Until the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus publicly announced in 1543 that Earth was not immobile at the center of the universe but actually revolved around the sun, medieval Europeans had relied on a 2,500-year-old model of the universe that was fundamental to Christian theology—that the universe consisted of a set of concentric spheres with the Earth at its center but bobbing slightly off-center in a sphere of water, “like an apple in a basin,” and that beyond the outer limits of this universe lay a realm of pure abstraction, or God. Acknowledged as “the mother of all paradigm shifts,” this theory of Copernicus dismantled the prevailing major religious dogma and ushered in the beginnings of modern thought about the universe.
But in an article in the October 11, 2009 issue of the
Boston Globe, its correspondent Toby Lester writes that Copernicus developed his revolutionary idea not so much by focusing on the heavens but on the contours of Earth itself. Indeed, Lester says, Copernicus came up with his idea of a heliocentric cosmos after a careful study of what is known today as the Waldseemüller map of 1507. That map depicted for the first time the new lands across the oceans that were discovered by Columbus and other early explorers, and from that map Copernicus was able to distill the answer to the fundamental problem with the prevailing theory of the universe: “If the cosmos did indeed consist of a set of spheres with the earth at its center, then why wasn’t the earth completely submerged in the sphere of water that surrounded it? Why was there any exposed land at all?”
Read Toby Lester’s “A World Redrawn” in the Boston Globe now! Read the text of Nicholas Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (On the Revolutions)
