ABSTRACT
In tackling the seeing revolution as a prime factor in modernity, the author starts with Copernicus, and then works out in various ways, initially staying with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and then going forward in different directions. Copernicus was a sixteenth-century Catholic priest, not a seventeenth-century modern scientific thinker. His context was the Renaissance, still half situated in medieval society. Though Copernicus launched his revolution from the periphery, and a century before the solidification of science as a way of life and method, he should be seen, nevertheless, as the progenitor of it all. Copernicus himself was not a revolutionary. In the "Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies" he used the word to mean a return to an original position, a simple revolving around a fixed point. Revolution as a word meaning an overturn, rather than a return, only appears a few centuries later, with the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
