THE CONTRIBUTION OF COPERNICUS
INTRODUCTION
Copernicus (1473-1543) was a member of the Catholic clergy (i.e. a deacon required to take the Holy Orders vow of chastity) who administered secular Church affairs in return for a secure life on cathedral grounds. Because all Catholic Bishops were required to provide medical services to the local populace since the early fourth century A.D., Copernicus was trained also as a physician.
Copernicus Self Portrait
But it was his mathematical expertise that came to the attention of Catholic
Church officials during his education in Italy (1500) and so he was one of the
experts who was asked to respond to Pope Leo X’s call to reform the calendar at
the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517). The Roman Catholic Church invented the
modern scientific method as part of it long standing requirements that the
Faith must not contradict reason or observation [1]. In any event, his apparent
contribution (1512-1514) was a handwritten treatise “Commentariolus” [2] arguing
for a heliocentric model (i.e. with the sun at the center of the solar system)
which had the advantage of naturally explaining the precession of the heavens
due a spinning earth.
This model allowed the first calculation of the sidereal year which as required
turned out to be a constant and was within one minute of the modern value. Note
that the seasons slowly change the point at which they occur along the earth’s
orbit because of precession shortening the tropical year by about 20 minutes
per year. And over his lifetime, Copernicus continued to refine and circulate
his ideas to an ever widening and admiring audience of fellow astronomers and
Church officials.
Unfortunately his data on heavenly motion was inaccurate (he believed in a
"non-linear" precession of Earth's axis which was only the result of
errors in historical observations) and he was a poor experimentalist (less than
30 recorded observations) with inferior equipment and a limited interest in
observation. Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) a century later purchased Copernicus'
instruments and was famously critical as his own observations were 10-100 times
more accurate. And it was only this precision that allowed Kepler to
distinguish between competing theories.
Copernicus' objections to the Geocentric model of Ptolemy (with the Earth at
the center) were not in the accuracy of the predictions because his own model
was both more complicated (many more epicycles, i.e. he increased Ptolemy's 14
to his own 34 and then 48) [3] and was less accurate on average. His great
contribution was to note the sun-centered system was mechanically realizable
because it eliminated Ptolemy's "equant" which mathematical artifact
could not be reconciled to Aristotle’s rotating crystalline spheres to which
the planets and stars were supposedly attached to keep them from falling to
earth.
Indeed, it was again Tycho Brahe who demonstrated by careful measurement of
parallax that the Great Comet of 1577 was not an atmospheric phenomena but in
fact travelled right through the imagined crystalline spheres of Aristotle,
that finally discredited all mechanical models.
Tycho Brahe, Greatest Astronomer of the Ages
A secondary contribution of the heliocentric model was the
correct arrangement of the planets in order of their distance from the sun and
the relative size of their orbits. Ptolemy treated each planet independently
with a “normalized” distance from Earth. But Copernicus knew from simple
observation how long each planet took to move once around the entire background
of the constellations. Those closest the sun had less distance to traverse so
there was only one possible geometric configuration.
A LACK OF CONFIDENCE AND PROTESTANT RESISTANCE
Because his earlier models were so inaccurate, Copernicus hesitated to publish
despite the repeated urging of Catholic Church officials to do so (by Pope Leo
X in 1514, by Albert Widmanstadt the secretary of Pope Clement VII in 1533, and
especially by Catholic Cardinal Schonberog, then Archbishop of Capula, on 1
November 1536, who offered to have his heliocentric model published at the
expense of the Catholic Church, and other friends and Church officials as
well).
One difficulty was that all the scientific evidence was against heliocentrism
especially the lack of an observed parallax. Since the stars and planets were
about the same brightness, they were thought to be roughly the same distance
away. Copernicus had to argue that the stars were very much brighter than
planets and thus millions of times further away. The heliocentric model thus
violated the "law of parsimony" or Occam's razor which states that if
two theories give equal results, the simpler one has fewer ways to be wrong and
should be preferred. Of course this is not a scientific or logical necessity
but rather only a practical suggestion. And in hindsight it is not always
correct.
Another consideration is that a geocentric system with a planet on a single
epicycle can be made to give exactly the same position and distance with
respect to Earth as for the heliocentric model with both revolving around the
Sun. The size of the epicycle in this geocentric model must be the same as for
Earth’s orbit about the Sun and the planetary orbit the same size in both
systems. Since the Earth-Planet distance and positions are geometrically
identical, the heliocentric system again violates Occam's razor.
Finally a young math prodigy, Rheticus, fleeing his teaching position after a
scandal, sought him out for room and board and assisted in the final calculations
(with advanced texts recently translated on geometry). These ideas were
assembled in his great work of "De Revolutionibus". The Catholic
Church reviewed and authorized the publication of his heliocentric
“sun-centered” model with an official "Imprimatur" (1543) and the
work was widely distributed throughout Europe.
Unfortunately Copernicus trusted Rheticus to get his work published and
Rheticus gave the job to an opponent of Copernicus. This Protestant opponent,
Osiander, added an unauthorized preface stating the heliocentric model was
simply a theory and didn't reflect physical reality. Copernicus had firmly
rejected this view in earlier correspondence with him. Rheticus was so
distressed he destroyed the preface in every copy he could find. The local
Catholic Bishop Tiedemann Giese wrote to the city fathers in Nurnberg demanding
that the preface be destroyed in all extant copies and a new edition be issued
which stated that the heliocentric theory was a physical fact.
On the other hand all the contemporary Protestant reformers, to include Martin
Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564), railed against Copernican
heliocentrism with unbridled fury rejecting it as pure heresy. The manifestly
radical suggestion of a moving earth was used to buttress their theological
attack (to include rewriting the Bible as with Luther's addition of "sola
fide" and in more than 1200 other revisions of dogma) against the Catholic
Church [4].
Despite the attacks, the work of Copernicus was referenced by Pope Gregory XIII to create the modern calendar in 1582. Protestants refused to accept this improvement for several centuries. In Great Britain and its colonies it was only adopted in 1752. And the rejection of modern cosmology continues even to the present day among many Protestant fundamentalist sects.
Martin Luther, German
Protestant John Calvin, French/Swiss Protestant
EARLY MODELS
Despite a lot of inventive suppositions imagining a
religious requirement for perfect circles demonstrating the beauty of God's
creations, this only reflects an ignorance of the mathematical necessities.
Indeed one ideal circle describes the majority of the daily circular motion of
the heavens and is the simplest single shape to do so. And as we know from
modern numerical analysis, the easiest way to make corrections is to add more
circles in a "Fourier Transform" which can be rigorously demonstrated
to achieve any desired degree of accuracy.
But in fact the heavens do behave in an elegantly simple and aesthetically
pleasing manner. Kepler (1571-1630) was able to demonstrate this using three
basic laws of planetary motion. His first law states that planetary motion is
the sum of two perfect circles revolving at a uniform rate about their proper
centers. This construct is a single epicycle which is the mathematical
equivalent of an ellipse with the addition of the sun at one foci. This
geometrical fact was known to Copernicus but his imprecise observational data
were not a match.
The first accurate model of the heavens was a geocentric one created by Ptolemy
(c. 100-170 A.D.) in the Greek city of Alexandra (150 A.D.). This gave by far
the best predictions until the collaboration of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler
(1609-1619). Despite many attempts at refinement, no other work before Kepler
was either as simple or as accurate. Indeed all modern planetariums still use
Ptolemy’s model to display the heavens from the perspective of the earth’s
surface for just these reasons.
With the rediscovery of ancient Greek science through Arabic translations,
updated mathematical tables (Alfonsine) using the original Ptolemaic model
without modification were prepared in Spain (1252) under the patronage of King
Alfonso X. These gained a wider acceptance when they were translated into Latin
in Paris (1320) and even more with their printed version (1483). So Copernicus'
contribution was definitely not in the invention of mathematical tables nor in
the concept of a mathematical model from which they were derived.
GALILEO, THE POPE, AND HUBRIS
While Copernicus’ heliocentric model excited great interest, it never found
much practical use outside of German speaking Europe which used it sparingly
and mostly out of nationalistic pride. Nevertheless, some seven years after
Copernicus’s death, a Protestant Duke Albert I of Prussia sponsored Erasmus
Reinhold to publish the Prutenic Tables in 1551 based on the heliocentric
model. But in an appendix, additional tables were added so more familiar and
accurate results could be obtained using the geocentric calculations of the
still widely preferred model of Ptolemy.
Considering that the Ptolemaic model was more accurate, the Alphonsine tables
remained the reference of choice for the greater part of Europe. It was only
with the publication of the Rudolphine tables (1625-1627) based on the work of
Johannes Kepler, that the phenomenal accuracy of modern times was achieved.
Interestingly, Galileo (1564–1642) nearly a century after Copernicus, began to
write, in accordance with longstanding Catholic principles after St. Augustine
(354-430) that since reason and scientific observation cannot be in conflict
with Christian faith, perhaps glib associations of Biblical allegory with
actual cosmology were wrong. To the extent this could have been demonstrated,
and it was not supported by any unequivocal physical evidence then extant, it
would have been more than acceptable. Unfortunately Galileo falsely claimed he
had such proof and then failed to produce it.
Galileo Galilei, Italian Astronomer and Polymath
Even Cardinal Bellarmine, who was later to conduct the initial trail of Galileo under the auspices of the Inquisition, acted more to defend the sole right of the Catholic Church to interpret scripture, especially against Protestant revisions, than out of any preference for the technical details of cosmology. Indeed, in 1615 one year before the trial began, Bellarmine wrote to Paolo Foscarini (ca. 1565-1616), who was a Catholic Carmelite priest and a proponent of Copernicanism but who remained in good standing with the Church after reaffirming its moral teaching authority, that
“If there were any real proof that the sun is in the center of the universe, that the Earth is in the third heaven [i.e. that the Earth is the third planet in orbit about the sun], and the Sun does not go around the Earth, but the Earth around the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which [i.e. in a strictly literal instead of metaphorical sense] appear to state the contrary, and rather admit that we did not rightly understand them, than to declare an opinion to be false which is [i.e. later] proved to be true.”
Nevertheless, shortly after his election as Pope Urban VIII in 1623–1624, Maffeo Barberini granted his old friend Galileo no less than six audiences so as to be instructed on Copernicus’ heliocentric model and afterwards offered a special Papal pension to Galileo's son.
Pope Urban VIII
Things went downhill after that as Galileo had been
emboldened to demand the Catholic Church support his theories by making an
official pronouncement of new dogma and this now came to a more widespread
attention [5]. This incidentally would have been the Church's very first
official preference for a physical model of the heavens. Since many of
Galileo's cosmological theories are now known to be wrong, especially on the
tides [7], the Church fortuitously declined.
Nor did it help Galileo's credibility that he subsequently caricatured Pope
Urban VIII, who had earlier encouraged him and his theories, as an idiot in
print and in the local vernacular. Whatever personal animosity this created, it
was also seen as a subtle theological attack on the Church itself.
So at the height of the Protestant Reformation with the mass murder of tens to
hundreds of thousands (because of relatively minor theological differences,
e.g. starting with Luther's Peasant's War in 1524-1525 and escalating
thereafter) coupled with ambitious land grabs by various aristocrats
(especially in the many warring German states before unification centuries
later) this was too much of an incitement to further violence. And so
Copernicus' work and Galileo's musings were put on the "Index"
requiring special permission to read (but interestingly never in Spain) and
remained there until 1835 when they were by then obsolete and known to be
scientifically inaccurate at best. The heliocentric model was however
continuously taught and discussed in Catholic universities.
AN IMPERFECT MODEL FINALLY PERFECTED
It is also interesting to note that Kepler, who was blessed with the best naked
eye observations mankind has ever produced, was a contemporary and
correspondent of Galileo [6-7]. And it was Kepler who discovered in 1609 (and
informed Galileo) his laws of planetary motion which consists of two perfect
circles in a single epicycle (equivalent to an ellipse) and just like
Copernicus all having uniform circular rotations (only the total sum was
non-uniform).
Kepler
Finally Rendered Copernicus and Galileo Obsolete
But despite the theoretical success, Kepler’s works were so dense and so
infused with weird geometrical constructs (e.g. Platonic solids and almost
magical magnetic forces we now know to be wrong), they were discounted by
Galileo and most of the scientific community as simply curiosities. In fact his
three laws were not distilled from the dross until centuries later [8].
The physical reality of the heliocentric system was not widely accepted nor demonstrated by any observations or physical evidence until the early 1800s (nearly three centuries after Copernicus) with the discovery of parallax by Friedrich Bessel in 1838 in the star 61 Cygni and by the Foucault pendulum in 1851.
REFERENCES
1. The rational basis of the Catholic Church was and remains:
a. The Catholic Bishop of Hippo St. Augustine (354–430 A.D.) wrote
"One does not read in the Gospel that the Lord said ‘I will send you the Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon. For He willed to make them Christians, not mathematicians.’ “
b. Catholic Cardinal Baronius (1538–1607 A.D) famously opined that the Bible was "intended to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."
c. In 1893, Pope Leo XIII published his encyclical “Providentissimus Deus” stating in part
“Here is the rule also laid down by St. Augustine, for the theologian: "Whatever [scientists] can really demonstrate to be true of physical nature, [Catholic theologians] must show to be capable of reconciliation with our Scriptures; and whatever they assert in their treatises which is contrary to these Scriptures of ours, that is to Catholic faith, we must either prove it as well as we can to be entirely false, or at all events we must, without the smallest hesitation, believe it to be so."
2. Pope Leo X in 1512–1517 made one of the first attempts to reform the Julian calendar and formally asked Copernicus and others for their assistance. The Catholic Bishop of Fossombrone, Paul of Middleburg recorded a contribution from Copernicus but unfortunately the original heliocentric submission has since been lost. This work was almost certainly his hand written “Commentariolus” complete by about 1510 describing a sun-centered model which was widely distributed and frequently copied.
The independent verification is a surviving inventory of a library belonging to a doctor and professor of medicine in Krakow which listed Copernicius’ essay of six pages specifically stating “a theorica [astronomical treatise] in which the author asserts the earth moves while the sun stands still” in May of 1514. Unfortunately the treatise itself did not survive. Note also this reasoning was based on logic and mathematics rather than any definitive observations; q.v. “A Perfect Heaven” by Dava Sobel, Walker and Company, 2011, pages 18-28.
Copernicius’ “brief sketch” or Commentariolus was long thought also lost but finally a copy was found in Vienna in 1878 and published for posterity; q.v. “Three Copernican Treatises” by Edward Rosen (1939).
3. While Ptolemy allowed each of the visible five planets a single epicycle, Copernicus’ attempts to eliminate the “equant” necessarily increased this to 34 as he states in the final paragraph of “Commentariolus”; q.v.
“Mercury runs on seven circles in all; Venus on five; the Earth on three, and round it the Moon on four; finally Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn on five each.”
But even this introduced additional unwanted wobbles which he eventually eliminated in his greater work “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” by further increasing the number of epicycles making hand written calculations even more difficult.
4. The Council of Trent (from 1546 to 1563) was the 19th Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church. It was held under the aegis of no less than three Catholic Popes and like others before sought to collect, organize, and precisely state long standing Christian beliefs and teachings (q.v. identical in motivation to the Council of Nicea in 325 approved by Pope St. Sylvester I which created the original Bible).
As a result of its deliberations, the Vulgate Bible (originally translated into Latin by St. Jerome (346–420) so ordinary Christians throughout the Roman world across the Mediterranean had immediate access to Christian teachings in a language they could personally understand) was blessed as the official cannon.
But in addition, prohibitions were promulgated against unofficial exegesis or novel interpretations of Christian Dogma with heightened sense of alert and especially enforcement.
The primary motivation in this case was to halt the splintering of long standing Christian doctrine in the exploding Protestant Reformation. Unfortunately, the rewriting of the Bible (q.v. starting with Luther’s insertion of “sole fide”) and re-interpretation of original dogma has resulted in nearly 30,000 Protestant sects today each holding to distinct and widely disparate theologies.
5. On 21 December 1613 Galileo wrote an eight page letter to Benedetto Castelli arguing for a new theological interpretation of the Bible. Apparently he later revised this in his own hand and thus falsely claimed the widely distributed original was mis-copied. In any event, to counter criticism of his foray into speculative theological re-definitions, which were not demonstrated by any unequivocal evidence, he expanded his original letter into a treatise of some forty pages for the Grand Duchess Christina.
Although Galileo echoed long standing principles of the Catholic Church that faith and scientific evidence cannot be in conflict, this demand for novel theological interpretations was an unwanted distraction at best and an incitement to violence in an age of extreme religious turmoil at worst.
6. Apparently Galileo never read the “New Astronomy” book Kepler sent him detailing his laws of planetary motion. Rather Galileo wrote describing planetary orbits to be ideal circles without epicycles and never engaged in mathematical predictions of planetary motion. Rather his significant contributions concerned telescopic observations of phases of Venus, satellites of Jupiter, mountains on the moon, and sunspots, as well as terrestrial motion and strength of materials; q.v. “A Clockwork Universe” by Edward Dolnick, Harper Perennial, 2011, page 170.
7. “Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”, by Galilei, Galileo.
Galileo rejected various proposals that the moon’s gravity was a cause of the
tides because he equated that with mysticism.
Page 445 “That concept is completely
repugnant to my mind…”
Page 462 “I am more astonished at Kepler than at any other. Though he has at
his fingertips the motions attributed to the Earth (q.v. Tycho Brahe’s data),
he has nevertheless lent his ear and his assent to the moon’s dominion over the
waters, i.e. to occult properties and to such puerilities.”
8. “The Life and Work of Blessed Robert Francis Cardinal Bellarmine, S. J.”, Chapter 2, page 359, translated by James Brodrick, published by Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, London (1928); q.v. Kuhn’s book on Copernicus page 198.