Paragraph on “Importance of  Copernicus” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12

Importance of  Copernicus

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries men in Europe began to look at ideas that had been accepted since the time of the Greeks and to re-examine them. We call this great upsurge in thinking, the Renaissance.

Nicolas Copernicus was born in Poland in 1473. He became a Roman Catholic cleric and was particularly interested in astronomy. After carefully observing the planets and calculating their movements, he discoverec newer and simpler ways of explaining their motions. He realised that the Moon travelled round the Earth, but he came to believe that the Earth, and the rest of the planets, travelled round the Sun. He still thought that all the heavenly bodies travelled round the Sun in perfect circles and he continued to believe in a sphere of fixed stars. This idea of the Universe is called the heliocentric or Sun-centred theory, with the Sun at the centre of the Universe.

Because his ideas were so new, Copernicus delayed publication of his book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) until he was dying because he was disturbed at what the reactions of the church authorities might be. They held that the Earth must stand still and it was to be a long time before they changed their minds. His book is so important because it formed the basis of all the new thinking about astronomy that was to take place in the next two hundred years.