It is a warm summer evening, circa 1514, you are just a simpleton in precolonial Poland. You look up at the magnificent sky. You see the stars in the clear evening sky and wonder about how beautiful the heavens that seated the gods really is. Back then the universe consisted of the 7 planets that humans knew about, their moons and the sun of our solar system, that is it.
Since the times of Aristotle in ancient Greece, it was basic knowledge that the planets we see in the night sky, our moon, and our sun travels around the earth. You did not need to be a natural philosopher or a scientist to deduce that, it was common sense. You could track their path across the sky even as a child. Such a simple and intuitive thing could not be wrong in any which way. Or could it?
The battle that raged in our interpretation of the skies and our position in the universe was an important one. It was like an admission of our world not being the centre of the universe and it carried a huge symbolic weight.
On one hand we have the simple theory that everything we see in the night sky revolves around us. On the other hand, we have the incredibly complex that not only is our planet moving around the sun, but also it rotates about an axis.
It seems so counter-intuitive to think this way, yet we, not the latter to be true. So how is it that this young polish scientist- Nicolaus Copernicus, without the help of any state-of-the-art satellite telescope and outer-space imaging, decoded the truth about planetary motion in our solar system?
After ancient Greek scientists made some of the earliest, quantifiable observation about a celestial phenomenon, the world saw the advent of a new era of observation-based astronomy. It was through observation of rotational motion that early astronomers like Hipparchus and Ptolemy deduced that the earth rotated on a slightly inclined axis. However, the universal model that was most widely accepted at the time was called the geocentric model.
This ‘broken model’ of geocentrism somehow survived past the middle ages and into the renaissance even. While it may be surprising how long people's faith in this model the simple explanation to the apparent success of this model was that the church loved it. The idea that the earth was in the center of the universe and fit in perfectly with the idea that god created everything. However, as astronomers tracked the motion of planetary objects across the night sky through the ages, it became extremely hard to keep track of the incredibly complex paths that these planets seemed to travel on. Some planets showed retrograde motion, others would disappear entirely for months on end. Ptolemy even included epicycles (circles within circles) to explain the peculiar paths of the planetary bodies, but soon they became too complex to be true.
Source- Wikimedia
In a Eureka moment, Polish mathematician and astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus reasoned that all the complexity of the geocentric model could be straightened out by reimagining the universal model to be centered around the sun rather than the earth. He called this new model the heliocentric model. For years the church had backed the geocentric model (roughly 1300 years) and Copernicus was a smart lad, so he thought better than to publish his findings immediately. He knew that going public meant that the church would probably declare his findings as heresy and sentence him to death for challenging god.
Not wanting to take his discovery to the grave, he decided to publish it from his deathbed. According to lore, he saw the first published copy right before dying the very same day. For 80 years the scientific community faced a backlash from both the general population and the church, till Galileo Galilei revolutionized astronomy with his modifications on the telescope. With his new telescope (which had around 30x the magnifying capacity of existing telescopes) he observed the way the suns light fell on Venus and Mars and deduced that Venus was between the Sun and Earth, and Earth was between Mars and the sun. His observations, which supported heliocentrism in totality and reduced geocentrism to fiction, was made published in the year 1632.
Source- Tes
By appealing to the common sense of the public, Galileo made history by cementing our understanding of the universe as a heliocentric model. In a way, this battle for the correct visualization of our solar system was symbolic of the perpetual battle between the new and rational thought process of science and the age-old stubborn and never changing beliefs of blind faith.
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