from ÒGlobal Mind Change
by
Willis Harman (1988, pp.5-8)
Once upon a time there was a merchant's son named Nicolaus Copernicus who lived in small city in Poland. He was a student of law and medicine and mathematics. While still in his twenties he was internationally eminent as a lecturer in mathematics. Most of all, however, he was fascinated by the mathematical intricacies of astronomy....
(The story is familiar to everyone. It is retold here because of its contemporary relevance. Why did the Copernican ideas have such reverberations throughout all of Western Europe? How were such powerful transformational forces set in motion? Suppose a similar transformation were underway todayÑwould we recognize the signs?)
Copernicus did not intend a
heresy, let alone a "revolution".
He was a canon and lawyer at the Cathedral of Frauenberg, the northernmost
Catholic diocese in Poland; however
he actually devoted much of his time to astronomical studies. As these studies
progressed, he became increasingly dissatisfied with the prevailing theoretical
system, that of the Alexandrian scholar
Ptolemy. This interpretation of the heavens
had become firmly entrenched in astronomical thought, virtually as an article
of faith, having been used and taught for 14 centuries.
It was essentially geocentric, with the firmament a vast spherical crystalline shell revolving around the spherical Earth, and additional mechanisms supporting the Sun, Moon, and planets. The scheme involved an elaborate system of basic circular orbits with superimposed circular motions, called epicycles, added as necessary to account for observed irregularities in the motions of the planets.
As observations had become progressively more accurate, more epicycles had to beadded, and the whole system had become very unwieldy; it was increasingly difficult to use it for predicting future positions of the heavenly bodies.
Copernicus was a competent Greek scholar, and poring over ancient Greek writings he foundthat some of them had proposed a heliocentric model. In this view the apparent motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets were accounted for by imagining the Earth to rotate daily on its axis, and to revolve around the stationary Sun once a year.
At first blush this idea of the
Earth moving around the Sun seemed absurd, but when Copernicus applied it to
his data (retaining, however, the concept of uniform circular motions) he found
the result was aesthetically superior and the model somewhat simpler, when
compared with the Ptolemaic system.
At first he only circulated the new ideas quietly among his friends. Meanwhile he developed his argument further with diagrams and mathematical computations. In order to have his model fit astronomical observations he found it necessary to add in numerous complications. In the end, Copernicus' scheme was more elegant than Ptolemy's, but not particularly simpler. (It was Johannes Kepler, a contemporary of Galileo, who later added the notion of elliptical orbits, and formulated the descriptive laws of planetary motion in a far simpler form.)
After three decades of gestation, Copernicus' book On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres was finally published in the year of his death, 1543; a second edition was printed in 1566, and by the end of the century it was well distributed inboth Protestant and Catholic countries of Western Europe.
His work not only offered an
alternative system to the Ptolemaic, on several points it was in direct
conflict with the venerated ideas of Aristotle.
For instance, Aristotle had argued for the fixity of the Earth, and had taught that bodies fall to the ground because that is their "natural place"Ñcloser to the center of the universe. If Copernicus was right, a new explanation for the behavior of falling bodies was clearly needed, since the Earth no longer held a singular position. (The re-examination of this matter eventually led to Newton's concept of universal gravitation.)
Throughout Western Christendom Aristotle's doctrines had become elevated almost to the level of religious dogma. To some, the new ideas of Copernicus amounted to heresy. To others, however, who had found the Aristotelian dogma stifling of intellectual development, the break with traditional doctrines actually added to the attractiveness of the Copernican theory.
(For example, in his Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World [1632], Galileo argues pointedly, through discussion between fictional characters, that it is most reasonable that the Earth moves and is not the center of the universe, and hence Aristotle's whole cosmology is baseless. The feeble defense of Aristotle is left to true-believer Simplicius, whose loyalist arguments are mercilessly attacked.)
The implications of Copernicus' ideas went much farther, however. The dethronement of earth from the center of the universe caused profound shock
No longer was the Earth the
site of all change and decay with the changeless universe encompassing it.
And the belief in a correspondence between man,
the microcosm, as a mirror of the surrounding universe, the macrocosm, was no
longer valid. Actually, the implication was that man might not have such a special place in creation after all.
The Copernican ideas became one focus of tremendous controversies in religion, philosophy, and social theory, which set the tenor of the modern mind; they catalyzed a major transition in Western values.
In truth, the Copernican
revolution amounted to a successful challenge to the entire system of ancient
authority, requiring a complete change in the philosophical conception of the
universe.
It was heresy on the grand scale. Ultimately the
"scientific heresy" prevailed, and we now look back on it as an unqualifiedly
positive evolutionary step.
Today we know that the
transformation in thought which is
symbolized by the Copernican episode reached far outside astronomical and
philosophical debate; it was part of an even broader transformation, involving
the whole way of looking at the worldÑthe transformation that we now call the
"scientific revolution".
The revolutionaries saw themselves
as attacking the traditional ways of thinking and educating. The heresy was
directed at the authority system known as Scholasticism.
Scholasticism assumed a living world created and guided by God for man's
benefit. Its understandings were largely arrived at by citing authorities,
either philosophical or scriptural. The
primary function of this knowledge was to rationalize sense experience in
harmony with revealed religion. In contrast, the
new way was empirical: What is true is what is found by scientific inquiry to
be true. Ultimate authority resides in observation and experiment rather than
tradition.
Thus in 1600 an educated man (most educated persons were men) knew that the Earth was the center of the cosmosÑthe seat of change, decay, and Christian redemptionÑwhile above it circled the planets and stars, themselves pure and unchanging but moved by some sort of intelligent or divine spirits and also signaling and influencing human events by their locations and aspects.
A hundred years later this man's equally Christian descendant, say, his great-grandson, knew (unless he lived in a church-controlled Catholic country)that the Earth was but one of many planets orbiting around one of many stars, moving through and separated by unimaginable distancesÑall still under the overall guidance of God, but with an important difference. The outlook ofthe first individual was teleological: The universe is alive and imbued with purpose; all creatures are part of a Great Chain of Being, with man between the angels and the lower animals; events are explained by divine purpose or by their function in a meaningful world.
To his great grandson, by contrast, it is essentially a dead universe, constructed and set in motion by the Creator, with subsequent events accounted for by mechanical forces and lawful behaviors.
The great-grandfather, as a
reasonable man, would accept the overwhelming evidence for the working of
enchantments, the occurrence of miracles, the existence of witches and other
beings with supernatural powers; his
descendant, with equal certainty, would dismiss all those stories as the
results of charlatanry and delusion.
The scientific revolution amounted to a new way of seeking and validating knowledge. Knowledge was no longer to be regarded as the established property of a priesthood; it was to be sought in open inquiry, and validated in public by agreed-upon means. Authority was to be sought in experience, rather than orthodoxy.
Gradually the role of Providence was transferred to the "natural laws" whereby God was thought to operate. Rather than resulting from the "grace" of Divine intervention, change was increasingly thought of as" evolution" and "stages of advancement" and "material progress". The development of the scientific method (effectively articulated by Francis Bacon) was to bring about creation of vast accumulations of knowledge, and the eventual application of that knowledge to manipulation of the physical environmentÑto the presumed betterment of man's condition on Earth. Progress in the arts and sciences became linked with material well-being and spiritual fulfillmentÑon Earth, rather than at some future time in Heaven.