Topic summary
Copernican Revolution
Opponents:Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Tommaso Caccini, Pope Paul V, Cardinal Bellarmine, Pope Urban VIII, Vincenzo Maculani, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Pope Alexander VII
Copernican Revolution is a phrase with different meanings in different contexts. In astronomy, the phrase refers to the transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism. For Christianity and Western culture, it may instead refer to the dismantling of the human-centric medieval cosmology and its cultural consequences. In physical cosmology, the phrase may be used to refer to the emergence and formalization of the Copernican principle that humans are not privileged observers of the universe. Within the philosophy of science, the Copernican Revolution is the first historic example of a paradigm shift in science. Finally, the phrase is sometimes used by English speakers as a metaphor for any radical intellectual upheaval that fundamentally reorders or reshapes our understanding of the world.
The Copernican Revolution is named for the Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who in the 16th century proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Driven by a desire for a more perfect (i.e. circular) description of the cosmos than the prevailing Ptolemaic model — which posited that the Sun circled a stationary Earth — Copernicus instead advanced a heliostatic model where a stationary Sun was located near, though not precisely at, the center of the heavens.