Nicolaus Copernicus: Against The Ptolemaic System By 1514, his reputation as an astronomer was such that he was consulted by church leaders attempting to reform the Julian calendar.
In his free time, he dedicated himself to scholarly pursuits, which sometimes included astronomical work. He returned to Poland, where he became a church administrator and doctor. At the University of Krakow, he studied liberal arts, including astronomy and astrology, and then, like many Poles of his social class, was sent to Italy to study medicine and law.Ĭopernicus later studied at the University of Padua and in 1503 received a doctorate in canon law from the University of Ferrara. He was given the best education of the day and bred for a career in canon (church) law.
Copernicus was born into a family of well-to-do merchants, and after his father’s death, his uncle–soon to be a bishop–took the boy under his wing. Nicolaus Copernicus was born on Februin Torun, a city in north-central Poland on the Vistula River. In addition to correctly postulating the order of the known planets, including Earth, from the sun, and estimating their orbital periods relatively accurately, Copernicus argued that Earth turned daily on its axis and that gradual shifts of this axis accounted for the changing seasons. Prior to the publication of his major astronomical work, “Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs,” in 1543, European astronomers argued that Earth lay at the center of the universe, the view also held by most ancient philosophers and biblical writers. He was the first modern European scientist to propose that Earth and other planets revolve around the sun, or the Heliocentric Theory of the universe. Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer known as the father of modern astronomy. Nicolaus Copernicus and the Heliocentric Theory.Nicolaus Copernicus: Against The Ptolemaic System.