Children's Nonfiction Science & Technology
Nicolaus Copernicus
Making the Earth a Planet
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Initial publish date
- May 2004
- Category
- Science & Technology
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780195161731
- Publish Date
- May 2004
- List Price
- $55.00
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Description
Born in Poland in 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus launched a quiet revolution. No scientist so radically transformed our understanding of our place in the universe as this curious bishop's doctor and church official. In his quest to discover a beautiful and coherent system to describe the motions of the planets, Copernicus placed the sun in the center of the system and made the earth a planet traveling around the sun. Today it is hard to imagine our solar system any other way, but for his time Copernicus's idea was earthshaking. In 1616 the church banned his book Revolutions because it contradicted the accepted notion that God placed Earth in the center of the universe. Even though those who knew of his work considered his idea dangerous, Revolutions remained of interest only to other scientists for many years. It took almost two hundred years for his concept of a sun-centered system to reach the general public. None the less, what Copernicus set out in his remarkable text truly revolutionized science. For this, Copernicus, a quiet doctor who made a tremendous leap of imagination, is considered the father of the Scientific Revolution.
About the authors
Contributor Notes
Owen Gingerich is at Harvard University. James MacLachlan is at Ryerson Polytech Institute, Toronto (Emeritus).
Editorial Reviews
"Numerous diagrams illustrate the concepts; additional art includes woodcuts, details from period books and paintings, and photographs.... A valuable resource."--School Library Journal
"Contains many interesting details on the life of a scientist and mathematician who, working in obscurity in a remote part of Poland, revised a world view that had prevailed for the previous 1500 years. It provides great support and enrichment for a topic that is included in most middle and secondary school curricula."--NSTA Recommends
"Insightful perspective on an era in science history when planets were assumed to be embedded in crystalline spheres and scholars struggled poignantly to explain inconsistencies in the earth-centric paradigm."--Booklist
