernicus
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Nicolaus Copernicus: the Loss of Centrality
I Nicolaus Copernicus: The Loss of Centrality The mathematician who studies the motions of the stars is surely like a blind man who, with only a staff to guide him, must make a great, endless, hazardous journey that winds through innumerable desolate places. [Rheticus, Narratio Prima (1540), 163] 1 Ptolemy and Copernicus The German playwright Bertold Brecht wrote his play Life of Galileo in exile in 1938–9. It was first performed in Zurich in 1943. In Brecht’s play two worldviews collide. There is the geocentric worldview, which holds that the Earth is at the center of a closed universe. Among its many proponents were Aristotle (384–322 BC), Ptolemy (AD 85–165), and Martin Luther (1483–1546). Opposed to geocentrism is the heliocentric worldview. Heliocentrism teaches that the sun occupies the center of an open universe. Among its many proponents were Copernicus (1473–1543), Kepler (1571–1630), Galileo (1564–1642), and Newton (1643–1727). In Act One the Italian mathematician and physicist Galileo Galilei shows his assistant Andrea a model of the Ptolemaic system. In the middle sits the Earth, sur- rounded by eight rings. The rings represent the crystal spheres, which carry the planets and the fixed stars. Galileo scowls at this model. “Yes, walls and spheres and immobility,” he complains. “For two thousand years people have believed that the sun and all the stars of heaven rotate around mankind.” And everybody believed that “they were sitting motionless inside this crystal sphere.” The Earth was motionless, everything else rotated around it. “But now we are breaking out of it,” Galileo assures his assistant. -
The Impact of Copernicanism on Judicial Astrology at the English Court, 1543-1660 ______
Clemson University TigerPrints All Theses Theses 1-2011 'In So Many Ways Do the Planets Bear Witness': The mpI act of Copernicanism on Judicial Astrology at the English Court, 1543-1660 Justin Dohoney Clemson University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses Part of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons Recommended Citation Dohoney, Justin, "'In So Many Ways Do the Planets Bear Witness': The mpI act of Copernicanism on Judicial Astrology at the English Court, 1543-1660" (2011). All Theses. 1143. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/1143 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. "IN SO MANY WAYS DO THE PLANETS BEAR WITNESS": THE IMPACT OF COPERNICANISM ON JUDICIAL ASTROLOGY AT THE ENGLISH COURT, 1543-1660 _____________________________________________________ A Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts History _______________________________________________________ by Justin Robert Dohoney August 2011 _______________________________________________________ Accepted by: Pamela Mack, Committee Chair Alan Grubb Megan Taylor-Shockley Caroline Dunn ABSTRACT The traditional historiography of science from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries has broadly claimed that the Copernican revolution in astronomy irrevocably damaged the practice of judicial astrology. However, evidence to the contrary suggests that judicial astrology not only continued but actually expanded during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During this time period, judicial astrologers accomplished this by appropriating contemporary science and mathematics. -
The (Likely) Last Edition of Copernicus's Libri Revolutionum
Variants The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship 14 | 2019 Varia The (likely) Last Edition of Copernicus’s Libri revolutionum André Goddu Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/variants/908 DOI: 10.4000/variants.908 ISSN: 1879-6095 Publisher European Society for Textual Scholarship Printed version Number of pages: 159-178 ISSN: 1573-3084 Electronic reference André Goddu, « The (likely) Last Edition of Copernicus’s Libri revolutionum », Variants [Online], 14 | 2019, Online since 10 July 2019, connection on 12 July 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ variants/908 ; DOI : 10.4000/variants.908 The authors The (likely) Last Edition of Copernicus’ Libri revolutionum André Goddu Review essay of Nicolas Copernic, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Des revolu- tions des orbes célestes. 3 volumes. Science et Humanisme, Collection published under the patronage of the Association Guillaume Budé (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2015). Vol. I: Introduction by Michel-Pierre Lerner and Alain-Philippe Segonds with the collaboration of Concetta Luna, Isabelle Pantin, and Denis Savoie, xxviii + 859 pp. Vol. II: Critical Edition and translation by Lerner, Segonds, and Jean-Pierre Verdet with the collaboration of Concetta Luna, viii + 537 pp. with French and Latin on facing pages and with the same page numbers. Vol. III: Notes, appendices, iconographic dossier, and general index by Lerner, Segonds, and Verdet with the collaboration of Luna, Savoie, and Michel Toulmonde, xviii + 783 pp. and 34 plates. T C’ , probably the last for the foresee- able future, represents the culmination of efforts that can be traced back to 1973. The two fundamental sources of De revolutionibus are Copernicus’s auto- graph copy which survived by sheer luck and the first edition published in Nuremberg in 1543. -
The Reception of the Copernican Revolution Among Provençal Humanists of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries*
The Reception of the Copernican Revolution Among Provençal Humanists of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries* Jean-Pierre Luminet Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) CNRS-UMR 7326 & Centre de Physique Théorique de Marseille (CPT) CNRS-UMR 7332 & Observatoire de Paris (LUTH) CNRS-UMR 8102 France E-mail: [email protected] Abstract We discuss the reception of Copernican astronomy by the Provençal humanists of the XVIth- XVIIth centuries, beginning with Michel de Montaigne who was the first to recognize the potential scientific and philosophical revolution represented by heliocentrism. Then we describe how, after Kepler’s Astronomia Nova of 1609 and the first telescopic observations by Galileo, it was in the south of France that the New Astronomy found its main promotors with humanists and « amateurs écairés », Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and Pierre Gassendi. The professional astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini, also from Provence, would later elevate the field to new heights in Paris. Introduction In the first book I set forth the entire distribution of the spheres together with the motions which I attribute to the earth, so that this book contains, as it were, the general structure of the universe. —Nicolaus Copernicus, Preface to Pope Paul III, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, 1543.1 Written over the course of many years by the Polish Catholic canon Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and published following his death, De revolutionibus orbium cœlestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) is regarded by historians as the origin of the modern vision of the universe.2 The radical new ideas presented by Copernicus in De revolutionibus * Extended version of the article "The Provençal Humanists and Copernicus" published in Inference, vol.2 issue 4 (2017), on line at http://inference-review.com/. -
Copernicus' First Friends: Physical Copernicanism
Filozofski vestnik Volume/Letnik XXV • Number/Številka 2 • 2004 • 143–166 COPERNICUS’ FIRST FRIENDS: PHYSICAL COPERNICANISM FROM 1543 TO 1610 Katherine A. Tredwell and Peter Barker Early assessments of the Copernican Revolution were hampered by the failure to understand the nature of astronomy in the sixteenth century, as scholars took statements made in praise of Copernicus to be implicit endorsements of his heliocentric cosmology. Gradually this view has been supplanted by the ac- knowledgement that many supposed partisans of Copernicus only endorsed the use of his astronomical models for the calculation of apparent planetary positions, while rejecting or remaining silent on the reality of heliocentrism. A classic example of this shift in historiography concerns Erasmus Reinhold (1511–1553), a professor of mathematics at the University of Wittenberg. Re- inhold’s use of Copernican models in his Prutenic Tables (Tabulae prutenicae, 1551) has led to the mistaken belief that he sanctioned a Sun-centered cos- mology as well. Careful reassessment of his published writings has revealed that he commended certain aspects of Copernicus’ work, such as the elimi- nation of the equant, but showed no interest in heliocentrism (Westman, 1975: pp. 174–178). Other supposed Copernicans, such as Robert Recorde (c. 1510–1558), expressed some openness to the Earth’s motion but left no clear indication of what they thought to be the true system of the world (Rus- sell, 1972: pp. 189–191). Between the publication of Copernicus’ epoch-making book On the Revo- lutions of the Celestial Orbs (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) in 1543 and the year 1610, only a handful of individuals can be identified with certainty as Copernicans, in the sense that they considered heliocentrism to be physically real and not merely a calculational convenience. -
Copernicus and the Origin of His Heliocentric System
JHA, xxxiii (2002) COPERNICUS AND THE ORIGIN OF HIS HELIOCENTRIC SYSTEM BERNARD R. GOLDSTEIN, University of Pittsburgh The introduction of a heliocentric system by Copernicus (d. 1543) is often considered to be a major blow to the traditional cosmology of his time and an epoch-making event in the history of science. But what was the question for which heliocentrism was the answer? For astronomers in the late Middle Ages cosmic distances were based on Ptolemy’s nesting hypothesis that was originally described in his Plan- etary hypotheses and transmitted to the Latin West through Arabic intermediaries. Copernicus specifically rejected this hypothesis inDe revolutionibus, i.10, although he might have expressed himself more clearly. It will be my goal here to understand the reasons why Copernicus rejected this tradition of cosmic distances and the geo- centric system in which it was embedded. First, it is important to distinguish astronomical issues, such as the use of the equant, from cosmological issues, such as the location of the centre of planetary motion and the order of the planets in space. Ptolemy had motion on a planet’s deferent move uniformly about the equant point, a point other than the centre of the deferent, in violation of the principle of uniform circular motion stated in Almagest, ix.2 (see Figure 1). Indeed, at the beginning of the Commentariolus Copernicus argued that FIG. 1. An equant model: T is the Earth, D is the centre of the deferent circle whose radius is R, and Q is the centre of uniform motion for C that lies on the deferent. -
Copernicus's Heliocentric System a Thesis Submitted T
THE HEURISTIC ROLE OF QUESTIONS IN THE FORMATION OF RESEARCH PROGRAMMES: COPERNICUS’S HELIOCENTRIC SYSTEM A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES OF MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY BY SEZEN ALTUĞ IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY SEPTEMBER 2016 Approval of the Graduate School of Social Sciences Prof. Dr. Tülin Gençöz Director I certify that this thesis satisfies all the requirements as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts. Prof. Dr. Şeref Halil Turan Head of Department This is to certify that we have read this thesis and that in our opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts. Doç. Dr. Samet Bağçe Supervisor Examining Committee Members Yrd. Doç. Dr. Sandy Berkovski (ID BILKENT, Phil) Doç. Dr. Samet Bağçe (METU, Phil) Doç. Dr. Sinan Kaan Yerli (METU, Phys) I hereby declare that all information in this document has been obtained and presented in accordance with academic rules and ethical conduct. I also declare that, as required by these rules and conduct, I have fully cited and referenced all material and results that are not original to this work. Name, Last name : Sezen Altuğ Signature : iii ABSTRACT THE HEURISTIC ROLE OF QUESTIONS IN THE FORMATION OF RESEARCH PROGRAMMES: COPERNICUS’S HELIOCENTRIC SYSTEM Altuğ, Sezen M.A., Department of Philosophy Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Samet Bağçe September 2016, 96 pages The aim of this thesis is to develop a critical view about the notion of the heuristic in Lakatos’s methodology of research programmes. -
The Astronomy and Cosmology of Copernicus
The Astronomy and Cosmology of Copernicus t was close to the northernmost coast of Europe, in the city of Torun, that the King of Poland and the Teutonic Knights signed I and sealed the Peace of 1466, which made West Prussia part of Polish territory. And it was in that city, just seven years later and precisely 500 years ago, in 1473, that Nicholas Copernicus was born. We know relatively few biographical facts about Copernicus and vir- tually nothing of his childhood. He grew up far from the centers of Renaissance innovation, in a world sti11largely dominated by medieval patterns of thought. But Copernicus and his contemporaries lived in an age of exploration and of change, and in their lifetimes they put to- gether a renewed picture of astronomy and geography, of mathematics and perspective, of anatomy, and of theology. I When Copernicus was ten years old, his father died, but fortunately his maternal uncle stepped into the breach. Uncle Lucas Watzenrode was then pursuing a successful career in ecclesiastical politics, and in 1489 he became Bishop of Varmia. Thus Uncle Lucas could easily send Copernicus and his younger brother to the old and distinguished University of Cracow. The Collegium Maius was then richly and un- usually endowed with specialists in mathematics and astronomy; Hart- mann Schedel, in his Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, remarked that "Next to St. Anne's church stands a university, which boasts many Selection 9 reprinted from Highlights in Astronomy of the International Astronomical Union, ed. by G. Contopoulos, vol. 3 (1974), pp. 67-85. 162 ASTRONOMY AND COSMOLOGY OF COPERNICUS eminent and learned men, and where numerous arts are taught; the study of astronomy stands highest there. -
Narratio Prima Or First Account of the Books on the Revolution by Nicolaus Copernicus
Introduction There are few, if at all, examples of scientific books which successfully preceded the publication of a groundbreaking work, announcing it with considerable success which can be additionally measured by, for instance, the number of successive editions. There are no traces of such a vanguard enterprise announcing the Almagest by Ptolemy who in the middle of the 2nd century, in Alexandria, presented to the world his opus magnum of Hel- lenistic mathematical astronomy. Similarly unaided was Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia nova, propagating the idea of elliptic orbits. In 1687, Isaac Newton published the Principia, a work that was fundamental for contemporary celestial mechanics, and yet without any earlier lite version. Typically, it is the explicit acknowledgement of the scientific significance of a given work 9 which triggers elucidating commentaries, synopses and summaries aimed at readers of varying competence. It is also in this respect that the history of this book appears extraordinary, or in fact, unique. De revolutionibus by Nicolaus Copernicus is one of the most famous sci- entific works of all time. The book was published by a Nuremberg printer, Johannes Petreius, in spring 1543. Paradoxically enough, however, De revo- lutionibus was not the first to introduce heliocentric astronomy to Latin Eu- rope. For the three preceding years the geocentric world model had already been challenged by the Narratio prima. The book entitled the First Account of the Books «On the Revolutions» by Nicolaus Copernicus appeared in 1540 Narratio prima or First Account of the Books “On the Revolutions”… in Danzig (Gdańsk), and was reprinted in Basel the following year. -
I the Reception of Copernicus As Reflected in Biographies* 1
ORGANON 35:2006 Andreas Kühne (Munich, Germany), Gudula Metze (Munich, Germany) THE EARLY COPERNICAN BIOGRAPHIES AND PORTRAITS I The reception of Copernicus as reflected in biographies* 1. Problems of the early modern Copernicus biographies The biographer of a person who was living in the 19th or 20th century is usually confronted with an abundance of material that he has to choose, sort and evaluate in order to separate substantial from insubstantial information. Nicolaus Copernicus’s early biographers, in contrast, had a rather small amount of biographical material that, in addition, sometimes seemed to be of questionable value or veracity. These meagre and dubious sources were determined by several events that mostly occurred in the first hundred years after Copernicus’s death and have a continuing influence up to now. Copernicus’s only disciple, Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514-1576), knew many details of his teacher’s life and a letter from Copernicus’s friend and Confrater Tiedemann Giese, dated July 26th, 15431, tells us that Rheticus had written a biography or at least made a draft of one shortly after Copernicus’s death. For unknown reasons, this manuscript has neither been printed nor even found. A few published biographical notes, for example, in Rheticus’s preface referring to the Ephemerides of 1551“, give us an impression of how much information about Copernicus’s life has been lost. Johannes Broscius (1581-1652) had also planned another and probably more important Copernicus biography, which he never wrote. Broscius, a doctor, theologian, astronomer at the University of Cracow and head of the Cracow observatory, travelled before 1612 to Prussia and Warmia in order to gather unknown material related to Copernicus’s life. -
The Silence of the Wolves, Οr, Why It Took the Holy Inquisition Seventy-Three Years to Ban Copernicanism1
chapter 2 The Silence of the Wolves, Οr, Why It Took the Holy Inquisition Seventy-Three Years to Ban Copernicanism1 Gereon Wolters Abstract I give two main answers to the question why Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (1543) had so long been officially ignored in ‘Rome’. The first is that cosmological issues were of only peripheral importance in such times of life-and-death contestations with Protestant reformers. The second is that it took—in a very contingent way—the per- sonality of Cardinal Bellarmine, driven by an anti-reformationist emphasis on author- ity, to unite with a ‘synergy effect’ two separate dogmatic strands: (1) the old teaching of the superiority of theology over all other forms of knowledge, made binding in the Papal Bull Apostolici Regiminis (1513), and, (2) the Decree of the Council of Trent on the Holy Scripture (1546), which stated that only the Church, and not the single believer (as Luther had claimed), had the authority to bindingly interpret the Scripture in matters of faith and morals. The synergy between the two strands had the surprising epistemic result of any biblical passage becoming a ‘matter of faith.’ 1 The Roman Wolves Howl (1616) Our story ends on 5 March 1616 with a Decree of the Holy Congregation of the Index:2 This Holy Congregation has also learned about the spreading and accep- tance by many of the false Pythagorean doctrine,[3] altogether contrary to 1 Thanks to Giora Hon (Haifa) for greatly improving the paper. 2 This Congregation had been in charge of prohibiting ‘dangerous’ books since 1571. -
University of Oklahoma Graduate College The
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE THE EXACT SCIENCES IN LUTHERAN GERMANY AND TUDOR ENGLAND A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By KATHERINE ANNE TREDWELL Norman, Oklahoma 2005 UMI Number: 3163319 UMI Microform 3163319 Copyright 2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 THE EXACT SCIENCES IN LUTHERAN GERMANY AND TUDOR ENGLAND A Dissertation APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE BY _____________________________ Peter Barker _____________________________ Steven J. Livesey _____________________________ Marilyn B. Ogilvie _____________________________ Kenneth L. Taylor _____________________________ Laura K. Gibbs _____________________________ James S. Hart © Copyright by KATHERINE ANNE TREDWELL 2005 All Rights Reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I wish to thank my advisor, Peter Barker, who introduced me to the fascinating world of early modern astronomy. This dissertation could not have been completed without his constant encouragement and patient suggestions. I consider it a privilege to have worked with a teacher of his caliber. Special thanks are also due to Steven J. Livesey, who has assisted me in the arcane fields of postclassical Latin and computer software. In the past year, I have learned a great deal from him about biographical and institutional research. Some of it, unfortunately, came too late to be incorporated into this dissertation; I hope to put it to good use in my future work. I am also grateful to the other readers of my dissertation, Laura K.