The man who moved Earth out of the center

On February 19, 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Torun, a city on the Vistula River in north-central Poland. A true polymath, he trained in canon law and medicine and served as a cathedral administrator, yet his lasting fame came from astronomy pursued largely in his spare hours.

For more than a thousand years, European thought had placed a motionless Earth at the center of everything. Sometime between 1507 and 1515, Copernicus began circulating a radical alternative: the Sun sits near the center, while Earth spins daily on its axis and circles the Sun once a year.

Cautious about controversy, he held back his great book until the very end of his life.

His masterwork, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), appeared in 1543, the year he died. It helped ignite the Scientific Revolution and reshaped humanity’s place in the universe.