Nicholas Copernicus or Nicholas Koppernigk was the founder of astronomy. He was born in 1478 at Torun in Poland. He died in 1543. He studied medicine and theology at Cracow university, law at Bologna and was made a canon of Frauenburg in 1497. In 1500 he went to Rome, where he taught mathematics and astronomy. He studied medicine at Padua, and in 1505 finally left Italy for Prussia to carry out the work of his life. Doubting that the motions of the heavenly bodies could be so confused and so complicated as the Ptolemaic system made them, he was induced to consider the simpler hypothesis that the sun was the centre round which the earth and the other planets revolve.
Besides this fundamental truth Copernicus anticipated many other of the principal facts of astronomical science, such as the motion of the earth round its axis, the immense distance of the stars which made their apparent position the same from any part of the earth's orbit, etc. His general theory also enabled him to explain for the first time many of the important phenomena of nature, such as the variations of the seasons and the precession of the equinoxes.
The great work in which Copernicus explained his theory, DeOrbium coelestium Revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Celestial orbs), was completed in 1530, and published at Nuremberg in 1543. It was long among books forbidden to Roman Catholics. Research Nicholas Copernicus
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