Some of his measurements were accurate to half an arc minute, which is especially admirable given that they were all made before the advent of the telescope. Although Brahe's observations revealed the flaws of the current system, he did not embrace Nicolaus Copernicus' newly proposed sun-...
Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish astronomer who proposed that the Sun is the center of the solar system and that the planets circle the Sun. Copernicus also noted that Earth turns once daily on its own axis and that very slow long-term changes in the directio
The intellectual and political edifice ofChristianity, seemingly impregnable in theMiddle Ages, fell in turn to the assaults made on it byhumanism, theRenaissance, and theProtestantReformation. Humanism bred the experimentalscienceofFrancis Bacon,Nicolaus Copernicus, andGalileoand the mathematical investigat...
SinceNicolaus Copernicus(1473–1543) established his heliocentric model of the universe, the stars have provided a fixedframe of reference, relative to which the plane of the equator slowly shifts—a phenomenon referred to as theprecession of the equinoxes, a wobbling of Earth’s axis of ...