Copernicus

Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus announced the motion of Earth in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI (“Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs,” 1543). (An early sketch of his heliocentric theory, the Commentariolus, had circulated in manuscript in the small astronomical community of central Europe from about 1510, but it was not printed until the 19th century.) Although Copernicus made some new observations of the planets and drew on some observations by his medieval predecessors, new observations played no important role in his discovery. Rather, Copernicus discovered the motion of Earth by understanding Ptolemy more deeply than anyone else had—for the essential clues lay there in the Almagest for all to see.

Each planet’s motion is connected with the motion of the Sun. The inferior planets are always the close companions of the Sun. Mercury never gets more than about 22° from the Sun, and Venus never more than about 48°. This can be explained simply by imagining that these two planets circle the Sun.

For the superior planets (Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), the connection is more subtle. Each of these planets goes into retrograde motion when it is diametrically opposite the Sun as viewed from Earth. In the ancient planetary theory, this required the three planets to move around their epicycles in lockstep with one another and with the motion of the Sun around Earth. In the case of Mars, for example, the revolving line from the epicycle’s centre to Mars must remain parallel to the revolving line from Earth to the Sun. The same holds true for Jupiter and Saturn. Ptolemy mentioned that one could use this fact to avoid duplicated calculations if one wanted to work out the positions of all three planets for the same date. Copernicus’s great insight was that these four simultaneous motions were really manifestations of one single motion—the motion of Earth itself.

The early reaction to Copernicus was rather muted, and astronomers had several different kinds of response. One could admire Copernicus’s mathematical abilities and simply remain agnostic on the question of Earth’s motion. Such, for example, was the position of German astronomer Erasmus Reinhold, who wrote a popular textbook of Ptolemaic astronomy but who also computed and published the Prutenic Tables, based on Copernicus’s planetary theory, which helped boost Copernicus’s reputation.

Tycho

Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was a good example of those who admired Copernicus’s achievement in tying all the motions of the planets more closely to the Sun but who were unable to accept the motion of Earth. Brahe worked out an alternative cosmology, known as the Tychonic system. In this view the Moon and the Sun revolve around Earth, but all of the other planets revolve around the moving Sun. Tycho’s system had the same explanatory advantages as Copernicus’s. It was what the Copernican system would look like if Earth was made to stay at rest.

Like many other astronomers, Tycho was fascinated by the brilliant new star that appeared in Cassiopeia in 1572. He made extensive observations to determine if it shifted its position with respect to neighbouring stars from night to night. For an astronomer or a philosopher of an Aristotelian frame of mind, it would be difficult to admit that a new star really could appear in the heavens; one would more likely consider it to be some sort of phenomenon in the upper reaches of the air and fire (the elements that, in Aristotle’s cosmology, surround Earth and the seas). If the new star displayed a parallax (i.e., if it shifted back and forth with respect to the real stars), one could be sure that it was near Earth and not a part of the cosmic sphere. Tycho’s demonstration that the new star had no measurable parallax and that it therefore really was a star in the celestial sphere did much to dismantle the old physics.

In 1577 there was a second gift from heaven—a particularly bright comet. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, comets were regarded as atmospheric phenomena. Thus, Aristotle did not treat them in On the Heavens but rather treated them in Meteorology. After all, they are transient, appear suddenly, rapidly cross from one constellation to another, and then disappear. However, Tycho was able to model the motion of the comet by putting it into an orbit around the Sun. He pointed out that the comet was therefore sometimes closer to Earth, and sometimes farther away, than Venus and Mercury were. This seemed to imply that it crashed through the celestial spheres that carried these planets, thus calling into question these vast constructions.

Galileo

In 1609 Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, using his own telescope, modeled on an invention recently made in the Netherlands, discovered that the Moon, far from being smooth and utterly unlike Earth, had mountains and craters. By using the lengths of their shadows, Galileo was even able to measure the heights of the Moon’s mountains. A number of nebulae resolved into swarms of individual small stars. Even the Milky Way was made of stars. Perhaps the most exciting find was the discovery of four moons revolving about Jupiter. These discoveries were announced in Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger, 1610), the book that made his reputation. Although none of these discoveries directly supported the Copernican theory, they all lent indirect support in that they made the new cosmology less objectionable. That Jupiter has satellites cannot prove that Earth goes around the Sun, but it showed that there was at least one other centre of revolution than Earth. It also showed that a moving planet could carry its satellites along with it (as Earth does the Moon in the Copernican view). The later discovery that Venus ran through a complete set of phases like the Moon definitely ruled out the Ptolemaic idea that Venus lay below the solar sphere, but it did not rule out a theory like Tycho Brahe’s, in which Venus circled the Sun while the Sun moved around Earth.

In 1616 the Roman Catholic Church placed Copernicus’s De revolutionibus on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books). In 1618 a list was issued of 10 specific corrections—passages dealing with Earth’s motion that were to be struck out. But outside Italy, this order was rarely followed. One curious exception can be mentioned. Jesuit missionaries to China in the late 16th and early 17th centuries carried European astronomy with them. The Jesuit astronomers were predisposed to the Tychonic system, which kept Earth at the centre of the universe but which otherwise shared the advantages of Copernicanism. After the condemnation of Copernicanism, they had no choice but to keep to the Tychonic system, and they continued to teach it in China long after it had gone out of fashion in Europe.

Galileo, even though he had been warned not to teach Copernicanism as literally true, decided to take advantage of the ascent of a more liberal thinker to the papacy, Pope Urban VII, and gambled on a work of popularization. In Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e copernicano (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican, 1632), three friends—an avowed follower of Ptolemy and Aristotle, a convinced Copernican, and an intermediary who guided the debate—discuss cosmology and astronomy. Naturally, the Copernican gets the better of the arguments. Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant, but the official condemnation of the book and the trial of Galileo did little to halt the advance of the new ideas.

Kepler

German astronomer Johannes Kepler embraced Copernicanism wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, he may be considered the last astronomer, and one of the greatest astronomers, in the old tradition—one of the last for whom the Almagest was still a part of the research literature. Kepler had begun with an interest in cosmology, in trying to understand God’s architecture for the solar system. Why, for example, were there six planets rather than some other number? Going back to speculations introduced by Plato and the Pythagoreans, Kepler applied first the geometry of the regular solids and then musical harmonies to explain various aspects of the universe. For example, there were six planets because there were only five regular solids (cube, tetrahedron, etc.), which God had used as spacers between the planetary orbs when working out the cosmic architecture. Kepler’s first book, Mysterium cosmographicum (“Cosmographic Mystery,” 1596), was based on this idea. As a result of this book, Kepler received an invitation to work with Tycho Brahe, but nothing happened until 1600, when Tycho left his native Denmark and relocated to Prague under the patronage of the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II.

Kepler went to Prague, hoping to obtain from Tycho better values of planetary parameters so that he could refine his cosmology. The collaboration lasted only a short time, because Tycho died in 1601. When Kepler arrived in Prague, Tycho and his assistants were involved in observations of Mars, which was then about to make a near approach to Earth. This turned out to be fortunate for Kepler, because only Mars and Mercury have large enough eccentricities to make the departures of their orbits from circularity appreciable and Mercury is too near the Sun to be easily or often observed. After Tycho’s death Kepler gained access to his observation records. Far from being able to find ready results to use in cosmology, Kepler was forced to analyze many observations to put them into usable form.

Kepler began as a convinced Copernican, so he put the Sun in the middle of his system, but for technical details he went back to Ptolemy. Kepler began by regarding Mars as moving on a circle that was slightly off-centre from the Sun and was following Ptolemy’s equant law. But he was unable to get this theory to match all of Tycho’s observations to better than about 8 minutes of arc (1 minute of arc = 1/60 of a degree), and he believed that Tycho’s observations were good to about 2 minutes of arc. Against his will he was forced to reexamine the fundamentals of planetary motion. This led to the first two of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, published in Astronomia Nova (New Astronomy, 1609). According to the first law, the paths of planets are ellipses with one focus located at the Sun. The second law, which was actually discovered first, makes a small improvement on Ptolemy’s equant: a planet moves around the Sun at a variable speed in such a way that the line from the Sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times. In Harmonice Mundi (The Harmony of the World, 1619), Kepler announced his third, or harmonic, law: the ratio a³/T² is the same for all planets, where a is the semimajor axis of a planet’s elliptical orbit and T is the orbital period.