Copernicus - The Genius Who Moved the Earth Documentary — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:01In 1539, the German mathematician Georg Joachim  Rheticus appeared at the town of Frauenburg, now
2. 0:08Frombork on the Baltic coast in northern Poland,  to seek a meeting with a Catholic clergyman in
3. 0:14his late sixties. A few months earlier, Rheticus  heard rumours that this obscure Polish cleric had
4. 0:20formulated a revolutionary new theory concerning  the relationship between the Sun, the Earth,
5. 0:26and the other planetary bodies. At this time,  the whole of Europe believed that the Earth
6. 0:31was fixed at the centre of the Universe. For  decades, Nicolaus Copernicus had been making
7. 0:37astronomical observations to develop his own  heliocentric model. However, the Polish cleric
8. 0:43was unwilling to publish his work, preferring  to make his theories known to a small group
9. 0:48of acquaintances who could understand the complex  mathematics behind them. After meeting Copernicus,
10. 0:55Rheticus persuaded him to publish his treatise  De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, or On the
11. 1:02Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and spent two  years working with him to revise the text before
12. 1:09returning to Germany to arrange its publication.  Copernicus anticipated that the publication of his
13. 1:15treatise would launch an astronomical revolution,  but he would not live to see its impact,
14. 1:21dying on 24 May 1543 shortly after receiving  the final copy of his published work. This
15. 1:29is the story of Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish  clergyman who turned the universe inside out.
16. 1:50The man known to history as Nicolaus Copernicus  was born on 19 February 1473 in the city of Toruń
17. 1:58on the banks of the Vistula River. The Polish  city was then part of Royal Prussia, an autonomous
18. 2:04German-speaking region under the Polish Crown.  Nicolaus Copernicus is the Latinized version
19. 2:10of his birth name Niklas Koppernigk, and in Poland  he is known as Mikołaj Kopernik. His father Niklas
20. 2:17Koppernigk the Elder was a wealthy copper merchant  whose family came from the village of Koperniki
21. 2:22in Upper Silesia, close to the modern-day  border of Poland and Czechia. By the 1380s,
22. 2:28the family had moved to Krakow, then the capital  of the kingdom of Poland. By the late 1450s,
23. 2:35Nikolas Koppernigk the Elder had moved to  Toruń, an important trading centre over 200
24. 2:41miles downstream from Krakow. Within a few years of his arrival at Toruń,
25. 2:49Niklas married Barbara Watzenrode, the daughter  of one of the city’s richest and most influential
26. 2:55men. The couple lived in a tall redbrick house  on what is now Copernicus Street and had two
27. 3:01sons and two daughters, all of whom survived into  adulthood. The future astronomer was the youngest
28. 3:07of the four children. Copernicus lived during  the European Renaissance, an age of intellectual
29. 3:13curiosity inspired by classical antiquity and  accompanied by a sceptical attitude towards
30. 3:19Christian understandings of the world. While the  Renaissance is perhaps most closely associated
31. 3:24with artistic masterpieces of Leonardo, Raphael,  and Michelangelo in Italy, the Renaissance was
32. 3:31a pan-European phenomenon that also took root  in Copernicus’s native Poland. The kingdom of
33. 3:37Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had been  in dynastic union under the Jagiellonian Dynasty
34. 3:43since 1385 and was one of the largest states  in Europe. At the time of Copernicus’s birth,
35. 3:50both parts of the union were ruled by Casimir IV,  one the most successful kings in Polish history.
36. 3:56While Copernicus was born in Toruń, his family  was well connected to the capital of Krakow. Young
37. 4:03Niklas was around ten years old when his namesake  father died in 1483. The Koppernigk children may
38. 4:10have been orphans at this point, since there is  no record of the date of their mother’s death.
39. 4:15Their uncle Lukas Watzenrode, a canon in the  diocese of Warmia, assumed responsibility for
40. 4:21their upbringing. Copernicus attended school at  Toruń and later Włocławek with financial support
41. 4:27from uncle Lukas, who was elected Prince-Bishop of  Warmia in 1489. Two years later, the 18-year-old
42. 4:35Copernicus and his elder brother Andreas began  their studies at the Jagiellonian University
43. 4:40in Krakow. The course of study included logic,  poetry, rhetoric, and natural philosophy, but
44. 4:47Copernicus was attracted above all to astronomy  and mathematics, which was a particular strength
45. 4:53of the University of Krakow. He combined his  university studies with independent reading and
46. 4:59began collecting a library of astronomical books. After four years at the Jagellonian University,
47. 5:08Copernicus left Krakow without taking a degree and  joined his uncle in Warmia. The Prince-Bishop had
48. 5:14arranged for the election of his young nephew  as one of the sixteen canons of the Frauenburg
49. 5:19Chapter in Warmia, though Copernicus was not  confirmed until 1497 while studying at the
50. 5:26University of Bologna in Italy. In September 1496,  Copernicus began his studies in canon law at the
51. 5:33oldest university in Europe, where he lodged with  the astronomy professor Domenico Maria Novara,
52. 5:39who helped him make his first observation  in March 1497. After four years in Bologna,
53. 5:45Copernicus visited Rome for the jubilee year  celebrations in 1500. He was still in the Eternal
54. 5:51City on 6 November, where he observed a partial  lunar eclipse. While Copernicus lectured in
55. 5:58mathematics, he remained destined for a career in  the Church. Nicolaus and his brother Andreas were
56. 6:04back in Warmia in 1501 but obtained permission  to return to Italy to pursue further studies at
57. 6:10the University of Padua, where Nicolaus studied  medicine to become a church physician. However,
58. 6:16he curtailed his studies after two years and  instead obtained a doctorate in canon law from
59. 6:22Ferrara in May 1503. The 30-year-old Copernicus  returned to Warmia, where he remained for the
60. 6:29rest of his life. Although the cathedral  of Warmia was in Frauenburg on the Vistula,
61. 6:35Bishop Watzenrode lived 50 miles away at the  bishop’s palace in Heilsberg, present-day Lidzbark
62. 6:40Warminski. While serving as his uncle’s physician  and secretary at the episcopal palace, Copernicus
63. 6:48treated the local population for free and was  known as Doctor Niklas. He had steady incomes
64. 6:54as a canon alongside an additional sinecure  from the Church of the Holy Cross in Wrocław.
65. 7:02Copernicus continued his astronomical  observations at Heilsberg and began
66. 7:07teaching himself Greek in order to study  the works of the ancient Greek astronomers.
67. 7:12The official systems of astronomy were based on  the writings of the Greek philosopher Aristotle in
68. 7:17the 4th century BC and the astronomer Claudius  Pompey in Roman Egypt in the 2nd century AD.
69. 7:24Although the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of  Samos had proposed an alternative model in
70. 7:29which the planets orbited the Sun as early as  the 2nd century BC, geocentricism remained the
71. 7:36officially accepted view and was endorsed by  the Christian Church. As part of his efforts,
72. 7:42Copernicus translated a collection of 85 letters  by Byzantine historian Theophylactus Simocatta
73. 7:48from Greek into Latin, which was published  in Krakow in 1509. Although the prince-bishop
74. 7:55was cultivating his nephew as his successor, in  1510 the 37-year-old Copernicus left his uncle’s
75. 8:02employ and moved to Frauenburg to carry out his  functions as canon in person. On 29 March 1512,
76. 8:10Lukas Watzenrode died in his native Toruń while  returning from the wedding of King Sigismund I
77. 8:16in Krakow. At Frauenburg, Copernicus befriended  his fellow canon Tiedemann Giese, who also had an
78. 8:23interest in astronomy. Copernicus’ biographer Dava  Sobel suggests that Giese was the first to hear
79. 8:30of Copernicus’s new theory in around 1510. The amateur astronomer had written a brief
80. 8:39summary of his theory, in which he praised  Ptolemy’s accomplishments but highlighted
81. 8:44some inadequacies in Ptolemy’s efforts to explain  the apparent backward motion of planets in the
82. 8:49sky with eccentric orbits, which contradicted  the Aristotelian view that the movements of the
83. 8:54planets were regular. Although familiar with some  of Aristarchus’s work, Copernicus does not appear
84. 9:00to have known about his heliocentric model.  Copernicus suggested that the inconsistencies
85. 9:06in the Ptolemaic system would be resolved if  all planets were to orbit the Sun rather than
86. 9:12the Earth, which was a planet like the others  and rotated on its axis once a day. With this
87. 9:18perspective, Copernicus easily ordered the known  planets out from the Sun as Mercury, Venus, Earth,
88. 9:26Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The only celestial  object which orbited the Earth was the Moon.
89. 9:32Copernicus left out the mathematical proof  behind the theory and announced his intention
90. 9:37to publish a more comprehensive book with all  the calculations. This essay, later known as the
91. 9:43Commentariolus or Brief Sketch, was initially  circulated among a small group of friends,
92. 9:49but was subsequently copied and became known  to the wider European scientific community,
93. 9:54which eagerly awaited the publication  of the proof.
94. 10:00Copernicus was sidetracked by his ecclesiastical  duties, especially following the death of his
95. 10:06uncle and the election of his colleague Fabian  Luzjanski as the new bishop. Meanwhile, as his
96. 10:12brother Andreas developed leprosy and left for  Italy, where he lingered until his death in 1518,
97. 10:19Copernicus assumed additional responsibilities  for managing church properties and in 1514 he
98. 10:25moved into a house outside the cathedral complex,  where he built a level patio for his astronomical
99. 10:31observations. He also used a tower in the  cathedral’s perimeter wall to observe the
100. 10:37heavens. In 1515, he was consulted as part of Pope  Leo X’s attempt to reform the Julian Calendar,
101. 10:44but his comments have not survived. In 1517,  Copernicus left Frauenburg for Allenstein or
102. 10:52Olsztyn at the southern extremity of the  diocese of Warmia to manage the church’s
103. 10:57properties. Copernicus kept administrative  records, responded to petitions from peasants,
104. 11:02and arbitrated over land disputes. In between,  he continued his astronomical work and painted a
105. 11:09sundial on the wall of his apartment at Allenstein  Castle to take observations of the Sun and
106. 11:15calculate the length of a year by measuring the  time between equinoxes. He repeated the experiment
107. 11:21each passing year and arrived at an answer  within minutes and seconds of the true figure.
108. 11:27On more earthly matters, Copernicus applied his  mathematical abilities to prove that unscrupulous
109. 11:33Polish merchants were debasing coinage. In August  1517, he completed the Meditata, a brief essay
110. 11:40about the corruption, which he translated into  German for the authorities in Danzig in 1519.
111. 11:47While Copernicus was exposing the corruption of  the merchant class, the German theologian Martin
112. 11:53Luther began circulating his criticisms of the  Catholic Church. Luther would soon unleash the
113. 11:59Protestant Reformation, but Copernicus’s  revolution was still two decades away.
114. 12:08Copernicus left Allenstein in  December 1519 at the end of his term,
115. 12:13but a few weeks after returning to Frauenburg  the town was attacked by the Teutonic Knights,
116. 12:18the Germanic Crusader order which established its  own state in the Baltics after defeating the last
117. 12:24pagans in Europe. The Poles were no match for  the energetic Albrecht of Hohenzollern, the Grand
118. 12:31Master of the Teutonic Order, and Copernicus  was obliged to beat a hasty retreat back to
119. 12:36the former Teutonic fortress at Allenstein, which  soon fell under siege. During this anxious period,
120. 12:44Copernicus organised the castle’s defences,  appealed to Krakow for reinforcements to lift
121. 12:49the siege and liberate Warmia, catalogued  the chapter’s archives, and continued his
122. 12:54planetary observations at night. After the  arrival of Polish reinforcements in late 1520,
123. 13:00the Teutonic knights lifted the siege, and a truce  was signed in April. Copernicus was recalled to
124. 13:07Frauenburg in June, although the Teutonic knights  continued to raid Polish territory. In March 1522,
125. 13:15Copernicus deputised for Bishop Fuzjanski  at negotiations with the Teutonic knights
126. 13:20at Graudenz. A few days later, he spoke on  the devaluation of coinage and proposed a new
127. 13:26monetary standard issued by a single authority to  replace the existing system that used both Polish
128. 13:32and Prussian coinage. Meanwhile, Albrecht  von Hohenzollern went to Wittenberg to meet
129. 13:38the excommunicated Martin Luther, who began to  encourage him to break from the Catholic Church.
130. 13:44Albrecht’s rival Bishop Fuzjanski died in  January 1523, and Copernicus was ordered to
131. 13:51Heilsberg to manage the bishopric of Warmia until  the confirmation of King Sigismund’s appointee,
132. 13:56Maurycy Ferber. In the early hours of 26  August, Copernicus observed a lunar eclipse
133. 14:03that enabled him to record the positions of  the Sun and Moon with great accuracy.
134. 14:12In October 1523, after Ferber was installed on  the episcopal throne, Copernicus was glad to
135. 14:18return to Frauenburg. He was now in his early  fifties and keen to continue his astronomical
136. 14:25work before his eyesight failed him. In June  1524, he wrote a paper addressed to his friend
137. 14:32Bernard Wapowski entitled Letter Against Werner.  Copernicus was responding to Johannes Werner’s
138. 14:391522 publication The Motion of the Eighth Sphere,  which argued that the stars of the night sky were
139. 14:46firmly embedded in an eighth sphere that slowly  rotated in the opposite direction to the planets.
140. 14:53Copernicus highlighted several errors in Werner’s  calculations, but instead of presenting his own
141. 14:59solution he informed Wapowski that he would “set  forth my views elsewhere.” Few people would have
142. 15:06paid attention to Copernicus’s private letter  at a time when Luther’s challenge to Rome not
143. 15:11only split the Western Church but fuelled  a peasant rebellion that Luther repudiated.
144. 15:17While the bishop of Warmia remained affiliated to  Rome, neighbouring dioceses adopted Lutheranism,
145. 15:23as did Albrecht of Hohenzollern, who dissolved  the Teutonic Order and re-established himself as
146. 15:29Duke of Prussia and a vassal of the Catholic  King Sigismund of Poland. Copernicus and his
147. 15:35friend Tiedemann Giese were moderates, but were  compelled to vote in favour of Ferber’s decision
148. 15:41to expel the Lutherans from Warmia. Despite his  distinguished record of service at Frauenburg
149. 15:47Chapter, in February 1531 Copernicus received a  stern letter from Bishop Ferber threatening to
150. 15:53dismiss him as canon unless he was ordained as a  priest. In July, Ferber issued a further reprimand
151. 16:01after receiving intelligence that Copernicus’s  former housekeeper Anna Schilling had stayed
152. 16:06at his house after separating from her husband.  Copernicus pleaded his innocence and continued
153. 16:12to carry out his administrative duties as the  officer responsible for the Chapter’s finances.
154. 16:18He proposed a system for changing the weight of  bread in response to fluctuating wheat prices to
155. 16:24keep bread affordable while protecting  the Chapter’s financial interests.
156. 16:31Copernicus’s unorthodox views about the Sun  and the Earth may have made him vulnerable to
157. 16:36charges of heresy, and even though his manuscript  was essentially completed by the early 1530s,
158. 16:43he was hesitant to arrange its publication.  In 1535, his friend Bernard Wapowski sought
159. 16:49to arrange publication of an almanac compiled  by Copernicus in Vienna, but died a few weeks
160. 16:56later. In summer 1533, the papal secretary Johann  Widmanstetter explained Copernicus’s theory to
161. 17:04Pope Clement VII, who expressed his favour.  After Clement’s death, Widmanstetter worked
162. 17:10for Cardinal Nicholas Schönberg, who wrote to  Copernicus in November 1536 seeking a copy of his
163. 17:16manuscript. Copernicus received the letter without  responding, since he was still unable to prove
164. 17:23parts of his theory and feared being ridiculed  by publishing an incomplete proof. He was also
165. 17:29busy with his official responsibilities, making  frequent trips to Heilsberg to attend to Bishop
166. 17:34Ferber. After Ferber’s death in early summer 1537,  Copernicus once again assumed responsibility for
167. 17:42the bishopric’s affairs during the interregnum.  After the election of Johannes Dantsicus,
168. 17:48as the new bishop of Warmia, Copernicus’s  friend Giese succeeded Dantsicus as bishop of
169. 17:54the smaller diocese of Kulm. The relationship  between the new bishop and the canons of the
170. 17:59Frauenburg Chapter was fraught after Dantsicus  had spent over a decade seeking office in Warmia
171. 18:05before obtaining his canonry in 1529. Although  Dantsicus had been a notorious womaniser and
172. 18:11had flirted with the cause of Lutheran reform  earlier in life, as bishop of Warmia he was a
173. 18:17Catholic zealot determined to crack down on  church officials living in sin. Copernicus’s
174. 18:23relationship with his housekeeper attracted  renewed scrutiny, but he refused to give her up
175. 18:28despite informing the bishop he would do so. Amidst Dantsicus’s anti-Lutheran zealotry,
176. 18:37the 25-year-old Rheticus arrived in Frauenburg  seeking Canon Copernicus. Rheticus was not only a
177. 18:45Lutheran, but he was a professor of mathematics  at Luther’s Wittenberg University. He was 22
178. 18:51years old in 1536 when he was appointed to the  professorship by Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s
179. 18:57close collaborator. Melanchthon and Rheticus  shared an interest in astrology and believed
180. 19:03that a better understanding of the heavens was  key to achieving a better understanding of God.
181. 19:08In September 1538, Melanchthon sent Rheticus  to study with Europe’s leading scholars.
182. 19:14Rheticus’s first port of call was Nuremberg, where  he called on Johann Schöner, the headmaster of
183. 19:20a secondary school and one of the city’s leading  intellectuals. Schöner was the heir of a tradition
184. 19:26founded by the German astronomer Johannes Müller,  better known as Regiomontanus, who was known for
185. 19:32a treatise on trigonometry and for his work on  translating the Almagest, Ptolemy’s astronomical
186. 19:39treatise, from Greek to Latin. Schöner himself  was an accomplished polymath who published
187. 19:45astronomical texts and a series of globes that  were among the first to show the New World,
188. 19:50which he named America after Amerigo Vespucci.  Schöner or someone in his circle would have
189. 19:57been acquainted with Copernicus’s Commentariolus  that sketched out his heliocentric theory without
190. 20:03going into any detail. After spending several  months in Nuremberg studying with Schöner and
191. 20:08his colleagues, Rheticus resolved to travel to  Poland with the cartographer Heinrich Zell to
192. 20:14seek out Copernicus himself. In May 1539, they  arrived in Frauenburg, with its vast cathedral
193. 20:21towering over a modest little town. Despite the  risk of imprisonment as a Lutheran, Rheticus
194. 20:27bravely knocked on the door of Copernicus’s house  and introduced himself to one of his servants as a
195. 20:33mathematician. While Copernicus the canon would  undoubtedly have been hesitant about welcoming
196. 20:38the young stranger, Copernicus the astronomer was  immediately intrigued by the three bound volumes
197. 20:44that his visitor presented to him as gifts. It had only been a century since Johannes
198. 20:53Gutenberg invented the movable type printing  press, and books remained valuable commodities.
199. 20:59The books that Rheticus brought with him included  a copy of Euclid’s Elements in the original Greek,
200. 21:05Regiomontanus’s trigonometry treatise On Triangles  of Every Kind, and most important of all,
201. 21:12the Greek edition of Ptolemy’s Almagest, which had  only been published in 1538. Copernicus would have
202. 21:19been thrilled with these valuable gifts, and with  the very fact that Rheticus was not only aware of
203. 21:24his work, but had travelled hundreds of miles  into enemy territory to consult him about it.
204. 21:31Copernicus took him on a tour of his hometown and  showed him his observatory, where he had to make
205. 21:36do with three relatively rudimentary instruments:  a triquetrum for determining the altitude of
206. 21:42celestial bodies using trigonometry, a quadrant  to record summer and winter solstices, and a
207. 21:49spherical astrolabe to determine the position of  the heavenly bodies in the night sky. Copernicus
208. 21:55soon showed Rheticus the holy grail that he  was seeking, the unpublished manuscript of his
209. 22:00proof for heliocentrism. Rheticus spent the next  four months poring over the hundreds of pages of
210. 22:06tables, diagrams, equations, and explanatory text  and was suitably impressed by Copernicus’s genius,
211. 22:13which he compared to that of Ptolemy. Rheticus  described the way in which Copernicus combined
212. 22:18the data from his own observations with those by  astronomers through the ages. He used the raw data
213. 22:24to form his own hypotheses, which he compared with  those of Ptolemy and other ancient astronomers.
214. 22:31Rheticus was particularly impressed by  Copernicus’s systemic approach to the
215. 22:35problems with the Ptolemaic system  in contrast to other astronomers,
216. 22:40who satisfied themselves with developing  theories to explain minor discrepancies in
217. 22:44their observations as well as Ptolemy’s model of  the universe. Copernicus’s efforts to understand
218. 22:50the motions of the universe from first principles  led Rheticus to equate him with Ptolemy.
219. 22:59Like Ptolemy’s Almagest, Copernicus divided his  manuscript into six parts. The first was a general
220. 23:06description of the heliocentric system, the  second discussed his theory of the fixed stars,
221. 23:11and how they appeared to move gradually in reverse  across the night sky. The third and fourth books
222. 23:17were about the Sun and the Moon, and the fifth  and sixth about the movements and positions of the
223. 23:22planets. Rheticus obtained Copernicus’s permission  to write his own summary of the heliocentric
224. 23:27theory, which became the Narratio prima or  First Report. Both men were thrilled about
225. 23:33their collaboration, though Rheticus reported that  there were also frequent arguments between them as
226. 23:39he expressed his frustration that Copernicus’s  profound ideas were punctuated by painstakingly
227. 23:45detailed calculations. The collaboration continued  even as Copernicus and Rheticus faced scrutiny
228. 23:51from Bishop Dantsicus. By the time of Rheticus’s  arrival, Copernicus may have already asked Anna
229. 23:58Schilling to move out of his house, but reports  continued to reach the bishop that she continued
230. 24:04to visit the house. The bishop’s spies would have  known about the arrival of the young stranger and
231. 24:10sought to establish his identity. It is unclear  how Copernicus obtained a dispensation to allow
232. 24:15Rheticus to remain in Frauenburg, or whether he  informed the bishop of his student’s affiliation
233. 24:21with Wittenberg. While the Bishop of Warmia  was suspicious of Rheticus’s activities,
234. 24:27Tiedemann Giese was eager to make the acquaintance  of the German mathematician and invited Copernicus
235. 24:33and Rheticus to meet him at the bishop’s castle  in Löbau, present-day Lubawa. Shortly before
236. 24:39their arrival in early July, Giese received  a letter from Dantsicus urging him to convey
237. 24:45his displeasure at Copernicus’s continued  dealings with Anna Schilling. Copernicus
238. 24:50signalled his willingness to comply, while  Giese, Rheticus, and Copernicus discussed the
239. 24:56prospects of publishing the full manuscript  of his work.
240. 25:01According to Rheticus, Giese had encouraged  Copernicus to continue working on his astronomical
241. 25:08theory to further the cause of calendar reform  and to ensure that Christian festivals were being
242. 25:13observed on the appropriate day. Rheticus claimed  that Copernicus was only prepared to publish his
243. 25:19astronomical tables, which would avoid causing  any controversy while providing accomplished
244. 25:24mathematicians with the necessary information  to infer his heliocentric theory. Copernicus
245. 25:30argued that by doing so he was following in the  footsteps of the ancient mathematician Pythagoras,
246. 25:36whose fame continued to echo through the ages  even though he only circulated his work among
247. 25:41a small group of scholars. Giese disagreed and  believed that Copernicus should publish his whole
248. 25:47proof and be prepared to defend it from critics.  Although Rheticus credited Giese for persuading
249. 25:53Copernicus to publish, it was in fact his own  efforts that finally encouraged the aging canon
250. 26:00to present his work to the world. Copernicus and  Rheticus returned to Frauenburg in late summer,
251. 26:06and on 23 September 1539 Rheticus completed  his summary of Copernicus’s theory. Rheticus
252. 26:14and Zell went to Danzig, present-day Gdansk, and  delivered the manuscript to Franciscus Rhodes, who
253. 26:20published the short book in April 1540. Rheticus’s  Narratio Prima took the form of a long letter of
254. 26:27some 100 pages addressed to Johann Schöner. While  Copernicus’s name appeared on the title page,
255. 26:34throughout the text Rheticus simply referred  to him as his teacher. Rheticus crafted his
256. 26:40own narrative based on his study of Copernicus’s  work, placing him in the tradition of the great
257. 26:45astronomers before him. Rather than shock the  world by introducing heliocentrism right away,
258. 26:51Rheticus begins by discussing the apparent  motions of stars and the shortcomings of the
259. 26:56received wisdom. Around 20 pages in, following an  astrological digression and a prediction of the
260. 27:02Second Coming of Christ, Rheticus concludes that  the Ptolemaic system cannot explain the movements
261. 27:08of the heavenly bodies and offers Copernicus’s  heliocentric theory as an alternative. The idea
262. 27:14that the Earth orbits the Sun is not the only  revolutionary aspect of Copernicus’s theory. The
263. 27:20concept that the Earth completes a full rotation  every day would have seemed even more incredible.
264. 27:29Following its publication, Rheticus dispatched  copies of the Narratio to his acquaintances
265. 27:34in Nuremberg, thus confirming Copernicus’s  reputation in Schöner’s circle. In August 1540,
266. 27:40the Nuremberg publisher Johannes Petreius wrote  to Rheticus urging him to convince Copernicus
267. 27:46to publish his manuscript with him. The letters  from Petreius and others had their desired effect,
268. 27:52and from summer 1540 Copernicus spent  the following year making revisions to
269. 27:57prepare the manuscript for publication. He  made substantive changes to his section on
270. 28:03trigonometry with the aid of Regiomontanus’s On  Triangles of Every Kind that Rheticus had gifted
271. 28:09him. Since Copernicus did most of the revisions  himself, Rheticus and his friend Heinrich Zell
272. 28:15occupied themselves by surveying the surrounding  countryside to complete a detailed map of Prussia
273. 28:21that Copernicus had started many years earlier.  In the winter of 1540-1541, Rheticus briefly
274. 28:28returned to Wittenberg to give two lectures  in astronomy. After his return to Frauenburg,
275. 28:34in April 1541 Rheticus accompanied Copernicus  to the Prussian capital of Königsberg, where the
276. 28:40canon was summoned to attend to the illness of one  of Duke Albrecht’s advisers. Despite the previous
277. 28:47animosity between the Poles and the Teutonic  knights, after his conversion to Lutheranism and
278. 28:52the secularisation of the Prussian state, Albrecht  recognised that he owed his status to his liege,
279. 28:58the king of Poland. In his efforts to obtain  protection for the Lutheran Rheticus, Tiedemann
280. 29:04Giese had dispatched a copy of the Narratio to  Albrecht in May 1540. Some twenty years after
281. 29:10facing down Albrecht’s knights from the walls of  Allenstein Castle, Copernicus and Albrecht now
282. 29:17had an opportunity to discuss the scientific  and religious implications of his theory.
283. 29:25Upon their return from Frauenburg in May 1541,  Copernicus and Rheticus each received letters
284. 29:32from Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg, a theologian  and mathematician in Schöner’s circle, advising
285. 29:38them how to publish the manuscript without  offending the sensibilities of religious and
286. 29:42academic establishments. Osiander suggested that  Copernicus should present his system as the result
287. 29:49of computations that offered a convenient means  of describing the motions of the planets without
288. 29:55necessarily being a representation of reality.  He advised Rheticus to offer up the possibility
289. 30:01for someone to develop competing hypotheses that  may be equally valid. Meanwhile, Achilles Gasser,
290. 30:08an astrologer who lived in Rheticus’s  hometown of Feldkirch in western Austria,
291. 30:13published a second edition of the Narratio prima  in Basel. He acknowledged that Copernicus’s theory
292. 30:20might be considered heretical but represented  “the rebirth of a true system of astronomy,” and
293. 30:27urged its progenitor to publish his proof.  Whatever reservations Bishop Dantsicus may have
294. 30:33had about both Copernicus and Rheticus, he was  an acclaimed poet who had intellectual curiosity
295. 30:38about Copernicus’s work. He received letters from  scholars as far away as the Netherlands urging him
296. 30:45to take a close interest in the publication of  Copernicus’s manuscript, which would make his
297. 30:50bishopric of Warmia the intellectual centre of  the world. By June 1541, he wrote to Copernicus
298. 30:56offering his official backing for publication and  agreed to provide a few verses for the preface. By
299. 31:02late summer 1541, Copernicus had finished all the  necessary revisions to his manuscript, which is
300. 31:09now in the collection of the University of Krakow.  Rheticus had made a fair copy which he would
301. 31:14deliver to the printer, and in late September he  and Zell bade Copernicus their final farewell and
302. 31:20embarked on their journey back to Wittenberg. While Rheticus had raised his profile among the
303. 31:29European intellectual community as Copernicus’s  collaborator, he returned to Wittenberg to a mixed
304. 31:35reception. He may have had a sense of this while  delivering his lectures over the previous winter,
305. 31:41since he had obtained a letter of recommendation  from Duke Albrecht to the Elector of Saxony
306. 31:47urging Rheticus to be confirmed in his  professorship. While Rheticus was in fact
307. 31:52promoted to dean of the Faculty of Arts, Luther  disparagingly referred to Copernicus’s efforts
308. 31:58as an attempt to “turn the whole of astronomy  upside down,” and Melanchthon also expressed his
309. 32:04irritation with Copernicus’s views. Meanwhile,  Rheticus’s new responsibilities at Wittenberg
310. 32:11prevented him from supervising the publication  of Copernicus’s manuscript in Nuremberg. Instead,
311. 32:16he extracted two sections on trigonometry from  Copernicus’s work for publication in Wittenberg,
312. 32:22availing himself of the opportunity to introduce  it with Bishop Dantsicus’s verses that he had
313. 32:28originally intended to introduce the full work.  After the end of the academic year in May 1542,
314. 32:35Rheticus personally delivered the full manuscript  to Petreius in Nuremberg for publication. Back in
315. 32:42Frauenburg, Copernicus was having second thoughts  in Rheticus’s absence. He struggled to fit his
316. 32:48data for the movements of the planet Mercury into  his hypothesis and continued to make amendments to
317. 32:54his manuscript. Nevertheless, Copernicus composed  a letter dedicating his book to Pope Paul III,
318. 33:01which he dispatched to Nuremberg in June  1542. Copernicus admitted to the pontiff
319. 33:07that his book might be ridiculed and explained  that he had been pressured into publication by
320. 33:12his friends. Copernicus explained that the  Ptolemaic system with its eccentric orbits
321. 33:18failed to offer a satisfactory representation  of the perfection and order of God’s creation.
322. 33:24Having rejected the impossibility of the Ptolemaic  model, Copernicus outlined his new hypothesis of a
323. 33:30stationary Sun and a moving Earth and warned that  it could only be understood by intellectuals like
324. 33:36the Pope himself. He concluded by reminding  the Pope of the urgency of reforming the
325. 33:41ecclesiastical calendar and invited the pontiff  and his astronomers to examine his insights.
326. 33:50The publication of Copernicus’s manuscript was  a laborious process that would take several
327. 33:55months. Not only did Petreius have to arrange  for the carving of bespoke woodblocks for the
328. 34:01142 diagrams, but it took time for the ink to dry  on each page. Petreius had agreed to cover all the
329. 34:08costs of the print run of several hundred copies.  The first few sections of the text arrived in
330. 34:14Frauenburg in June 1542 for Copernicus to review.  The author was impressed by the print quality but
331. 34:22could not avoid identifying a few amendments he  wanted Petreius to make. The publisher could not
332. 34:27afford to reprint the pages with the changes,  but added an extra page listing the errors that
333. 34:32Copernicus had identified. Rheticus supervised  the publication in the summer, but in October
334. 34:39he left Nuremberg for Leipzig, where he had been  appointed professor of higher mathematics. Upon
335. 34:44his departure, he asked Andreas Osiander to  supervise the publication. More printed pages
336. 34:51arrived in Frauenburg for review, but Copernicus  was no longer able to do so after suffering a
337. 34:57serious stroke in November 1542 that impaired his  memory and deprived him of his ability to speak.
338. 35:04The previous year, Copernicus had arranged for  his teenage kinsman Jan Loitz of Danzig to serve
339. 35:10as his assistant and presumed successor  to his canonry. Tended by his friend and
340. 35:16colleague Canon Jerzy Donner, Copernicus remained  semi-paralysed over the winter as his condition
341. 35:22gradually declined. Copernicus entered a coma in  early May 1543 and remained asleep on 24 May when
342. 35:30the final pages of his book were delivered  to his house. This included the title page
343. 35:36identifying its author as “Nicolaus Copernicus of  Toruń.” According to legend, as Donner placed the
344. 35:43printed sheets in its author’s hands, Copernicus  briefly opened his eyes before breathing his last,
345. 35:50taking his leave from the earthly realm at  the age of 70. He was subsequently buried
346. 35:55under the cathedral without a grave marker. Over the seven decades of his life, Nicolas
347. 36:03Copernicus of Toruń was known to most of his  acquaintances through his work as a medical doctor
348. 36:09and canon of the Frauenburg Chapter in the diocese  of Warmia. Notwithstanding the salacious rumours
349. 36:16surrounding Copernicus and his housekeeper,  the canon was held in great esteem throughout
350. 36:21Frauenburg and beyond. The older generation  would have remembered his uncle and patron,
351. 36:27Prince-Bishop Lucas Watzenrode, one of the  most distinguished men to hold the office.
352. 36:32Having spent more than a decade studying at  the universities of Krakow, Bologna, and Padua,
353. 36:38Copernicus was well-educated, but he was not  alone among his colleagues in his interest in
354. 36:43astronomy and mathematics. Copernicus’s academic  training served him well as an administrator,
355. 36:50and he regularly held senior appointments,  including the responsibility of governing the
356. 36:55prince-bishopric while the episcopal office was  vacant. His administrative talents even enabled
357. 37:01him to successfully defend Allenstein against  a siege by the Teutonic knights. Yet behind
358. 37:07his official responsibilities, Copernicus  spent years collecting astronomical data
359. 37:12from his own observations and from others, and  diligently performed calculations to trace the
360. 37:18movements of the Sun, the Moon, the Earth,  and the other planetary bodies. His theory
361. 37:23that the Sun was at the centre of the universe,  and that the Earth not only orbited the Sun but
362. 37:28spun around its axis, began circulating  among a small group of intellectually
363. 37:33curious friends from the early 1510s. As  Copernicus continued to work on his proof,
364. 37:40his theories reached the community of astronomers  around Johann Schöner in Nuremberg, and even the
365. 37:45heart of the Catholic Church in Rome. Although  he had completed the manuscript by the 1530s,
366. 37:51he feared ridicule and resisted the repeated  pleas by his friend Tiedemann Giese to publish
367. 37:56his proof. It was up to the young mathematician  Georg Joachim Rheticus to successfully persuade
368. 38:02Copernicus to consent to the publication of  De revolutionibus during his final years.
369. 38:11Copernicus’s friend Tiedemann Giese had  advised him to be prepared to defend his
370. 38:16theory from critics after publishing his magnum  opus. Copernicus’s illness and death prevented
371. 38:23him from doing so, and it was up to Rheticus to  defend his legacy in the first instance. However,
372. 38:29Rheticus was not impressed by the first edition  of De revolutionibus, which was introduced by
373. 38:35an anonymous preface addressed to the reader,  echoing Andreas Osiander’s advice to present
374. 38:40Copernicus’s work not as a definitive proof,  but a plausible hypothesis of the workings of
375. 38:46the universe. Copernicus was in no condition  to object to these words, but the apologetic
376. 38:52introduction had been Osiander’s own, and Rheticus  was infuriated when he saw them in print. Rheticus
377. 38:58had crossed out the preface in the copy he sent to  Giese, who was equally infuriated by the offending
378. 39:04remarks. Rheticus was astonished to see that  although Copernicus had acknowledged Giese and
379. 39:10the late Cardinal Schönberg’s efforts to encourage  his publication, Rheticus’s name did not appear at
380. 39:16all. While Dava Sobel argues that Copernicus chose  not to name the Lutheran professor in a dedication
381. 39:23addressed to the Pope, Jack Repcheck argues it  would have made little difference since Rheticus’s
382. 39:29collaboration with Copernicus was known through  the Narratio prima. In his reply, Giese informed
383. 39:35Rheticus of Copernicus’s demise and apologised for  the absence of Rheticus’s name in the dedication,
384. 39:41which he recognised as an injustice and attributed  to Copernicus’s declining health. In order to
385. 39:48ensure that Rheticus received the recognition he  deserved, Giese advised him to force Petreius to
386. 39:54publish a revised edition that included in  the introduction a biography of Copernicus
387. 39:59that Rheticus had composed in Frauenburg as  well as a brief essay by Rheticus reconciling
388. 40:05the heliocentric system with biblical accounts. While no revised edition appeared, Rheticus sent
389. 40:14the copies of the first edition to friends in  Wittenberg. The Wittenberg astronomers followed
390. 40:19Luther and Melanchthon’s lead in rejecting  heliocentrism but used Copernicus’s data on
391. 40:25the positioning of the planets to compile  more accurate tables of their own. The
392. 40:30Catholic hierarchy was likewise unimpressed by  the Polish clergyman’s claims. After a copy of
393. 40:35De revolutionibus was sent to its dedicatee Pope  Paul III, in 1544 the Dominican friar Giovanni
394. 40:43Maria Tolosani denounced Copernicus and claimed  that he had not offered sufficiently strong proofs
395. 40:49against received wisdom. In 1545, Rheticus went  to Milan to present a copy of Copernicus’s work
396. 40:56to the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano,  but was disappointed when the latter showed
397. 41:02little enthusiasm for the Copernican theory.  After recovering from a severe bout of illness
398. 41:07in 1547, Rheticus hoped to build on Copernicus’s  foundations with his own astronomical research. In
399. 41:151549 he outlined his ambitions in correspondence  to Giese, who had succeeded Dantsicus as bishop
400. 41:21of Warmia two years before his own death in  October 1550. In 1552, Rheticus was expelled
401. 41:28from Leipzig after allegations that he had engaged  in homosexual activities with a young boy. He
402. 41:35eventually found refuge in Krakow but died in 1574  before he could complete his work on trigonometry.
403. 41:42By then, Rheticus’s collaboration with Copernicus  had been formally acknowledged in a second edition
404. 41:48of De revolutionibus that appeared in  Basel in 1566, but he failed to live up
405. 41:54to his promise as Copernicus’s successor. Copernicus’s first great successor was the Danish
406. 42:03astronomer Tycho Brahe, who made his own profound  discovery after observing what he believed was
407. 42:09a new star in 1572, though it was in fact a  supernova caused by the explosion of a dying
408. 42:15star. Brahe admired Copernicus but remained firmly  attached to the concept of a stationary Earth.
409. 42:23He struggled to accept Copernicus’s view that the  stars were millions of miles away from Earth and
410. 42:29instead formulated an alternative model which  accepted that the planets of Mercury, Venus,
411. 42:34Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn orbited the Sun, but  suggested that the Sun itself orbited the Earth,
412. 42:41firmly fixed in the centre of the cosmos.  While Brahe hoped to support his theory
413. 42:46by making more accurate observations, after his  death his data was used by his Bohemian research
414. 42:53assistant Johannes Kepler to provide additional  supporting evidence for the Copernican system.
415. 42:59Kepler maintained Copernicus’s central thesis but  used Brahe’s observations to introduce elliptical
416. 43:06rather than circular orbits to account  for discrepancies. Between 1617 and 1621,
417. 43:13Kepler published the Epitome of Copernican  Astronomy in three volumes, which combined
418. 43:18Copernicus’s heliocentric model with his own  insights. A few years earlier in 1610, the Italian
419. 43:25astronomer Galileo Galilei used his newly improved  telescopes to make observations that encouraged
420. 43:31him to openly support the Copernican system.  Galileo’s promotion of heliocentrism in Italy
421. 43:38prompted renewed attention to De revolutionibus  from the Roman Church. Although Copernicus’s
422. 43:44work had enabled the formulation of the Gregorian  Calendar in 1582, in February 1616, the Catholic
423. 43:52Church officially deemed heliocentrism  a heresy and placed De revolutionibus
424. 43:57in its infamous list of banned books. A third  edition was published in Amsterdam in 1617.
425. 44:07A 1632 treatise by Galileo comparing the  Ptolemaic and Copernican systems entitled
426. 44:14Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems  was immediately deemed heretical and placed on the
427. 44:20prohibited list, leading to a high-profile heresy  trial in 1633 that ensured Galileo’s name was
428. 44:27as connected to the heliocentric theory as that  of Copernicus. While the 20th century Hungarian
429. 44:33writer Arthur Koestler dismissed Copernicus’s De  revolutionibus as “the book that nobody read,”
430. 44:40Owen Gingerich of Harvard University spent  three decades tracking down 277 copies of its
431. 44:47first edition, and 324 of the second, including  those that had been read by Kepler and Galileo.
432. 44:54Gingerich proved that Copernicus’s work was  widely read in European academic circles and
433. 45:01passed down the generations with annotations from  scholars seeking to make sense of Copernicus’s
434. 45:06universe. In 1757, the Catholic Church removed  De revolutionibus and other heliocentric books
435. 45:13from the banned list. With Copernicus cleared  of heresy, statues of him began appearing in
436. 45:19Poland in the 19th century. The Nicolaus  Copernicus Monument in front of the Polish
437. 45:24Academy of Sciences in Warsaw was designed  by the Danish sculptor Berthel Thorvaldsen
438. 45:30and was completed in 1830. In 1853, a monument  was erected in Copernicus’s hometown of Toruń,
439. 45:38then part of the kingdom of Prussia.  In 2004, archaeological excavations in
440. 45:43Frombork uncovered the skeletal remains of a  70-year-old man later confirmed to be those of
441. 45:49Copernicus following DNA analysis. In 2010, these  remains were reinterred under a black tombstone
442. 45:57with a representation of the heliocentric  system that changed not only the world,
443. 46:02but our understanding of the entire universe. What do you think of Nicolaus Copernicus? Should
444. 46:11he be considered one of history’s most  influential scientists for his attempts
445. 46:16to revolutionise humanity’s understanding of  the universe as an amateur astronomer? Could
446. 46:21he have achieved more had he dedicated his  career entirely to intellectual pursuits?
447. 46:27Please let us know in the comment section and in  the meantime, thank you very much for watching.