Nicolaus Copernicus pursued medical studies at the University of Padua between 1501 and 1503.
Gallery of Nicolaus Copernicus
Gołębia 24, 31-007 Kraków, Poland
Between 1491 and about 1494 Copernicus studied liberal arts - including astronomy and astrology - at the University of Krakow (now Jagiellonian University).
Gallery of Nicolaus Copernicus
Via Zamboni, 33, 40126 Bologna BO, Italy
Nicolaus Copernicus studied at the University of Bologna.
Career
Achievements
U.S. postage stamp on 500th anniversary of Copernicus's birth (1973)
Between 1491 and about 1494 Copernicus studied liberal arts - including astronomy and astrology - at the University of Krakow (now Jagiellonian University).
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Copernicus, Nicolaus - Amazon.com
(On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres is the seminal...)
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres is the seminal work on the heliocentric theory of the Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). The book, first printed in 1543 in Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire, offered an alternative model of the universe to Ptolemy's geocentric system, which had been widely accepted since ancient times.
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer who proposed that the planets have the Sun as the fixed point to which their motions are to be referred; that Earth is a planet which, besides orbiting the Sun annually, also turns once daily on its own axis; and that very slow, long-term changes in the direction of this axis account for the precession of the equinoxes. A versatile person, he was also a mathematician, governor, diplomat, and economist.
Background
Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in the city of Thorn (modern Torun), in the province of Royal Prussia, in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. His father was a merchant from Kraków and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy Toruń merchant. Nicolaus was the youngest of four children.
Education
Between 1491 and about 1494 Copernicus studied liberal arts - including astronomy and astrology - at the University of Krakow (now Jagiellonian University). Like many students of his time, however, he left before completing his degree, resuming his studies in Italy at the University of Bologna, where his uncle had obtained a doctorate in canon law in 1473.
In 1501 he stayed briefly in Frauenburg but soon returned to Italy to continue his studies, this time at the University of Padua, where he pursued medical studies between 1501 and 1503. At this time medicine was closely allied with astrology, as the stars were thought to influence the body’s dispositions. Thus, Copernicus’s astrological experience at Bologna was better training for medicine than one might imagine today.
In May 1503 Copernicus finally received a doctorate - like his uncle, in canon law - but from an Italian university where he had not studied: the University of Ferrara.
Having completed all his studies in Italy, Copernicus came back to Warmia, where he would live out the remaining 40 years of his life. In 1496, through the efforts of his uncle, he became a canon (priest) at Frauenburg, remaining in that office for the remainder of his life. In Bologna Copernicus came under the influence of Domenico Maria de Novara, an astronomer. Novara had the responsibility of issuing annual astrological prognostications for the city, forecasts that included all social groups but gave special attention to the fate of the Italian princes and their enemies. Copernicus, as is known from Rheticus, was “assistant and witness” to some of Novara’s observations, and his involvement with the production of the annual forecasts means that he was intimately familiar with the practice of astrology.
In 1500 Copernicus spoke before an interested audience in Rome on mathematical subjects, but the exact content of his lectures is unknown.
In 1501 there followed a brief visit to home. His first official act as canon there was to apply for permission to spend 3 more years in Italy, which was granted him on his promise that he would study medicine. Copernicus settled in Padua, but later he moved to the University of Ferrara. Only then did he take up the study of medicine in Padua, prolonging his leave of absence until 1506.
Upon returning to Ermland in 1506, Copernicus stayed in his uncle's castle at Heilsberg as his personal physician (doctor) and secretary. During that time he used the knowledge of Greek that he had acquired during his Italian studies to prepare a Latin translation of the aphorisms of an obscure 7th-century Byzantine historian and poet, Theophylactus Simocattes. The work was published in Cracow in 1509 and dedicated to his uncle. It was during the last years of Watzenrode’s life that Copernicus evidently came up with the idea on which his subsequent fame was to rest.
Upon returning to Ermland, Copernicus stayed in his uncle's castle at Heilsberg as his personal physician and secretary. During that time he translated from Greek into Latin the 85 poems of Theophylactus Simacotta, the 7th-century Byzantine poet. The work, printed in Krakow in 1509, evidenced Copernicus's humanistic leanings. At this time Copernicus was also mulling over the problems of astronomy, and the heliocentric system in particular. The system is outlined in a short manuscript known as the Commentariolus, or small commentary, which he completed about 1512. Copies of it circulated among his friends eager to know the "Sketch of Hypotheses Made by Nicolaus Copernicus on the Heavenly Motions," as Copernicus referred to his work. In it, right at the outset, there was a list of seven axioms, all of which stated a feature specific to the heliocentric system. The third stated in particular: "All the spheres revolve about the sun as their midpoint, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe." The rest of the work was devoted to the elaboration of the proposition that in the new system only 34 circles were needed to explain the motion of planets.
Although the Commentariolus produced no reaction, either in print or in letters, Copernicus's fame began to spread. Copernicus’s reputation outside local Polish circles as an astronomer of considerable ability is evident from the fact that in 1514 he was invited to offer his opinion at the church’s Fifth Lateran Council on the critical problem of the reform of the calendar. The civil calendar then in use was still the one produced under the reign of Julius Caesar, and, over the centuries, it had fallen seriously out of alignment with the actual positions of the Sun. This rendered the dates of crucial feast days, such as Easter, highly problematic. Whether Copernicus ever offered any views on how to reform the calendar is not known; in any event, he never attended any of the council’s sessions.
Between 1510 and 1512 Copernicus went to Frombork, where he took part in the election of Fabian of Lossainen as Prince-Bishop of Warmia. He took up residence in his chapter of Frombork and stayed there for the rest of his life. In 1512, Copernicus became a magister pistoriae, taking responsibility for managing various holdings, which involved heading the provisioning fund, adjudicating disputes, attending meetings. In response to the problem he found with the local currency, he drafted an essay on coinage in which he deplored the debasement of the currency and made recommendations for reform. His manuscripts were consulted by the leaders of both Prussia and Poland in their attempts to stabilize the currency.
He was a leader for West Prussia in the war against the Teutonic Knights, which lasted from 1520–1525. He was a physician for the bishop (his uncle had died in 1512) and members of the chapter, and he was a consulting physician for notables in East and West Prussia.
In 1522 the secretary to the King of Poland asked Copernicus to pass an opinion on De motu octavae spherae (On the Motion of the Eighth Sphere), just published by Johann Werner, a mathematician of some repute. This time he granted the request in the form of a letter in which he took a rather low opinion of Werner's work. More important was the concluding remark of the letter, in which Copernicus stated that he intended to set forth elsewhere his own opinion about the motion of the sphere of stars. He referred to the extensive study of which parts and drafts were already very likely extant at that time.
Copernicus could pursue his studies only in his spare time. He continued making astronomical observations whenever he could, hampered by the poor position for observations in Frombork and his many pressing responsibilities as canon. He made observations of Mars, Saturn, and Sun, which resulted in the discovery of the variability of Earth's eccentricity and of the movement of the solar apogee in relation to the fixed stars. For all his failure to publish anything in astronomy, to have his manuscript studies circulate, or to communicate with other astronomers, more and more was rumored about his theory, still on the basis of the Commentariolus.
Not all the comments were flattering. Luther denounced Copernicus as "the fool who will turn the whole science of astronomy upside down." In 1531 a satirical play was produced about him in Elbing, Prussia, by a local schoolmaster. In Rome things went better, for the time being at least. In 1533 John Widmanstad, a papal secretary, lectured on Copernicus's theory before Pope Clement VII and several cardinals. Widmanstad's hand was behind the letter which Cardinal Schönberg sent in 1536 from Rome to Copernicus, urging him to publish his thoughts, or at least to share them with him.
It was a futile request. Probably nobody knew exactly how far Copernicus had progressed with his work until Georg Joachim (Rheticus), a young scholar from Wittenberg, arrived in Frauenburg in the spring of 1539. When he returned to Wittenberg, he had already printed an account, known as the Narratio prima, of Copernicus's almost ready book. Rheticus was also instrumental in securing the printing of Copernicus's book in Nuremberg, although the final supervision remained in the care of Andrew Osiander, a Lutheran clergyman. He might have been the one who gave the work its title, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which is not found in the manuscript. But Osiander certainly had written the anonymous preface, in which Copernicus's ideas were claimed to be meant by their author as mere hypotheses, or convenient mathematical formalism, that had nothing to do with the physical reality.
The printed copy of his work, in six books, reached Copernicus only a few hours before his death on May 24, 1543. The physics of Copernicus was still Aristotelian and could not, of course, cope with the twofold motion attributed to the earth. But Copernicus could have done a better job as an observer. Only 27 recorded observations are known for Copernicus’s entire life, most of them concerning eclipses, alignments, and conjunctions of planets and stars. The accuracy of predicting celestial phenomena on the basis of his system did not exceed the accuracy achieved by Ptolemy. Nor could Copernicus provide proof for the phases of Mercury and Venus that had to occur if his theory was true. The telescope was still more than half a century away. Again, Copernicus could only say that the stars were immensely far away to explain the absence of stellar parallax due to the orbital motion of the earth. Here, the observational evidence was not forthcoming for another 300 years. Also, while Ptolemy actually used only 40 epicycles, their total number in Copernicus's system was 84, hardly a convincing proof of its greater simplicity.
Still, the undeniable strength of Copernicus's work lay in its appeal to simplicity. The rotation of the earth made unnecessary the daily revolution of thousands of stars. The orbital motion of the earth fitted perfectly with its period of 365 days into the sequence set by the periods of other planets. Most importantly, the heliocentric ordering of planets eliminated the need to think of the retrograde motion of the planets as a physical reality. In the tenth chapter of the first book Copernicus made a straightforward statement: "In the centre rests the sun. For who would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple in another or better place than this wherefrom it can illuminate everything at the same time."
Copernicus felt his scientific studies and reading was fully compatible with being a good Catholic Christian; he also never showed any interest in the new Protestant Reformation movement. Copernicus believed the right attitude was to use his God given reason and scientific method and not just rely on blind faith in scriptures.
Views
Nicolaus Copernicus was one of the first theoreticians of heliocentrism, a cosmological model in which the Sun is assumed to lie at or near a central point.
In the Commentariolus Copernicus listed assumptions that he believed solved the problems of ancient astronomy. He stated that the earth is only the center of gravity and center of the moon’s orbit; that all the spheres encircle the sun, which is close to the center of the universe; that the universe is much larger than previously assumed, and the earth’s distance to the sun is a small fraction of the size of the universe; that the apparent motion of the heavens and the sun is created by the motion of the earth; and that the apparent retrograde motion of the planets is created by the earth’s motion. Although the Copernican model maintained epicycles moving along the deferent, which explained retrograde motion in the Ptolemaic model, Copernicus correctly explained that the retrograde motion of the planets was only apparent not real, and its appearance was due to the fact that the observers were not at rest in the center. The work dealt very briefly with the order of the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, the only planets that could be observed with the naked eye), the triple motion of the earth (the daily rotation, the annual revolution of its center, and the annual revolution of its inclination) that causes the Sun to seem to be in motion, the motions of the equinoxes, the revolution of the moon around the Earth, and the revolution of the five planets around the Sun.
In "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" Copernicus established that the planets orbited the sun rather than the Earth. He laid out his model of the solar system and the path of the planets. Central to his model is his proposal that the Earth has three distinct motions: a daily axial rotation, an annual rotation about the Sun, and a third motion related to precession (the 25,800-year-long cycle reflecting the changing position of the Earth in space). In the book's introduction Copernicus credits his heliocentric hypothesis to the ideas of ancient Greek writers such as Aristarchus and Philolaus.
Apart from science, Nicolaus Copernicus was broadly supportive of the humanist movement, which sought to offer a more liberal approach to life, literature and the sciences. He printed translations of Greek literature, which showed his support for a more liberal approach to non-Christian literature.
Quotations:
"Finally we shall place the Sun himself at the center of the Universe."
"What indeed is more beautiful than heaven, which of course contains all things of beauty."
"If perchance there should be foolish speakers who, together with those ignorant of all mathematics, will take it upon themselves to decide concerning these things, and because of some place in the Scriptures wickedly distorted to their purpose, should dare to assail this my work, they are of no importance to me, to such an extent do I despise their judgment as rash."
"To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge."
Personality
Copernicus was a typical "Renaissance man," a well-educated person who excels in a wide variety of subjects or fields. He spoke Latin, German, and Polish with equal fluency; he also spoke Greek and Italian and had some knowledge of Hebrew.
Physical Characteristics:
As for physical characteristics, Copernicus had a broken nose and a scar above the left eye.
Quotes from others about the person
Gerald James Whitrow: "Copernicus made his revolutionary suggestion on purely theoretical grounds. The invention of the telescope came after and not before, the publication of his great work. This is a fact upon which we may well ponder, for it shows that the insight into natural phenomena has come as much from the genius of the theoretical as from that of the experimental and observational investigator."
Edward Rosen: "It was not only... with classical antiquity that Copernicus showed himself a man of the Renaissance. He also strove to achieve the many-sided accomplishments of that humanistic ideal, the universal man. He was competent in canon law; he practised medicine; he wrote a tract on coinage; he served his cathedral chapter as an administrator and diplomatic representative; he painted his own portrait; he made many of his own astronomical instruments, and he established the heliocentric system on a firm basis."
Friedrich Nietzsche: "It gave me pleasure to contemplate the right of the Polish nobleman to upset with his simple veto the determinations of a parliamentary session; and the Pole Copernicus seemed to have made of this right against the determinations and presentations of other people, the greatest and worthiest use."
Thomas Hobbes: "The beginning of astronomy, except observations, I think is not to be derived from farther time than from Nicolaus Copernicus; who in the age next preceding the present revived the opinion of Pythagoras, Aristarchus, and Philolaus."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "Of all discoveries and opinions, none may have exerted a greater effect on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus. The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the centre of the universe. Never, perhaps, was a greater demand made on mankind - for by this admission so many things vanished in mist and smoke! What became of our Eden, our world of innocence, piety and poetry; the testimony of the senses; the conviction of a poetic - religious faith? No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go and offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown, indeed not even dreamed of."
Galileo Galilei: "Copernicus did not ignore the Bible, but he knew very well that if his doctrine were proved, then it could not contradict the Scriptures when they were rightly understood."
Friedrich Engels: "What Luther's burning of the Papal Bull was in the religious field, in the field of natural science was the great work of Copernicus, in which he, although timidly... threw down a challenge to ecclesiastical superstition. From then on natural science was in essence emancipated from religion, although the complete settlement of accounts in all details has gone on to the present day and in many minds is still far from being complete. But from then on the development of science went forward with giant strides, increasing, so to speak, proportionately to the square of the distance in time from its point of departure, as if it wanted to show the world that for the motion of the highest product of organic matter, the human mind, the law that holds good is the reverse of that for the motion of inorganic matter."
Interests
art
Connections
As an official in the Catholic Church, Copernicus took a vow of celibacy. He never married and is not known to have had children, but from at least 1531 until 1539 his relations with Anna Schilling, a live-in housekeeper, were seen as scandalous by two bishops of Warmia who urged him over the years to break off relations with his "mistress."