February 19

Nicolaus Copernicus was born on the 19th in 1473. As I am certain you know, he became a bit of a big shot in the field of astronomy. His book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, generally referred to as On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), was first printed in 1543 in Nuremberg. In that book, as Dava Sobel points out in her book Galileo’s Daughter, Copernicus, goes out of his way to do his bit to make our solar system just a bit more relaxed (page 50). Sobel points out that Copernicus “saved the enormous Sun the trouble of traipsing all the way around the smaller earth from morning till evening. Likewise the vast distant realm of the stars could now lie still, instead of having to wheel overhead even more rapidly than the Sun every single day.” Wasn’t that a very considerate thing for Copernicus to have done?