Nicolaus Copernicus Quotes
For when a ship is floating calmly along, the sailors see its motion mirrored in everything outside, while on the other hand they suppose that they are stationary, together with everything on board. In the same way, the motion of the earth can unquestionably produce the impression that the entire universe is rotating.
Copernicus, Nicolaus. On the Revolutions. Translated by Edward Rosen, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p. 16.
He was the first known person who realized that the earth revolved rapidly about its own axis—which few believed in his day and into modern times until Copernicus (See {590327}). Intuitively, most people assumed that if the earth were spinning, the people and things would fly off. Most ancients believed that the earth was stationary and the heavens were moving because they could see the stars move.
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance-era mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.
