Copernican Revolution

Motion of the Sun (yellow), Earth (blue), and Mars (red). At left, Copernicus's heliocentric motion. At right, traditional geocentric motion, including the retrograde motion of Mars. For simplicity, Mars's period of revolution is depicted as 2 years instead of 1.88, and orbits are depicted as perfectly circular or epitrochoid.

The term "Copernican Revolution" was coined by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1781 work Critique of Pure Reason. It was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth stationary at the center of the universe, to the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. This revolution consisted of two phases; the first being extremely mathematical in nature and beginning with the 1543 publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, and the second phase starting in 1610 with the publication of a pamphlet by Galileo.[1] Contributions to the "revolution" continued until finally ending with Isaac Newton's 1687 work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.[2]

  1. ^ Gillies, Donald (2019-04-10), Why did the Copernican revolution take place in Europe rather than China?, retrieved 2019-12-03
  2. ^ Smith, George (2007). "Isaac Newton". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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