On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres

What Hacker News says

1. akkartikSep 2014
   "Gingerich has examined nearly every extant first- and second-edition copy—six hundred in all—of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres."

   That is a fascinating book; part history of science, part detective story and part bibliophile's wet dream: http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Nobody-Read-Revolutions/dp/B0...

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2. OlognMay 2022
   On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was not published until a month before Copernicus died.

   On the Origin of Species was not published until 1859 - Darwin had the basic ideas down in 1839, but did not start thinking to publish until Alfred Russel Wallace started to publish in the mid/late 1850s, which is probably what pushed him into finally publishing. Also, Darwin only alluded to humans in the work, and didn't publish the Descent of Man until 1871.

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3. KeyshSep 2019
   That the church rejected heliocentrism because it clashed with scripture is a common misinterpretation.

   No, it's the simple truth, as the Church and other documents from the time attest.

   Galileo's model did not match the observations of the time

   Galileo did not have his own model of the heavens; he was a proponent of Copernicus's heliocentric model, which gave predictions approximately as accurate (or inaccurate) as those of the Ptolemaic model. Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus, however, did render the Ptolemaic model untenable, as most astronomers admitted once they had confirmed Galileo's observations themselves. After that, the debate was between heliocentrism and various neo-geocentric models, like Tycho Brahe's.

   Galileo may well have offended the Pope with the character of Simplicius, but that character appeared in the book Dialog Concerning the Two World Systems, which was published in 1632. Copernicus's De Revolutionibus was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, along with other heliocentric texts, 16 years earlier, in 1616. (This was also the time of the Inquisition's first investigation of Galileo, for promulgating doctrines contrary to scripture.)

   The official Church decree of 5 March 1616 read, in part: "This Holy Congregation has also learned about the spreading and acceptance by many of the false Pythagorean doctrine, altogether contrary to the Holy Scripture, that the earth moves and the sun is motionless, which is also taught by Nicholaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and by Diego de Zuñiga's On Job. This may be seen from a certain letter published by a certain Carmelite Father, whose title is Letter of the Reverend Father Paolo Foscarini, on the Pythagorean and Copernican Opinion of the Earth's Motion and Sun's Rest and on the New Pythagorean World System (Naples: Lazzaro Scoriggio, 1615), in which the said Father tries to show that the above-mentioned doctrine of the sun's rest at the center of the world and the earth's motion is consonant with the truth and does not contradict Holy Scripture. Therefore, in order that this opinion may not creep any further to the prejudice of Catholic truth, the Congregation has decided that the books by Nicolaus Copernicus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) and Diego de Zuñiga (On Job) be suspended until corrected; but that the book of the Carmelite Father Paolo Antonio Foscarini be completely prohibited and condemned; and that all other books which teach the same be likewise prohibited..."

   ("Corrected" in this case means with their heliocentric content censored.)

   See the following for more of the background: http://copernicus.torun.pl/en/revolution/reception/2/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989JHA....20....1W/abstra...

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4. ijkFeb 2015
   There's a record of Luther dismissing Copernicus, or at least geocentrism, though it's from four years before On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published:

   "So it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing that others esteem. He must do something of his own. This is what that fellow does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down."

   But that's pretty mild for Luther. If he wasn't using scatalogical references, his heart wasn't really in it. We only know about it because many of Luther's casual conversations were recorded; he was literally complaining about it at the dinner table.

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