James Baquet

    At one point in European history, the use of Latin names was commonplace. While the use of this lingua franca smoothed communications between countries, it also hid the national identities of numerous famous people. Where was Desiderius Erasmus from, for instance? (Holland) Or Carolus Linnaeus? (Sweden)

    This has resulted in the fact that few people realize that the great astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was in fact born in Poland, with the name Mikolaj Kopernik.

    Copernicus was the youngest of four children. He was the son and grandson of merchants. His brother was a monk, and one sister was a nun; the other sister married another merchant. Although Copernicus never married — in fact, he was also a type of monk — he took care of his married sister’s five children after she passed away.

    But it is for his brainchild that he is best remembered. For Copernicus is one of those rare individuals who — like Ptolemy, Newton, and Einstein — single-handedly changed our understanding of the universe.

    His great work, “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies,” set out the heliocentric theory of the solar system — that is, the idea that the planets such as Mars, Jupiter, and so on, circle around the sun. This replaced Ptolemy’s geocentric system which since antiquity had put the earth at the center.

    Naturally, this caused a revolution in scientific thinking, but the revolution was slow in coming. The book was not a big seller. It was too technical for most people to understand, and those who did understand it tried to portray it as merely theoretical, a fiction that did not represent reality. This was mainly to protect Copernicus from charges of heresy. Although the Church never banned the book, they did suspend sale until Copernicus “corrected” it by deleting passages calling heliocentrism a certainty, changing it to a mere “hypothesis.”

    Nevertheless, the solar system we inhabit today is decidedly Copernican. Everything from navigation on the seas to launching probes into space depends on the foundations laid by this revolutionary astronomer.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. invention or discovery

    2. something 100 percent sure

    3. ancient times

    4. the science of guiding something like a ship or an airplane

    5. by oneself

    6. live in

    7. a language used for communication between people of different language groups

    8. a scientific “guess”

    9. ideas against the official view of a church