The Sun at the Center of the World

Around 1514 a small pamphlet began to circulate in manuscript among scholars and clerics in northern Europe. Entitled the Little Commentary and written by a Polish church canon from Frombork, who studied the heavens when he was not otherwise occupied with ecclesiastical finances and bureaucracy, it proposed nothing less than a wholesale rethinking of the premise of Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy, both of which had firmly placed the earth at the center of the universe. Instead, the author informed his readers that this idea was a product of a long-standing misperception of the structure of the cosmos. Based on careful examination of the best planetary data available at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) came to the following conclusion: “All the spheres revolve about the sun as their mid-point, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe.” ¹ Some 30 years later he would develop this idea more fully in On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, published as he lay dying in 1543.