Copernicus sensed how shocking his proposal would seem to some readers. On the Revolutions begins with a dedication to Pope Paul III. He writes: “Some people, as soon as they find out about this book I have written on the revolutions of the universal spheres, in which I ascribe a kind of motion to the earthly globe, will clamor to have me and my opinions shouted down.”
Among his concerns: The heliocentric model appeared to challenge what the Bible said about the workings of the cosmos. (A passage in the Book of Joshua, for example, seems to describe the Sun moving around Earth.) Copernicus wanted no part of such controversies and successfully avoided conflict; Galileo, in the next century, would not be so lucky. The Italian thinker famously provoked the ire of the Roman Catholic Church over his endorsement of the Copernican view by saying the Bible was open to interpretation and needn’t conflict with what science had revealed about the heavens. That irked Church authorities, who felt he was encroaching on their intellectual turf. Galileo was tried for heresy and placed under house arrest. Some of his writings, along with Copernicus’ book, were banned.
Copernicus fared much better, never suffering directly for his beliefs. Nonetheless, he waited decades before allowing his work to be published. In fact, On the Revolutions might never have seen the light of day, had not a young German mathematician and clergyman, Georg Joachim Rheticus, paid a visit to Copernicus in Frombork in 1539. Rheticus encouraged Copernicus to complete his manuscript and oversaw its publication. The encounter and subsequent friendship between Rheticus and Copernicus forms the heart of Sobel’s stage play, And the Sun Stood Still.
When On the Revolutions was eventually published in 1543, it contained a preface added by a Lutheran clergyman named Andreas Osiander. The preface urged readers to treat the idea of a Sun-centered system as a mathematical convenience rather than a literal description of the cosmos. We know that Copernicus never intended such a disclaimer because a surviving manuscript of the book, written in Copernicus’ own hand, contains a very different preface, explains Jacek Partyka, a classics scholar and translator at the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków. (That manuscript is the library’s most prized possession.) Partyka points out that even the title of the book was altered for publication, adding the phrase orbium coelestium, or “heavenly spheres,” thus putting the emphasis on the heavens rather than Earth and avoiding the vexing issue of Earth’s motion.
The idea that our world was a planet hurtling through space was still controversial, Partyka says: “To most philosophers or scientists at that time, it would have been unthinkable.” According to legend, Copernicus was presented with a copy of the published book as he lay on his deathbed; he is believed to have died of a stroke soon afterward. Partyka is only half-joking when he suggests that seeing the changes to the book might have been the last straw. “If I was Copernicus, and I had seen this, I probably would have had a stroke, too,” he says.