The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

by Tamim Ansary

The towering luminaries associated with the origins of science were not scientists. They couldn’t be, since no such thing existed yet. The trailblazers of science were men of the church, one and all. Take Copernicus, for example, the fifteenth-century astronomer who solved the growing incoherence of the Ptolemaic star charts with a bold new theory: he proposed that the sun stood still and everything else, including Earth, revolved around it. The author of this seminal restructuring of the cosmos lived his whole life nestled in the warm embrace of Mother Church. Copernicus was a famous academic of his time, and he held a doctorate in, yes, canon law. When he wrote a book describing his heliocentric theory, his admiring readers included the pope. Copernicus had a pupil named Kepler, another giant of early science. Kepler was also a devout man of the church. He labored to complete the work Copernicus had begun because, in the spirit of the scholastics—men of the church, one and all—he thought God’s creation must reflect God’s perfection, and there were still a few discrepancies in his master’s heliocentric model.