How did nicolas copernicus know the planets revolve around the sun?
Although I have read parts of his (very complicated and detailed) article, he didn’t lay out the steps as we learn them. Very few people do this in scientific articles, although the steps are there implicitly. With an earth-centered solar system, explaining the paths of the planets across the sky was very complicated. Some planets wobbled around and changed direction, others showed regularly for awhile but then disappeared without warning. But by placing the sun at the center, and the earth and all the planets revolving around the sun but at different distances from the sun, and the moon around us, he found that very simple mathematics could explain all of the observed paths. The simplest answer was correct, an idea called “parsimony.
