Suns of Anarchy

The other Renaissance hellraisers who put the Sun at the heart of the solar system

Nicolaus Copernicus 1473-1543

It was his support for Copernicus’ theories that caused so much controversy for Galileo. Copernicus’ model of the universe placed the Sun at the centre rather than Earth and it was therefore at odds with geocentrism. He did not publish his findings, On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, until the last year of his life, fearful of the criticism and religious objections he would face. Judging from the punishment Galileo faced decades later, Copernicus was right to be concerned.

Tycho Brahe 1546-1601

Brahe’s model of the universe was a balancing affair. Combining the mathematical aspects of the Copernican model with the philosophical aspects of Ptolemy’s, Brahe created the Tychonic system. While he agreed that the Moon and Sun orbited the Earth, his model persisted with the theory that the

Earth remained in the centre. It was an acceptable system during the Galileo affair as it explained Galileo’s observations of Venus while supporting geocentrism. Brahe was one of the last astronomers to make his observations without a telescope.

Johannes Kepler 1571-1630

In 1596, Kepler created an outstanding defence of Copernicanism with his astronomical book Mysterium Cosmographicum. A spiritual man, he attempted to show that the Scriptures could support heliocentrism rather than geocentrism – and he tried to use the Ptolemaic model to demonstrate this. Kepler became Tycho Brahe’s assistant, with Brahe influencing Kepler’s work and his heliocentric laws of planetary motion. When Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius, Kepler supported his findings and made his own telescopic observations with the Keplerian telescope, which he invented in 1611.

Sir Isaac Newton 1643-1727

Using Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Sir Isaac Newton developed his laws of motion and law of universal gravitation in his work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687. This finally confirmed that heliocentrism, not geocentrism, was the correct model of the universe – eight decades after Galileo’s death. Newton may have read Galileo’s work as a student at Cambridge University, supplementing the teachings of Aristotle, which were still being taught largely as fact. Just like Galileo and Kepler, Newton built his own telescope, creating the world’s first reflecting telescope.