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Concept
Copernican Revolution
Summary
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. This revolution consisted of two phases; the first being extremely mathematical in nature and the second phase starting in 1610 with the publication of a pamphlet by Galileo. 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.
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 in the Almagest 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. 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).
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.
Official source
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