Mikolaj Kopernik

Everyone, that is, except Mikolaj Kopernik, a Polish physician and astronomer, whose name had been Latinized as was the custom, to Nicolaus Copernicus. After years of observing the skies with a primitive telescope and consulting mathematical tables which he had copies at the University of Krakow, Copernicus had reached the conclusion -- which at first seemed absurd, even to him -- that the earth was actually ‘moving’. In 1514 he showed friends a short manuscript, ‘De hypothesibus motuum coelestium a se consitutis commentariolus’ [Little commentary), challenging that ancient Ptolemaic assumptions, and this was followed by a fuller ’De revolutionibus orbium coelestium [On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs), in which he concluded that the earth, far from being center of the universe, merely rotated on its own axis and orbited around a stationary sun once a year. - Page 89