A Short History of Astronomy, Arthur Berry [large screen ebook reader .TXT] 📗

which Hipparchus would have considered very serious. His pupil Rheticus (§ 74) reports an interesting discussion between his master and himself, in which the pupil urged the importance of making observations with all imaginable accuracy; Coppernicus answered that minute accuracy was not to be looked for at that time, and that a rough agreement between theory and observation was all that he could hope to attain. Coppernicus moreover points out in more than one place that the high latitude of Frauenburg and the thickness of the air were so detrimental to good observation that, for example, though he had occasionally been able to see the planet Mercury, he had never been able to observe it properly.

Although he published nothing of importance till towards the end of his life, his reputation as an astronomer and mathematician appears to have been established among experts from the date of his leaving Italy, and to have steadily increased as time went on.

In 1515 he was consulted by a committee appointed by the Lateran Council to consider the reform of the calendar, which had now fallen into some confusion (chapter II., § 22), but he declined to give any advice on the ground that the motions of the sun and moon were as yet too imperfectly known for a satisfactory reform to be possible. A few years later (1524) he wrote an open letter, intended for publication, to one of his Cracow friends, in reply to a tract on precession, in which, after the manner of the time, he used strong language about the errors of his opponent.46

It was meanwhile gradually becoming known that he held the novel doctrine that the earth was in motion and the sun and stars at rest, a doctrine which was sufficiently startling to attract notice outside astronomical circles. About 1531 he had the distinction of being ridiculed on the stage at some popular performance in the neighbourhood; and it is interesting to note (especially in view of the famous persecution of Galilei at Rome a century later) that Luther in his Table Talk frankly described Coppernicus as a fool for holding such opinions, which were obviously contrary to the Bible, and that Melanchthon, perhaps the most learned of the Reformers, added to a somewhat similar criticism a broad hint that such opinions should not be tolerated. Coppernicus appears to have taken no notice of these or similar attacks, and still continued to publish nothing. No observation made later than 1529 occurs in his great book, which seems to have been nearly in its final form by that date; and to about this time belongs an extremely interesting paper, known as the Commentariolus, which contains a short account of his system of the world, with some of the evidence for it, but without any calculations. It was apparently written to be shewn or lent to friends, and was not published; the manuscript disappeared after the death of the author and was only rediscovered in 1878. The Commentariolus was probably the basis of a lecture on the ideas of Coppernicus given in 1533 by one of the Roman astronomers at the request of Pope Clement VII. Three years later Cardinal Schomberg wrote to ask Coppernicus for further information as to his views, the letter showing that the chief features were already pretty accurately known.

74. Similar requests must have been made by others, but his final decision to publish his ideas seems to have been due to the arrival at Frauenburg in 1539 of the enthusiastic young astronomer generally known as Rheticus.47 Born in 1514, he studied astronomy under Schoner at Nürnberg, and was appointed in 1536 to one of the chairs of mathematics created by the influence of Melanchthon at Wittenberg, at that time the chief Protestant University.

Having heard, probably through the Commentariolus, of Coppernicus and his doctrines, he was so much interested in them that he decided to visit the great astronomer at Frauenburg. Coppernicus received him with extreme kindness, and the visit, which was originally intended to last a few days or weeks, extended over nearly two years. Rheticus set to work to study Coppernicus’s manuscript, and wrote within a few weeks of his arrival an extremely interesting and valuable account of it, known as the First Narrative (Prima Narratio), in the form of an open letter to his old master Schoner, a letter which was printed in the following spring and was the first easily accessible account of the new doctrines.48

When Rheticus returned to Wittenberg, towards the end of 1541, he took with him a copy of a purely mathematical section of the great book, and had it printed as a textbook of the subject (Trigonometry); it had probably been already settled that he was to superintend the printing of the complete book itself. Coppernicus, who was now an old man and would naturally feel that his end was approaching, sent the manuscript to his friend Giese, Bishop of Kulm, to do what he pleased with. Giese sent it at once to Rheticus, who made arrangements for having it printed at Nürnberg. Unfortunately Rheticus was not able to see it all through the press, and the work had to be entrusted to Osiander, a Lutheran preacher interested in astronomy. Osiander appears to have been much alarmed at the thought of the disturbance which the heretical ideas of Coppernicus would cause, and added a prefatory note of his own (which he omitted to sign), praising the book in a vulgar way, and declaring (what was quite contrary to the views of the author) that the fundamental principles laid down in it were merely abstract hypotheses convenient for purposes of calculation; he also gave the book the title De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), the last two words of which were probably his own addition. The printing was finished in the winter 1542-3, and the author received a copy of his book on the day of his death (May 24th, 1543), when his memory and mental vigour had already gone.

75. The central idea with which the name of Coppernicus is associated, and which makes the De Revolutionibus one of the most important books in all astronomical literature, by the side of which perhaps only the Almagest and Newton’s Principia (chapter IX., §§ 177 seqq.) can be placed, is that the apparent motions of the celestial bodies are to a great extent not real motions, but are due to the motion of the earth carrying the observer with it. Coppernicus tells us that he had long been struck by the unsatisfactory nature of the current explanations of astronomical observations, and that, while searching in philosophical writings for some better explanation, he had found a reference of Cicero to the opinion of Hicetas that the earth turned round on its axis daily. He found similar views held by other Pythagoreans, while Philolaus and Aristarchus of Samos had also held that the earth not only rotates, but moves bodily round the sun or some other centre (cf. chapter II., § 24). The opinion that the earth is not the sole centre of motion, but that Venus and Mercury revolve round the sun, he found to be an old Egyptian belief, supported also by Martianus Capella, who wrote a compendium of science and philosophy in the 5th or 6th century A.D. A more modern authority, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), a mystic writer who refers to a possible motion of the earth, was ignored or not noticed by Coppernicus. None of the writers here named, with the possible exception of Aristarchus of Samos, to whom Coppernicus apparently paid little attention, presented the opinions quoted as more than vague speculations; none of them gave any substantial reasons for, much less a proof of, their views; and Coppernicus, though he may have been glad, after the fashion of the age, to have the support of recognised authorities, had practically to make a fresh start and elaborate his own evidence for his opinions.

It has sometimes been said that Coppernicus proved what earlier writers had guessed at or suggested; it would perhaps be truer to say that he took up certain floating ideas, which were extremely vague and had never been worked out scientifically, based on them certain definite fundamental principles, and from these principles developed mathematically an astronomical system which he shewed to be at least as capable of explaining the observed celestial motions as any existing variety of the traditional Ptolemaic system. The Coppernican system, as it left the hands of the author, was in fact decidedly superior to its rivals as an explanation of ordinary observations, an advantage which it owed quite as much to the mathematical skill with which it was developed as to its first principles; it was in many respects very much simpler; and it avoided certain fundamental difficulties of the older system. It was however liable to certain serious objections, which were only overcome by fresh evidence which was subsequently brought to light. For the predecessors of Coppernicus there was, apart from variations of minor importance, but one scientific system which made any serious attempt to account for known facts; for his immediate successors there were two, the newer of which would to an impartial mind appear on the whole the more satisfactory, and the further study of the two systems, with a view to the discovery of fresh arguments or fresh observations tending to support the one or the other, was immediately suggested as an inquiry of first-rate importance.

76. The plan of the De Revolutionibus bears a general resemblance to that of the Almagest. In form at least the book is not primarily an argument in favour of the motion of the earth, and it is possible to read much of it without ever noticing the presence of this doctrine.

Coppernicus, like Ptolemy, begins with certain first principles or postulates, but on account of their novelty takes a little more trouble than his predecessor (cf. chapter II., § 47) to make them at once appear probable. With these postulates as a basis he proceeds to develop, by means of elaborate and rather tedious mathematical reasoning, aided here and there by references to observations, detailed schemes of the various celestial motions; and it is by the agreement of these calculations with observations, far more than by the general reasoning given at the beginning, that the various postulates are in effect justified.

His first postulate, that the universe is spherical, is supported by vague and inconclusive reasons similar to those given by Ptolemy and others; for the spherical form of the earth he gives several of the usual valid arguments, one of his proofs for its curvature from east to west being the fact that eclipses visible at one place are not visible at another. A third postulate, that the motions of the celestial bodies are uniform circular motions or are compounded of such motions, is, as might be expected, supported only by reasons of the most unsatisfactory character. He argues, for example, that any want of uniformity in motion

“must arise either from irregularity in the moving power, whether this be within the body or foreign to it, or from some inequality of the body in revolution.... Both of which things the intellect shrinks from with horror, it being unworthy to hold such a view about bodies which are constituted in the most perfect order.”

77. The discussion of the possibility that the earth may move, and may even have more than one motion, then follows, and is more satisfactory though by no means conclusive. Coppernicus has a firm grasp of the principle, which Aristotle had also enunciated, sometimes known as that of relative motion, which he