this series honors Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543)
Listen to the music! ♫ ♪
The music is a languid version of my song "There's a world in your eye," for two harps, bass drum, and a chorus of synthesized kalimbas. Choose a format to play or download: MP3 | MIDI
The quotations are taken from Six Books on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, by Nicholas Copernicus, published in 1543.
In the nine brief chapters of Book VI, Copernicus continued his discussion of the nature of the orbits of the planets, including that of the Earth.
In Copernicus's model, the Earth moves around the sun.
Copernicus stated in Chapter 10 of Book I of Revolutions, that:
"I feel no shame in asserting that this whole region engirdled by the moon, and the center of the earth, traverse this grand circle amid the rest of the planets in an annual revolution around the sun. Near the sun is the center of the universe. Moreover, since the sun remains stationary, whatever appears as a motion of the sun is really due rather to the motion of the earth."
In the Introduction, he stated that:
"[T]he planets' true places are said to be known when their longitude is determined together with their latitudinal deviation from the ecliptic. What the ancient astronomers believed they had demonstrated here too by means of a stationary earth, I shall accomplish perhaps more compactly and more appropriately by assuming that the earth moves."