What is Copernican revolution? Answer in points only
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Motion of Sun (yellow), Earth (blue), and Mars (red) according to heliocentrism (left) and to geocentrism (right), before the Copernican Revolution. Note the retrograde motion of Mars on the right.
(To create a smooth animation, Mars' period of revolution is depicted as exactly 2 years instead of 1.88. The orbits are depicted as circular in the heliocentric case.)
The Copernican Revolution was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth stationary at the center of the universe, to the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. Beginning with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, contributions to the “revolution” continued until finally ending with Isaac Newton’s work over a century later.
Contents
1 Heliocentrism
1.1 Before Copernicus
1.2 Nicolaus Copernicus
2 Reception
2.1 Tycho Brahe
2.2 Johannes Kepler
2.2.1 Kepler's laws of planetary motion
2.3 Galileo Galilei
2.4 Sphere of the fixed stars
2.5 Chinese astronomy
2.6 Arabic astronomy
2.6.1 Maragha observatory
2.6.2 Tusi couple
2.6.3 Arabic mathematics
2.7 Isaac Newton
2.8 Immanuel Kant
3 Metaphorical usage
4 See also
5 Notes
6 References
7 Works cited
8 External links
Heliocentrism
Before Copernicus
Main article: Heliocentrism
The "Copernican Revolution" is named for Nicolaus Copernicus, whose Commentariolus, written before 1514, was the first explicit presentation of the heliocentric model in Renaissance scholarship. The idea of heliocentrism is much older; it can be traced to Aristarchus of Samos, a Hellenistic author writing in the 3rd century BC, who may in turn have been drawing on even older concepts in Pythagoreanism. Ancient heliocentrism was, however, eclipsed by the geocentric model presented by Ptolemy and accepted in Aristotelianism.
European scholars were well aware of the problems with Ptolemaic astronomy since the 13th century. The debate was precipitated by the reception by Averroes' criticism of Ptolemy, and it was again revived by the recovery of Ptolemy's text and its translation into Latin in the mid-15th century.[a] Otto E. Neugebauer in 1957 argued that the debate in 15th-century Latin scholarship must also have been informed by the criticism of Ptolemy produced after Averroes, by the Ilkhanid-era (13th to 14th centuries) Persian school of astronomy associated with the Maragheh observatory (especially the works of Al-Urdi, Al-Tusi and Ibn al-Shatir).[2]
The state of the question as received by Copernicus is summarized in the Theoricae novae planetarum by Georg von Peuerbach, compiled from lecture notes by Peuerbach's student Regiomontanus in 1454 but printed only in 1472. Peuerbach attempts to give a new, mathematically more elegant presentation of Ptolemy's system, but he does not arrive at heliocentrism. Regiomontanus himself was the teacher of Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara, who was in turn the teacher of Copernicus.
There is a possibility that Regiomontanus already arrived at a theory of heliocentrism before his death in 1476, as he paid particular attention to the heliocentric theory of Aristarchus in a late work, and mentions the "motion of the Earth" in a letter.[3]
Nicolaus Copernicus
Main articles: Nicolaus Copernicus and Copernican heliocentrism
Nicolaus Copernicus's heliocentric model
Copernicus studied at Bologna University during 1496–1501, where he became the assistant of Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara. He is known to have studied the Epitome in Almagestum Ptolemei by Peuerbach and Regiomontanus (printed in Venice in 1496) and to have performed observations of lunar motions on 9 March 1497. Copernicus went on to develop an explicitly heliocentric model of planetary motion, at first written in his short work Commentariolus some time before 1514, circulated in a limited number of copies among his acquaintances. He continued to refine his system until publishing his larger work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543), which contained detailed diagrams and tables.[4]
The Copernican model makes the claim of describing the physical reality of the cosmos, something which the Ptolemaic model was no longer believed to be able to provide. Copernicus removed Earth from the center of the universe, set the heavenly bodies in rotation around the Sun, and introduced Earth's daily rotation on its axis.[4] While Copernicus's work sparked the "Copernican Revolution", it did not mark its end. In fact, Copernicus's own system had multiple shortcomings that would have to be amended by later