Question

how and why human understanding of the Universe changed

Answer 1

For nearly 1500 years, most people of the world believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe and all the heavenly bodies revolved around it unconditionally.

Somewhere in the mid 1500s, a brave man called Nicolas Copernicus published a book two months before his death that would change the scientific world as we know it. He proposed that the Earth was like any other planet in the solar system and it revolved around the Sun which was very close to the center of the universe.

Now why this was so groundbreaking was because it could explain the retrograde motion of planets like Mars and it went against church-ly beliefs. Retrograde motion is of course, the occasional traveling backward of planets across the sky over several months of observation.

Answer 2

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