ABSTRACT
In 1543, the year of his death, Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) saw his life work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies), finally printed. A four-hundred-page technical treatise, it laid out a heliocentric framework for the planetary system, thereby providing the essential basis for the Newtonian synthesis that was to follow a century and a half later. During this same interval, the gradual overthrow of the long-accepted geocentric worldview created an upheaval in the sacred geography of the cosmos. These changes, both in technical astronomy and mechanics and in humankind’s vision of its physical place in the universe, constitute the Copernican revolution.
