Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was an astronomer who believed in astrology because it was considered a science in the Renaissance, as it held in observation and calculation, thus allowing prediction. From 18 years he studied at the University of Krakow. And in the classes of Professor Brudzewski became fascinated by astronomy, without neglecting the philosophy, medicine and painting. He was a Renaissance man. Perhaps that is why he went to Italy and taught mathematics at Rome, with 26 years of age. Four years later he was ordained and was assigned to the city of Frauenburg in Germany.
The study of the stars and the universe was complicated by semiempirical and theological concepts, which spoke of "Music of the Spheres" of various levels of heaven, as described by Dante in Comedy, which inhabit the angels and God himself.
Copernicus wanted to see the most immediate, simpler. That suggested by the observation that the Sun and not Earth, was at the center of our solar system. It was a modest canon of provinces in the sixteenth century Poland, without instruments only and guided only by his scientific curiosity, his mathematical ability and willingness to seek truth, discovered and demonstrated to his contemporaries than the sun that , as it seems, revolves around the Earth, but this one that revolves around that. His De revolutionibus orbium caelestium , explaining the finding is without doubt one of the most important books in the history of universal science. But that letter was the product of 25 years of observation and study, but were afraid to publish it until he thought near death, fearing he was condemned as a heretic. Indeed, a year after leaving the printing, the book was banned. Years later, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) confirmed and tried to spread the astronomical discovery that contradicted religious dogma and the Aristotelian natural system. Led, however, a time when the world assimilate the new testimony of science. That is why a Jacques Barzun (1) nonsensical to say that the influence of these scientists expelled the man in the center of the universe. Copernicus did not dare to spread their views in fear of the Church. Founded fear itself because when Galileo dared to do was jailed, tortured by the Inquisition and forced to recant publicly. Kepler better luck ran it lived on the Protestant side and after the Council of Trent, the reformers decided to defend and support the heliocentric theory and other scientific theories condemned by the Catholic Church. The Counter, for its part, the recluse, unsuccessfully, to cabinet heresies.
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| Galileo Galilei |
On the criterion of Barzun, it is important to make the difference that although most public did not understand or support the theory of Copernicus, Galileo, its influence among intellectuals and scholars (philosophers, scientists, poets, playwrights, etc.) had set happily. Therefore, in the modern mind of man of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Earth was round, was no longer the center of the universe after the discovery of America Philippines, and travel around the world of Magellan and Elcano, Europe was no longer the center of the world either. And the truth, as we saw in the text of the Reformation, was no longer unique. The man lived in a world far different from the ancient Greeks and Romans, a more enlightened and wise than the dark Middle Ages, but the imaginary cult of the time he showed an eccentric space, a smaller planet in a mechanically rotating awesome and infinite universe suddenly, and on a continent and a culture that was beginning to face the possibility of ceasing to be hegemonic.
The new world was not America but the question that had no God to help resolve it.
Modern man still at the center of the universe, yes. But suddenly left alone.
(1) Barzun, Jacques. From dawn to decadence. Madrid. Taurus-Santillana. 2001. (P. 302)
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