Nicolaus Copernicus Quotes
We are taught all this [the motion of the earth on its axis and around the sun] by the order of succession, in which those phenomena (various planetary happenings) follow each other, and by the harmony of the world, if we will only, as the saying goes, look at the matter with both eyes.
Copernicus, Nicolaus. On the Revolutions. Translated by Edward Rosen, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p. 20.
The Roman Catholic Church had stultified scientific thinking for over a thousand years where differing with accepted church doctrine was not only discouraged but was dangerous. Hicletas—see {590328}—realized that the earth rotated around its own axis three centuries before Christ, and his view was in the literature to which learned people had access. Copernicus later communicated this idea to the Pope but in much more delicate terms—see {590327}. He did not have the problems that Galileo endured with the Church for several reasons. There were different men controlling the church, the printing press had been invented and Galileo published a book that many could read, the Protestant Reformation had really frightened the Church fathers who felt more vulnerable and less tolerant.
He was the first known person who realized that the earth revolved rapidly about its own axis—which few believed in his day and into modern times until Copernicus (See {590327}). Intuitively, most people assumed that if the earth were spinning, the people and things would fly off. Most ancients believed that the earth was stationary and the heavens were moving because they could see the stars move.
This is a very important quotation for it proves that the solar system was known to be centered around the sun (and not the Earth) 1500 years before the Roman Catholic Church was persecuting Galileo for claiming the opposite. The church exercised such control over thoughts and expression that they suppressed what scientists had known for over 1000. Modern governments cannot suppress truth easily for 1000 days and often not more than a few days. The Romans learned it from the Egyptians so it was not a major secret until it was made one by the church This astronomer of Cleopatra’s Egypt, was the one who taught Julius Caesar about the Egyptian calendar which he adopted for Rome and the Western World. See {621708} .
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance-era mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.
