Big Bang. Simon Singh

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      The Revolution

      Born in 1473 into a prosperous family in Torun, on the banks of the Vistula in modern-day Poland, Copernicus was elected a canon at the cathedral chapter of Frauenburg, largely thanks to the influence of his uncle Lucas, who was Bishop of Ermland. Having studied law and medicine in Italy, his main duty as canon was to act as physician and secretary to Lucas. These were not onerous responsibilities, and Copernicus was free to dabble in various activities in his spare time. He became an expert economist and advisor on currency reform, and even published his own Latin translations of the obscure Greek poet Theophylactus Simocattes.

      However, Copernicus’s greatest passion was astronomy, which had interested him ever since he had bought a copy of the Alphonsine Tables as a student. This amateur astronomer would grow increasingly obsessed with studying the motion of the planets, and his ideas would eventually make him one of the most important figures in the history of science.

      Surprisingly, all Copernicus’s astronomical research was contained in just 1¹/₂ publications. Even more surprising, these 1¹/₂ publications were hardly read during his lifetime. The ¹/₂ refers to his first work, the Commentariolus (‘Little Commentary’), which was handwritten, never formally published and circulated only among a few people in roughly 1514. Nevertheless, in just twenty pages Copernicus shook the cosmos with the most radical idea in astronomy for over one thousand years. At the heart of his pamphlet were the seven axioms upon which he based his view of the universe:

      1. The heavenly bodies do not share a common centre.

      2. The centre of the Earth is not the centre of the universe.

      3. The centre of the universe is near the Sun.

      4. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is insignificant compared with the distance to the stars.

      5. The apparent daily motion of the stars is a result of the Earth’s rotation on its own axis.

      6. The apparent annual sequence of movements of the Sun is a result of the Earth’s revolution around it. All the planets revolve around the Sun.

      7. The apparent retrograde motion of some of the planets is merely the result of our position as observer on a moving Earth.

      Copernicus’s axioms were spot on in every respect. The Earth does spin, the Earth and the other planets do go around the Sun, this does explain the retrograde planetary orbits, and failure to detect any stellar parallax was due to the remoteness of the stars. It is not clear what motivated Copernicus to formulate these axioms and break with the traditional world-view, but perhaps he was influenced by Domenico Maria de Novara, one of his professors in Italy. Novara was sympathetic to the Pythagorean tradition, which was at the root of Aristarchus’ philosophy, and it was Aristarchus who had first posited the Sun-centred model 1,700 years earlier.

      The Commentariolus was a manifesto for an astronomical mutiny, an expression of Copernicus’s frustration and disillusionment with the ugly complexity of the ancient Ptolemaic model. Later he would condemn the makeshift nature of the Earth-centred model: ‘It is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head and other members for his images from diverse models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body, and since they in no way match each other, the result would be a monster rather than a man.’ Nevertheless, despite its radical contents, the pamphlet caused no ripples among the intellectuals of Europe, partly because it was read by so few people and partly because its author was a minor canon working on the fringes of Europe.

      Copernicus was not dismayed, for this was only the start of his efforts to transform astronomy. After his uncle Lucas died in 1512 (having quite possibly been poisoned by the Teutonic Knights, who had described him as ‘the devil in human shape’), he had even more time to pursue his studies. He moved to Frauenburg Castle, set up a small observatory and concentrated on fleshing out his argument, adding in all the mathematical detail that was missing in the Commentariolus.

      Copernicus spent the next thirty years reworking his Commentariolus, expanding it into an authoritative two-hundred-page manuscript. Throughout this prolonged period of research, he spent a great deal of time worrying about how other astronomers would react to his model of the universe, which was fundamentally at odds with accepted wisdom. There were often days when he even considered abandoning plans to publish his work for fear that he would be mocked far and wide. Moreover, he suspected that theologians would be wholly intolerant to what they would perceive as sacrilegious scientific speculation.

      He was right to be concerned. The Church later demonstrated its intolerance by persecuting the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was part of the generation of dissenters that followed Copernicus. The Inquisition accused Bruno of eight heresies, but the existing records do not specify them. Historians think that it is likely that Bruno had offended the Church by writing On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, which argued that the universe is infinite, that stars have their own planets and that life flourishes on these other planets. When condemned to death for his crimes, he responded: ‘Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.’ On 17 February 1600, he was taken to Rome’s Campo dei Fiori (Field of Flowers), stripped naked, gagged, tied to a stake and burned to death.

      Copernicus’s fear of persecution could have meant a premature end to his research, but fortunately a young German scholar from Wittenberg intervened. In 1539, Georg Joachim von Lauchen, known as Rheticus, travelled to Frauenburg to seek out Copernicus and find out more about his cosmological model. It was a brave move, because not only was the young Lutheran scholar facing an uncertain welcome in Catholic Frauenburg, but also his own colleagues were not sympathetic to his mission. The mood was typified by Martin Luther, who kept a record of dinner-table conversation about Copernicus: ‘There is talk of a new astronomer who wants to prove that the Earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the Sun and the Moon, just as if somebody moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the ground and the trees walked and moved… The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down.’

      Luther called Copernicus ‘a fool who went against Holy Writ’, but Rheticus shared Copernicus’s unshakeable confidence that the route to celestial truth lay with science rather than Scripture. The sixty-six-year-old Copernicus was flattered by the attentions of the twenty-five-year-old Rheticus, who spent three years at Frauenburg reading Copernicus’s manuscript, providing him with feedback and reassurance in equal measure.

      By 1541, Rheticus’s combination of diplomatic and astronomical skills was sufficient for him to obtain Copernicus’s blessing to take the manuscript to the printing house of Johannes Petreius in Nuremberg for publication. He had planned to stay to oversee the entire printing process, but was suddenly called away to Leipzig on urgent business, and so handed responsibility for supervising publication to a clergyman by the name of Andreas Osiander. At last, in the spring of 1543, De revolutionibus orbium cælestium (‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’) was finally published and several hundred copies were on their way to Copernicus.

      Meanwhile, Copernicus had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage at the end of 1542, and was lying in bed, fighting to stay alive long enough to set eyes on the finished book that contained his life’s work. Copies of his treatise reached him just in time. His friend Canon Giese wrote a letter to Rheticus describing Copernicus’s plight: ‘For many days he had been deprived of his memory and mental vigour; he only saw his completed book at the last moment, on the day he died.’

      Copernicus had completed his duty. His book offered the world a convincing argument in favour СКАЧАТЬ