Copernicus Cashes In

Nicolaus Copernicus shook the book world last month when a first edition of his 1543 classic De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium ("On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres") was auctioned for $2.2 million. Experts knew the book was worth a fortune, but they expected it to sell for half that.

Of course, it's fitting that Copernicus's work continues to turn heads. After all, it once set the whole world spinning--by launching the conceptual revolution that placed the sun, and not the Earth, at the center of our little corner of the universe. So, who was this man who tracked the heavens and moved the Earth? He was hardly a revolutionary.

Majoring in Bologna

Born in 1473 to a merchant family in Poland, Nicolaus Copernicus studied at some of his nation's best schools before shipping off to the University of Bologna in 1496. There, in Italy, he became a renaissance man.

Though he went to Bologna to study canon law, Copernicus lived with a mathematics professor who was the university's top astronomer--not to mention a critic of existing Ptolemaic astronomy. Evidently, Copernicus learned a lot from his housemate. By 1500, he was giving his own astronomy lectures in Rome. After that, he studied medicine at the University of Padua before taking his doctorate--in canon law--from yet another school, the University of Ferrara.

Copernicus returned to Poland in 1503 and went to work for his uncle, Bishop Lucas Watzenrode, as a physician and private secretary. Between his duties, he translated a collection of aphorisms by a 7th-century Byzantine poet. Later, he composed a short manuscript on astronomy known as the Commentariolus ("Little Commentary") and wrote a treatise on money. He also spent plenty of time stargazing, a pastime that paid off when he penned the work for which he is still remembered, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium ("On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres").

Moving Heaven and Earth

Prior to Copernicus, pretty much everyone who watched the skies--from the lowliest shepherd to the most learned astronomer--believed that the Earth stood stock still at the center of the universe, while the sun, moon, stars, and planets revolved around it. That model may sound quaint now, but based on the evidence people could gather with their naked eyes (telescopes weren't invented until half a century after Copernicus), it made good enough sense.

Well, good enough for most people. Copernicus and others noticed holes in the geocentric model. For one thing, they found it odd that the planets periodically seem to go retrograde--to stop their forward progress across the sky, throw their planetary thrusters into reverse, and back up. Faced with such problems, Copernicus proposed an Earth-moving idea. He proposed that the sun is at the center of the universe, that the Earth revolves around it once per year, and that the Earth rotates on its axis once per day.

Leaving a Mark

Copernicus's model retained much that was wrong from classical astronomy--including the idea that solid, rotating spheres bear the celestial bodies through circular orbits. (In fact, there are no spheres, and planetary orbits are elliptical, not circular. And while the sun may be the center of our solar system, it's not the center of the universe.) Still, his proposal was far too radical for the times. Copernicus delayed publication of De Revolutionibus until shortly before his death in 1543, and the challenging, technical text, based largely on complex mathematical computations, was long ignored outside technical astronomy circles.

Inside those circles, however, Copernican theory began winning influential converts--notably Johannes Kepler, who revised and improved the heliocentric model, and Galileo Galilei. The Catholic Church tried to suppress Galileo and heliocentrism by putting him on trial in 1633, but it didn't work. The sun-centered model was on the rise. In the late 17th century, Isaac Newton made further improvements to the model, and Copernicus's star hasn't set since.