FEBRUARY 19

Born on this date in 1473 was one of the greats in science, Nicolaus Copernicus. This son of a Pole wrote the epochal book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (that's Latin, my friends, for On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) . Good old Copernicus had figured out that the Earth was not the center of the universe with all the other stars and planets moving around it. He put forth scientifically for the first time that the Earth was moving in an orbit around the Sun and he used mathematical proofs to show that it was possible. Though he began developing the theory in the 1520's, his book was not published until the year of his death, 1543. The Catholic Church called the book heresy many years later because they thought it contradicted the Bible. His work is now considered the beginning of modern Astronomy.
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