God placed the Earth at the center of the universe. In his book ‘De revolutionibus orbium coelestium’, Copernicus placed the Sun, not the Earth, at the center. Copernicus changed the world. 500 years ago he proved god wrong.
Taslima Nasreen
No Country for Women - Humanism, Secularism, Feminism
Thanks for the Gem like recollections!
Happy Budday Sir ji. .. grateful to you that you discovered the truth and atleast some of us could get emancipated from GOD’s shadow.
You know the best thing that happened after knowing that GOD does not exist? I don’t have to take bath in cold water every morning to perform puja like others do. 😛
Dear Taslima !
🙂 Bangladesh is going to come round soon . Very soon we will be able to make Bangladesh fit for you !
Ha ha ha . Liked your comment very much . God — hah , a useless idea to rule the world, the powerful helping hand to support capitalism.
Thank You Yajna.
Genuinly put :). Copernicus was lucky in some way. God’s protectors could not put him on trial as the book was published on the day he died. But poor Galileo paid a lot by following him, even almost hundred years after Copernicus’ death. Why does the Omnipotent always need saviors.
Good grief! Copernicus did not invent heliocentrism; he revived it. Aristarchus of Samos first proposed it about 2250 years ago. As to geocentrism, it’s the first thing that one would think of when considering the motions of the planets, so I would not be too hard on geocentrism.
However, he did good work, and his revival of heliocentrism was a success, even if a rather slow one. His calculations did not get a much better fit than Ptolemy’s, and the Earth moving around the Sun did not fit Aristotle’s physics very well. But his works were widely circulated. About 70 years later, when Johannes Kepler corrected some mistakes in Copernicus’s mathematics, he exclaimed “Copernicus did not know his own riches!” Around then, Galileo built some telescopes and he saw sights that nobody had seen before. Mountains on the Moon. Spots on the Sun. Phases of Venus. Moons of Jupiter. Something or other around Saturn. Stars, stars, stars!
As to Copernicus and the Catholic Church, he didn’t provoke much hostility. HIs good friend Osiander wrote a preface for his great book stating that it was purely hypothetical and speculative: “only a theory”. “We all know that the Sun moves around the Earth, but if the Earth moves around the Sun…” Galileo tried to get the Church to consider heliocentrism to be more than “only a theory”, and he’d argue that the Holy Spirit tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. But he pissed off certain important people, and the Church declared heliocentrism a no-no and made him recant.
BTW, today’s Google doodle is a heliocentric-cosmology depiction.