DARE TO DREAM BIG!: From Inquiring Scientist to Founding Father of Astronomy

Imagine This: For centuries everyone has believed that the sun and all the planets revolve around the earth. But you have studied all the old books and by studying astronomy and the heavens, you have concluded that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the solar system and that the earth and all the other planets revolve around the sun. Your theory is so radical that you are hesitant to even tell others about it.

 You're born in 1473 in Torun, Poland, the youngest of four children. Your father dies when you're ten years old, and your mother's brother steps in to help the family.

You attend the University of Krakow in Poland where you study mathematics, optics, and perspective. You then continue your study of both astrology and astronomy at the University of Bologna in Italy. After Bologna, you attend the University of Padua where you concentrate on medicine.

After you finish your education at age thirty, you return to Poland where you serve your uncle as his personal physician and secretary for the next several years.

When your day's duties are done, you spend your nights studying the heavens, and you notice things that don't make sense to you.

The astronomy books you've studied were written by ancient Greek philosophers and scientists such as Ptolemy who believed the earth was the center of the universe and that the other planets and the sun revolved around it.

But you disagree! You believe that the sun is the center of the universe and that the earth is just another planet that revolves around it.

You work on your theory your entire life, but you know that for such a revolutionary theory to be accepted, you will need to have mathematical details.

So you write a book explaining your heliocentric theory (that the sun is the center of the universe and that all the heavenly bodies, including the earth, revolve around it). You begin your book around 1515 and finish most of it around 1530, but you continue to revise it for years afterward.

Your findings go against the teachings of Aristotle and Ptolemy and the classical astronomical view that the earth is the center of the universe which people have believed for 1400 years. If your theory is correct, then that means the church is wrong, and the church refuses to believe that it's wrong.

In 1543, you finally publish your astronomical findings in your book On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres which is often now regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the beginning of the scientific revolution.

That same year you also suffer a stroke which leaves your right side paralyzed. You live just long enough to see your completed work on the day you die on May 24, 1543, at the age of seventy.

Although initially your beliefs are denounced and ridiculed, scientists with more advanced instruments and telescopes will later prove that the earth does indeed revolve around the sun.

Many of our modern advances in science would not have been possible without your heliocentric theory which is why you're considered to be the founding father of modern astronomy.

"To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do

not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."

 Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)

 Excerpted from They Stood Alone!: 25 Men and Women Who Made a Difference by Sandra McLeod Humphrey

For More about Copernicus:

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/scien...

Giving Back: Copernicus spent his entire life developing and refining a view of the universe that was in opposition to the established beliefs of his day.

Did You Know that during this period of history, the Church was so powerful that it could imprison in dungeons, inhumanely torture, and kill by burning or hanging anyone who disagreed with their teachings?

 Something to Think about: Why do you think Copernicus took such a risk to publish his astronomical findings when he knew the possible consequences of his actions?

Willoughby and I hope you enjoyed this week's true story and will be back next week for another story to inspire you to DARE TO DREAM BIG!