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Copernicus’s precise objections to Ptolemy are not known, but sometime around 1510 he wrote an unpublished manuscript called the Commentariolus in which he expressed his dissatisfaction with the model. ‘I often considered whether there could perhaps be found a more reasonable arrangement of circles, from which every apparent irregularity would be derived while everything in itself would move uniformly, as is required by the rule of perfect motion.’

The Commentariolus contained a list of radical and mostly correct assertions. Copernicus wrote that the Moon revolves around the Earth, the planets rotate around the Sun, and the distance from the Earth to the Sun is an insignificant fraction of the distance to the stars. He was the first to suggest that the Earth rotates on its axis, and that this rotation is responsible for the daily motion of the Sun and stars across the sky. He also understood that the retrograde motion of the planets is due to the motion of the Earth and not the planets themselves. Copernicus always intended Commentariolus to be the introduction to a much larger work, and included little if any detail about how he had come upon such a radical departure from classical ideas. The full justification for and description of his new cosmology took him a further 20 years, but by 1539 he had finished most of his six-volume De revolutionibus, although the completed books were not published until 1543. They contained the mathematical elaborations of his heliocentric model, an analysis of the precession of the equinoxes, the orbit of the Moon, and a catalogue of the stars, and are rightly regarded as foundational works in the development of modern science. They were widely read in universities across Europe and admired for the accuracy of the astronomical predictions contained within. It is interesting to note, however, that the intellectual turmoil caused by our relegation from the centre of all things still coloured the view of many of the great scientific names of the age. Tycho Brahe, the greatest astronomical observer before the invention of the telescope, referred to Copernicus as a second Ptolemy (which was meant as a compliment), but didn’t accept the Sun-centred solar system model in its entirety, partly because he perceived it to be in contradiction with the Bible, but partly because it does seem obvious that the Earth is at rest. This is not a trivial objection to a Copernican solar system, and a truly modern understanding of precisely what ‘at rest’ and ‘moving’ mean requires Einstein’s theories of relativity – which we will get to later! Even Copernicus himself was clear that the Sun still rested at the centre of the universe. But as the seventeenth century wore on, precision observations greatly improved due to the invention of the telescope and an increasingly mature application of mathematics to describe the data, and led a host of astronomers and mathematicians – including Johannes Kepler, Galileo and ultimately Isaac Newton – towards an understanding of the workings of the solar system. This theory is good enough even today to send space probes to the outer planets with absolute precision.