What was the Copernican Revolution?
Note: Watch a video version of this page and the next page: Video 8 (Legacy, 9:26 mins) The Copernican idea that the Earth moves as a planet sparked a revolution in physics. Widespread adoption of the Copernican system required a thorough revision of physics, which Galileo completed in his Discorsi, published 80 years after Copernicus’ De revolutionibus. Once Newton unified the terrestrial physics of Galileo with the celestial mechanics of Kepler’s laws, Copernicus became a symbol of a Scientific Revolution, a complete overthrow of Aristotelian physics and cosmology. (Figure 1) (Figure 2) (Figure 3) (Figure 4) (Figure 5) Still, direct observational proof of the motion of the Earth was hard to find. The first direct evidence of the annual revolution of the Earth came in 1725, when James Bradley detected stellar aberration, a shifting of light from distant stars. Stellar parallax was not confirmed until 1827, when Wilhelm Bessel found a shift in the position of double star 61 Cygni. The
