Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance astronomer, priest and the first person ever to formulate a comprehensive cosmology that displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. He lived from Feb. 19^th 1473- May 24^th 1543. Copernicus’ wrote a book that was published just before his dead in 1543. His epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, is generally regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the scientific revolution. It asserted that the earth rotated on it’s axis once daily and traveled around the sun once yearly: a fantastic concept for the times. He also made the heliocentric model which had the Sun at the center of the universe, and it demonstrated that the observed motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting Earth at rest in the center of the universe. He is now a landmark in the history of science and it is often referred to as the ‘Copernican Revolution.’