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Quotes About Copernicus

The Egyptians saw the sun and called him Ra, the Sun God. He rode across the sky in his chariot until it was time to sleep. Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise, and poor Ra lost his divinity.
~ Ashwin Sanghi
What Copernicus dispelled, however, were not myths but other explanations.
~ James P. Carse
But what resounds most deeply in the life of Copernicus is the journey that made knowledge possible and not the knowledge that made the journey successful.
~ James P. Carse
It was not just the Church that resisted the heliocentrism of Copernicus.
~ Tycho Brahe
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. ("Tomorrow")
~ Yevgeny Zamyatin
History of science is a relay race, my painter friend. Copernicus took over his flag from Aristarchus, from Cicero, from Plutarch; and Galileo took that flag over from Copernicus.
~ Mehmet Murat Ildan
In 1543, Polish astronomer and priest Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) put our corner of the universe in order, suggesting that the Sun and not Earth was at the center of our planetary system. The idea contradicted the teachings of the Church, but was eventually proved by Galileo.
~ Robin Kerrod
The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS [coordinate system] could be used with equal justification. The two sentences, "the Sun is at rest and the Earth moves," or "the Sun moves and the Earth is at rest," would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS.
~ Albert Einstein
Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art. Harpur Griffin was just such a man, spurred on by a suspicion, although he could never have expressed it in so many words, that he was just an emptiness with a name.
~ John Connolly
For while Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does NOT stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing that stood fast of the earth—the belief in substance, in matter, in the earth-residuum, and particle-atom: it is the greatest triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on earth.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
privately Galileo thought the condemnation of Copernicus was wrong. "The Bible tells us how to go to Heaven," he once quipped, "not how the heavens go.
~ Arthur Herman
More than any previous work, Galileo's Dialogue showed that if Copernicus wasn't right on every detail of the working of the solar system, Aristotle and Ptolemy were both very clearly wrong. The first printing sold out almost at once.
~ Arthur Herman
There is a strangely consistent parallel between Copernicus' character, and the humble, devious manner in which the Copernican revolution entered through the back door of history, preceded by the apologetic remark: 'Please don't take seriously - it is all meant in fun, for mathematicians only, and highly improbable indeed.
~ Arthur Koestler
A simpler model, however, was proposed in 1514 by a Polish priest, Nicholas Copernicus. (At first, perhaps for fear of being branded a heretic by his church, Copernicus circulated his model anonymously.) His idea was that the sun was stationary at the center and that the earth and the planets moved in circular orbits around the sun.
~ Stephen Hawking
The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus of Geometry [as did Clifford], for geometry is only a part of the vaster domain which he renovated; it might even be just to designate him as a Copernicus of all thought.
~ Eric Temple Bell
But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus.
~ Mary Oliver
Copernicus, gezegenlerin dans?n?n merkezinde dünyan?n de?il, güne?in oldu?unu anlad? ve bunu kan?tlad?. Gezegenimiz di?erleri gibi bir gezegen konumuna geldi.
~ Carlo Rovelli
Looking at the sun going down, the eye of Copernicus had seen the world turning. Looking at a glass of still water, the eyes of Boltzmann saw atoms and molecules frenziedly moving
~ Carlo Rovelli
Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.
~ Mary McCarthy
Copernicus fostered the vision of a multiplicity of worlds and a wider universe, and he revealed it; Buddha beheld the vision of a spiritual world of stainless beauty and perfect peace, and he entered into it.
~ James Allen
Louis Kelso's formula sounds like Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. The whole theory sounds crazy. But, then, one may recall, they said all that of Copernicus too.
~ James J. Kilpatrick
There were at least two possible explanations for the fact that distant stars in all directions seemed to be flying away from us: (1) because we are the center of the universe, something that since the time of Copernicus only our teenage children believe; (2) because the entire metric of the universe was expanding, which meant that everything was stretching out in all directions so that all galaxies were getting farther away from one another.
~ Walter Isaacson
Many consider the publication of this book to be the beginning of the Scientific Revolution.   This has been debated.  However, Copernicus' theory stimulated the astronomical work of some of the most important minds of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, upon which later natural philosophers, including Newton, were able to build modern science.
~ James Weber
Nicolaus Copernicus was the father of the heliocentric model—the belief that the planets revolve around the sun—which ignited a scientific revolution in the 1500s that entirely obliterated the Church's long-held teaching that mankind occupied the center of God's universe. His discovery was condemned by the Church for three centuries, but the damage had been
~ Dan Brown