Nicolaus Copernicus: Making The Earth A Planet

2005·8 MB·English

by  Owen Gingerich, James Mac Lachlan

Nicolaus
Copernicus
Making the Earth a Planet

XFORD
S
PORTRAITS
IN CIENCE
Owen Gingerich
General Editor
Nicolaus
Copernicus
Making the Earth a Planet
Owen Gingerich
and James MacLachlan
Oxford University Press
New York • Oxford
We fondly dedicate this book to our oldest grandchildren,
Philip Gingerich and Erin MacLachlan.
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Design:Design Oasis
Layout:Greg Wozney
Picture research:Ted Szczepanski
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gingerich,Owen.
Nicolaus Copernicus :making the Earth a planet / Owen Gingerich and
James MacLachlan.
p.cm.—(Oxford portraits in science)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-516173-4
1. Copernicus,Nicolaus,1473-1543—Juvenile literature.2.
Astronomers—Poland—Biography—Juvenile literature. I.MacLachlan,
James H.II.Title.III.Series.
QB36.C8G46 2004
520'.92—dc22 2004020959
Printing number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
On the cover:The 16th-century portrait in the background hangs in the town hall of Torun´,
Poland.Both portraits were based on a now-lost self-portrait.
Frontispiece:Copernicus holds a traditional armillary sphere,or model of the sky girdled by
the zodiac,in this commemorative statue in Torun´,Poland,the city where he was born.
Contents
Chapter 1.Expanding the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
Chapter 2.School Days in Poland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
Chapter 3.At the University in Cracow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23
Sidebar:Astronomy before Copernicus . . . . . . . . . . . . .28
Chapter 4.A Scholar in Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
Sidebar: Ptolemy’s Equant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40
Sidebar:The Myth of Epicycles-on-Epicycles . . . . . . . . . .46
Chapter 5.The Breakthrough . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53
Chapter 6.An Earth-Shaking Development . . . . . . . . . . . . .63
Sidebar: Parallax:Using Geometry to Find Distance . . . .70
Chapter 7.The Busy Canon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79
Sidebar: Copernicus’s Instruments and Observatory . . .82
Chapter 8.On the Revolutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97
Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111
Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .116
Further Reading and Websites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .122
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XFORD
S
PORTRAITS
IN CIENCE
Charles Babbage
Alexander Graham Bell
Nicolaus Copernicus
Francis Crick
& James Watson
Marie Curie
Charles Darwin
Thomas Edison
Albert Einstein
Michael Faraday
Enrico Fermi
Sigmund Freud
Galileo Galilei
William Harvey
Joseph Henry
Edward Jenner
Johannes Kepler
Othniel Charles Marsh
& Edward Drinker Cope
Margaret Mead
Gregor Mendel
Isaac Newton
Louis Pasteur
Linus Pauling
Ivan Pavlov
Ernest Rutherford
CHAPTER
1
Expanding
the World
The university hall was humming with conversations.At
the beginning of the fall term in 1493, students at the
Jagiellonian University in Cracow were renewing acquain-
tances after the summer break.Waiting for university offi-
cials to arrive,the students gradually gathered into buzzing
clusters. Soon, one large group formed around a student
from Vienna,standing on a chair waving a pamphlet.
The pamphlet contained a report from Christopher
Columbus,a sea captain who had sailed westward across the
Atlantic Ocean.He claimed that he had arrived at islands
off the coast of Asia after sailing for 33 days from the
Canary Islands near Africa. Could it possibly be true? He
had brought back with him natives of those islands, who
looked very different from Africans. He called them
Indians.He also brought back gold and spices and forecast
a rich trade with China for Spain.But the natives did not
appear to be Asians.Was it possible that some new land
blocked the westward route to the fabled East?
Andreas and Nicolaus Copernicus, from northern
Poland,joined the students.They were returning for their
third year at the university. More questions assaulted the
8
This world map,printed in Germany in 1482,reveals European knowledge of the world 10 years prior to Columbus’s
first voyage to the Americas.The mapmakers depicted the world using the positions of places tabulated by Claudius
Ptolemy,the second-century astronomer and geographer.