The Hermetic tradition also had more specific effects. Inspired, as is now known, by late Platonist mysticism, the Hermetic writers had rhapsodized on enlightenment and on the source of light, the Sun. Marsilio Ficino, the 15th-century Florentine translator of both Plato and the Hermetic writings, composed a treatise on the Sun that came close to idolatry. A young Polish student visiting Italy at the turn of the 16th century was touched by this current. Back in Poland, he began to work on the problems posed by the Ptolemaic astronomical system. With the blessing of the church, which he served formally as a canon, Nicolaus Copernicus set out to modernize the astronomical apparatus by which the church made such important calculations as the proper dates for Easter and other festivals. The scientific revolution Copernicus
In 1543, as he lay on his deathbed, Copernicus finished reading the proofs of his great work; he died just as it was published. His De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI (“Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs”) was the opening shot in a revolution whose consequences were greater than those of any other intellectual event in the history of humankind. The scientific revolution radically altered the conditions of thought and of material existence in which the human race lives, and its effects are not yet exhausted.
Engraving from Christoph Hartknoch's book Alt- und neues Preussen (1684; “Old and New Prussia”), depicting Nicolaus Copernicus as a saintly and humble figure. The astronomer is shown between a crucifix and a celestial globe, symbols of his vocation and work. The Latin text below the astronomer is an ode to Christ's suffering by Pope Pius II: “Not grace the equal of Paul's do I ask / Nor Peter's pardon seek, but what / To a thief you granted on the wood of the cross / This I do earnestly pray.”Courtesy of the Joseph Regenstein Library, The University of Chicago
All this was caused by Copernicus daring to place the Sun, not the Earth, at the centre of the cosmos. Copernicus actually cited Hermes Trismegistos to justify this idea, and his language was thoroughly Platonic. But he meant his work as a serious work in astronomy, not philosophy, so he set out to justify it observationally and mathematically. The results were impressive. At one stroke, Copernicus reduced a complexity verging on chaos to elegant simplicity. The apparent back-and-forth movements of the planets, which required prodigious ingenuity to accommodate within the Ptolemaic system, could be accounted for just in terms of the Earth’s own orbital motion added to or subtracted from the motions of the planets. Variation in planetary brightness was also explained by this combination of motions. The fact that Mercury and Venus were never found opposite the Sun in the sky Copernicus explained by placing their orbits closer to the Sun than that of the Earth. Indeed, Copernicus was able to place the planets in order of their distances from the Sun by considering their speeds and thus to construct a system of the planets, something that had eluded Ptolemy. This system had a simplicity, coherence, and aesthetic charm that made it irresistible to those who felt that God was the supreme artist. His was not a rigorous argument, but aesthetic considerations are not to be ignored in the history of science.
Copernicus, Nicolaus: heliocentric systemEngraving of the solar system from Nicolaus Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI, 2nd ed. (1566; “Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs”), the first published illustration of Copernicus's heliocentric system.The Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum, Chicago, Illinois
Copernicus did not solve all of the difficulties of the Ptolemaic system. He had to keep some of the cumbrous apparatus of epicycles and other geometrical adjustments, as well as a few Aristotelian crystalline spheres. The result was neater, but not so striking that it commanded immediate universal assent. Moreover, there were some implications that caused considerable concern: Why should the crystalline orb containing the Earth circle the Sun? And how was it possible for the Earth itself to revolve on its axis once in 24 hours without hurling all objects, including humans, off its surface? No known physics could answer these questions, and the provision of such answers was to be the central concern of the scientific revolution.
More was at stake than physics and astronomy, for one of the implications of the Copernican system struck at the very foundations of contemporary society. If the Earth revolved around the Sun, then the apparent positions of the fixed stars should shift as the Earth moves in its orbit. Copernicus and his contemporaries could detect no such shift (called stellar parallax), and there were only two interpretations possible to explain this failure. Either the Earth was at the centre, in which case no parallax was to be expected, or the stars were so far away that the parallax was too small to be detected. Copernicus chose the latter and thereby had to accept an enormous cosmos consisting mostly of empty space. God, it had been assumed, did nothing in vain, so for what purposes might he have created a universe in which Earth and humankind were lost in immense space? To accept Copernicus was to give up the Dantean cosmos. The Aristotelian hierarchy of social place, political position, and theological gradation would vanish, to be replaced by the flatness and plainness of Euclidean space. It was a grim prospect and not one that recommended itself to most 16th-century intellectuals, and so Copernicus’s grand idea remained on the periphery of astronomical thought. All astronomers were aware of it, some measured their own views against it, but only a small handful eagerly accepted it.
In the century and a half following Copernicus, two easily discernible scientific movements developed. The first was critical, the second, innovative and synthetic. They worked together to bring the old cosmos into disrepute and, ultimately, to replace it with a new one. Although they existed side by side, their effects can more easily be seen if they are treated separately. Tycho, Kepler, and Galileo
The critical tradition began with Copernicus. It led directly to the work of Tycho Brahe, who measured stellar and planetary positions more accurately than had anyone before him. But measurement alone could not decide between Copernicus and Ptolemy, and Tycho insisted that the Earth was motionless. Copernicus did persuade Tycho to move the centre of revolution of all other planets to the Sun. To do so, he had to abandon the Aristotelian crystalline spheres that otherwise would collide with one another. Tycho also cast doubt upon the Aristotelian doctrine of heavenly perfection, for when, in the 1570s, a comet and a new star appeared, Tycho showed that they were both above the sphere of the Moon. Perhaps the most serious critical blows struck were those delivered by Galileo after the invention of the telescope. In quick succession, he announced that there were mountains on the Moon, satellites circling Jupiter, and spots upon the Sun. Moreover, the Milky Way was composed of countless stars whose existence no one had suspected until Galileo saw them. Here was criticism that struck at the very roots of Aristotle’s system of the world.