Nicolaus Copernicus- Биография ученого на английском.
February 19, 1473 - May 24, 1543
Nicolaus Copernicus was the first astronomer to formulate a scientifically-based heliocentric cosmology that displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. His epochal book, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" - On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres - is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the Scientific Revolution.
Publication of De Revolutionibus
Although Greek, Indian and Muslim savants had published heliocentric hypotheses centuries before Copernicus, his publication of a scientific theory of heliocentrism, demonstrating that the motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting the Earth at rest in the center of the universe, stimulated further scientific investigations and became a landmark in the history of modern science that is known as the Copernican Revolution. Among the great polymaths of the Renaissance, Copernicus was a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classical scholar, translator, Catholic cleric, jurist, governor, military leader, diplomat and economist. Among his many responsibilities, astronomy figured as little more than an avocation - yet it was in that field that he made his mark upon the world.
Copernicus proposed that the planets have the Sun as the fixed point to which their motions are to be referred; that the Earth is a planet which, besides orbiting the Sun annually, also turns once daily on its own axis; and that very slow, long-term changes in the direction of this axis account for the precession of the equinoxes.
This representation of the heavens is usually called the heliocentric, or "Sun-centred," system--derived from the Greek helios, meaning "Sun." Copernicus's theory had important consequences for later thinkers of the scientific revolution, including such major figures as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton.