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

83. Coppernicus devotes the first eleven chapters of the first book to this preliminary sketch of his system; the remainder of this book he fills with some mathematical propositions and tables, which, as previously mentioned (§ 74), had already been separately printed by Rheticus. The second book contains chiefly a number of the usual results relating to the celestial sphere and its apparent daily motion, treated much as by earlier writers, but with greater mathematical skill. Incidentally Coppernicus gives his measurement of the obliquity of the ecliptic, and infers from a comparison with earlier observations that the obliquity had decreased, which was in fact the case, though to a much less extent than his imperfect observations indicated. The book ends with a catalogue of stars, which is Ptolemy’s catalogue, occasionally corrected by fresh observations, and rearranged so as to avoid the effects of precession.53 When, as frequently happened, the Greek and Latin versions of the Almagest gave, owing to copyists’ or printers’ errors, different results, Coppernicus appears to have followed sometimes the Latin and sometimes the Greek version, without in general attempting to ascertain by fresh observations which was right.

84. The third book begins with an elaborate discussion of the precession of the equinoxes (chapter II., § 42). From a comparison of results obtained by Timocharis, by later Greek astronomers, and by Albategnius, Coppernicus infers that the amount of precession has varied, but that its average value is 50″·2 annually (almost exactly the true value), and accepts accordingly Tabit ben Korra’s unhappy suggestion of the trepidation (chapter III., § 58). An examination of the data used by Coppernicus shews that the erroneous or fraudulent observations of Ptolemy (chapter II., § 50) are chiefly responsible for the perpetuation of this mistake.

Of much more interest than the detailed discussion of trepidation and of geometrical schemes for representing it is the interpretation of precession as the result of a motion of the earth’s axis. Precession was originally recognised by Hipparchus as a motion of the celestial equator, in which its inclination to the ecliptic was sensibly unchanged. Now the ideas of Coppernicus make the celestial equator dependent on the equator of the earth, and hence on its axis; it is in fact a great circle of the celestial sphere which is always perpendicular to the axis about which the earth rotates daily. Hence precession, on the theory of Coppernicus, arises from a slow motion of the axis of the earth, which moves so as always to remain inclined at the same angle to the ecliptic, and to return to its original position after a period of about 26,000 years (since a motion of 50″·2 annually is equivalent to 360° or a complete circuit in that period); in other words, the earth’s axis has a slow conical motion, the central line (or axis) of the cone being at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic.

85. Precession being dealt with, the greater part of the remainder of the third book is devoted to a discussion in detail of the apparent annual motion of the sun round the earth, corresponding to the real annual motion of the earth round the sun. The geometrical theory of the Almagest was capable of being immediately applied to the new system, and Coppernicus, like Ptolemy, uses an eccentric. He makes the calculations afresh, arrives at a smaller and more accurate value of the eccentricity (about 1∕31 instead of 1∕24), fixes the position of the apogee and perigee (chapter II., § 39), or rather of the equivalent aphelion and perihelion (i.e. the points in the earth’s orbit where it is respectively farthest from and nearest to the sun), and thus verifies Albategnius’s discovery (chapter III., § 59) of the motion of the line of apses. The theory of the earth’s motion is worked out in some detail, and tables are given whereby the apparent place of the sun at any time can be easily computed.

The fourth book deals with the theory of the moon. As has been already noticed, the moon was the only celestial body the position of which in the universe was substantially unchanged by Coppernicus, and it might hence have been expected that little alteration would have been required in the traditional theory. Actually, however, there is scarcely any part of the subject in which Coppernicus did more to diminish the discrepancies between theory and observation. He rejects Ptolemy’s equant (chapter II., § 51), partly on the ground that it produces an irregular motion unsuitable for the heavenly bodies, partly on the more substantial ground that, as already pointed out (chapter II., § 48), Ptolemy’s theory makes the apparent size of the moon at times twice as great as at others. By an arrangement of epicycles Coppernicus succeeded in representing the chief irregularities in the moon’s motion, including evection, but without Ptolemy’s prosneusis (chapter II., § 48) or Abul Wafa’s inequality (chapter III., § 60), while he made the changes in the moon’s distance, and consequently in its apparent size, not very much greater than those which actually take place, the difference being imperceptible by the rough methods of observation which he used.54

In discussing the distances and sizes of the sun and moon Coppernicus follows Ptolemy closely (chapter II., § 49; cf. also fig. 20); he arrives at substantially the same estimate of the distance of the moon, but makes the sun’s distance 1,500 times the earth’s radius, thus improving to some extent on the traditional estimate, which was based on Ptolemy’s. He also develops in some detail the effect of parallax on the apparent place of the moon, and the variations in the apparent size, owing to the variations in distance: and the book ends with a discussion of eclipses.

86. The last two books (V. and VI.) deal at length with the motion of the planets.

In the cases of Mercury and Venus, Ptolemy’s explanation of the motion could with little difficulty be rearranged so as to fit the ideas of Coppernicus. We have seen (chapter II., § 51) that, minor irregularities being ignored, the motion of either of these planets could be represented by means of an epicycle moving on a deferent, the centre of the epicycle being always in the direction of the sun, the ratio of the sizes of the epicycle and deferent being fixed, but the actual dimensions being practically arbitrary. Ptolemy preferred on the whole to regard the epicycles of both these planets as lying between the earth and the sun. The idea of making the sun a centre of motion having once been accepted, it was an obvious simplification to make the centre of the epicycle not merely lie in the direction of the sun, but actually be the sun. In fact, if the planet in question revolved round the sun at the proper distance and at the proper rate, the same appearances would be produced as by Ptolemy’s epicycle and deferent, the path of the planet round the sun replacing the epicycle, and the apparent path of the sun round the earth (or the path of the earth round the sun) replacing the deferent.