Finding Copernicus's grave

January 8, 2024 6:27 PM

Copernicus's grave was lost for centuries. An unlikely discovery finally solved the mystery. A team of archaeologists discovered the remains of the 16th-century father of modern astronomy, who was the first to demonstrate that the Earth orbits the Sun.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (23 comments total)

Science!
posted by Windopaene at 6:49 PM on January 8

Revolutionary!
posted by Capt. Renault at 8:37 PM on January 8 [2 favorites]

Wild!
posted by brachiopod at 10:25 PM on January 8

... seminal impetus to the Scientific Revolution, which resulted in knowledge and instruments capable of locating his remains five centuries later.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 11:23 PM on January 8 [1 favorite]

On the one hand, I had no idea he was Polish.

On the other, who was the first to demonstrate that the Earth orbits the Sun.

...was he though? I think this Greek Dude would like a word.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:14 AM on January 9 [5 favorites]

This article is in Polish but offers a facial reconstruction and some photos of the archeological works. It's amazing how his prominent jaw matches the historical portraiture (, 19th century reimaginings and the monument in Warsaw - despite the fact the guy doing the reconstruction was not told whose skull he was working on. Apparently the hair in the book was a bit of a miracle - they were trying to find the grave of Nicholas's brother or descendants of his sister or aunt, but the fact Poland had been looted and partitioned so many times since then made that research impossible, documents were just lost.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 1:17 AM on January 9 [14 favorites]

Back in those days, suggesting that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not the other way round, was religious heresy. To that end, Copernicus didn't have his work published until just before his death. Given that religious fanatics had a habit of digging corpses up and putting them on trial, it would make sense that the location of his remains wasn't made public either.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:19 AM on January 9 [2 favorites]

That's a pretty unfair reading of the response to Copernicus, which was 1) very mild (no serious official action was taken by the church until the Galileo controversy nearly 75 years later) and 2) almost entirely scientific and philosophical in nature - keep in mind his theory was unproven until the invention of powerful enough telescopes in the 1600s. Catholic universities were using Copernicus's works as a textbook within twenty years of his death.

It's obvious now in hindsight but at least from a review of the Wikipedia section on the Copernican theory controversy, the Ptolemaic system explained a great deal of astronomy and without the necessary tools, there was little reason to question it. Hence the skeptical response to Copernican theory as a fact and not a hypothesis.
posted by fortitude25 at 4:29 AM on January 9 [5 favorites]

keep in mind his theory was unproven

It didn't need to be "proven". As with all theories, his provided a model which fit previous observations and allowed predictions to be made re: future positions of planets.

What powerful enough telescopes brought to the table were additional observations (phases of Venus, etc) that couldn't be explained by a geocentric model but did align with a heliocentric one.

In other words, it wasn't that Copernicus' theory was proved as the other theory was dis-proved.

(You can also argue that geocentric model + epicycles was kind of a kludge to explain the retrograde motion of Mars, but I think that did work out at the time, even though it was complicated?)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:04 AM on January 9 [1 favorite]

(I apologize. I think I just reiterated what you just said. I'm a little sleep-deprived at the moment.)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:35 AM on January 9

There's a good summary of the reaction to Copernicus here.

Basically, the planetary model with all its cycles and epicycles was complex enough that people kept the idea of calculating where the planets would be separate from the reality of how the universe worked. Copernicus didn't get in trouble because he provided a simpler method for calculation, only of interest to a few. Galileo got in trouble because he said that was how the world actually worked, which affected everyone.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:43 AM on January 9 [1 favorite]

From Bklyn: On the one hand, I had no idea he was Polish.

This comment inspired me to check to see if the Wikipedia edit war about Copernicus' nationality was still raging, and yes, the latest comment in that particular kerfuffle was just a month ago. Wikipedians have been arguing whether Copernicus was German, Polish or Prussian since 2006. That dispute is old enough to vote. It's the real life version of the dril tweet "'Is Wario A Libertarian' - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,".
posted by Kattullus at 9:18 AM on January 9 [3 favorites]

My great regret is that Orlinski's latest book doesn't have an English translation yet. It's called Copernicus: Revolutions, and technically it starts out as a biography but since we know so little about Copernicus's life before he settled in Frombork, the author just drops all brakes and reimagines him as a secret agent in Renaissance Italy, taking advantage of that very ethnic ambiguity to play all sides while running into all sorts of fun Renaissance people.

(I can buy Polish or Prussian, but Prussia wasn't even German at the time, I could buy a German Prussia in the 17th century at the earliest, in the 15th it was a colonial state under the Teutonic knights. I love the theory that Nicholas's dad came over from Cracow and settled in Torun as a Polish spy - he did finance Torun's insurrection against the Teutons - and mum was from a German-origin family but again with family traditions of "screw the Teutons, the Poles are better for trade".)
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:29 AM on January 9 [1 favorite]

Copernicus didn't get in trouble because he provided a simpler method for calculation, only of interest to a few. Galileo got in trouble because he said that was how the world actually worked, which affected everyone.

Osiander's preface probably went a long way to giving people the false impression that Copernicus didn't mean for his theory to be taken literally and physically. And that he had any doubts about whether it was true (when read literally). Maybe that also saved Copernicus from quick condemnation. I'm not sure anyone really knows. However, De Revolutionibus was put on the Index in 1616 a few generations after Copernicus' death in 1543. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

On March 5, 1616, the work of Copernicus was forbidden by the Congregation of the Index “until corrected”, and in 1620 these corrections were indicated. Nine sentences, by which the heliocentric system was represented as certain, had to be either omitted or changed. This done, the reading of the book was allowed.

Also, probably not true, though widely-believed, that Copernicus' book was not read very much or only mattered to a very small number of people (for which, see Owen Gingerich's excellent book, a kind of literary detective non-fiction on Copernicus: The Book Nobody Read).

The real enemy for Copernicus was Ptolemy's equant. And you can readily see why: it's incredibly ad hoc! (Even the eccentric bothers me on aesthetic grounds, though I guess I could live with it if I had to.)
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 11:35 AM on January 9 [2 favorites]

That's a pretty unfair reading of the response to Copernicus, which was 1) very mild (no serious official action was taken by the church until the Galileo controversy nearly 75 years later) and 2) almost entirely scientific and philosophical in nature

But the Church's response was only mild because Copernicus pre-censored himself to avoid severe punishment. Copernicus included a forward in his book by Osiander stating that his heliocentric model was merely for mathematical convenience, and shouldn't be interpreted as denoting the real positions of the Earth, planets, and sun. You do not have to hand it to the 16th century Catholic Church.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 12:36 PM on January 9

I'm not sure anyone really knows.

It's a pretty reasonable conjecture that if Copernicus had openly identified as a Pythagorean, De Revolutionibus would've been banned, at the least.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 12:47 PM on January 9

The heliocentric model made the math easier. iI had predictive power.
But was it real?
You'd have to accept that we are all spinning 1000 miles per hour right now.
Not to mention revolving about the sun at 60,000 miles per hour at the same time.
So it's a useful mathematical fiction.

Is quantum mechanics real? Or just a useful mathematical fiction.
It has remarkable predictive powers but is it real?
As a famous physicist stated : God does not play dice.

--
I think the idea that it was just a useful bit of fiction, of no real interest interest except for a handful academics makes sense.
Galileo however stated that it was real.
posted by yyz at 1:53 PM on January 9

Galileo however stated that it was real.

But so did Copernicus. In De Revolutionibus. Several times.

I mean, he says that's what he's doing, I think pretty clearly, in Chapter 10. Here's an English rendering by Edward Rosen of an especially clear passage:

Hence I feel no shame in asserting that this whole region engirdled by the moon, and the center of the earth, traverse this grand circle amid the rest of the planets in an annual revolution around the sun. Near the sun is the center of the universe. Moreover, since the sun remains stationary, whatever appears as a motion of the sun is really due rather to the motion of the earth.

I mean, maybe things look different with Osiander's (un-invited) apology in view, but it seems to me by far the simplest, most natural reading of Copernicus' text is as saying literally that the Earth moves in various ways. He explicitly considers arguments against that claim and rejects them. He gives arguments that the Earth does move -- both rotating about its axis and revolving around the sun. He doesn't phrase these arguments in terms of seemings or appearances or as-ifs. He doesn't say that taking the Earth to move merely makes things easier to calculate. Rather, when he appeals to simplicity, as he does, it's as part of an argument that his model is true. And why would he say that he has no shame (in the passage quoted) if he weren't making a claim he took to be literally true? What reason would there be to stand boldly in this way for offering a mere calculational device?
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 3:25 PM on January 9 [5 favorites]

He gives arguments that the Earth does move -- both rotating about its axis and revolving around the sun.

And Earth's third motion, in addition to its rotation and revolution, which also isn't appropriately characterized as a mere calculating tool, at least if it explains the precession of the equinoxes as Copernicus supposed.

Thanks for spelling out several other ways Copernicus isn't a closeted Pythagorean, and Osiander's preface is instrumentalist window-dressing.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 4:52 PM on January 9 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure what to think. That translation seems straightforward. But the Catholics claim that they had no problem with Copernicus (despite banning his book) and Galileo erred because "It wasn’t heliocentrism that upset the Church but rather Galileo’s refusal to admit that his ideas were theories rather than facts not subject to questions or criticism."

If Copernicus's work wasn't "just a theory," then why wasn't it banned immediately just as GalileoI'm was? (I don't know the answer here, I'm just confused why the two were treated differently.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:55 PM on January 9

I don't know the answer here, I'm just confused why the two were treated differently.

Yeah, I don't know either. I've heard and read several suggestions, but I'm not sure any of them are really compelling. And at the end of the day, to answer the question, you would have to know what was in the minds of the people who were in power in the Church, and putting a book on the Index isn't always (or often) a clear, rational exercise. This is why I said earlier that I don't think anyone really knows. I mean, maybe some of it is on traditional lines: Copernicus wrote in Latin, not Italian; Copernicus wasn't as widely read as was Galileo; Copernicus didn't say anything about how to interpret Scripture, but Galileo did; ...

Maybe it came down to Galileo being more obviously aggressive. Maybe it was that Galileo was more of a global threat to Aristotle -- not just to Ptolemy. I suspect a big part of it was just general social and cultural shifts that happened in the second half of the sixteenth century and made the Church more concerned about all those pesky natural philosophers. In any event, Galileo got in trouble a couple of times. But the first time, it's a bit unclear what the driver was -- the Church's concern with Copernicus or the Church's concern with Galileo. Galileo first got himself "on the map" with his telescopic observations reported in Starry Messenger in 1610, but that didn't get him in trouble. He advocated for Copernicanism in his 1613 Letters on Sunspots. Then he got into some controversies about Copernicanism. And then the history is a bit ... muddled.

Maybe Galileo's popular writing brought Coperinicanism enough attention that it was subsequently banned. Or maybe the Church was already looking at Copernicanism as a threat and then objected to Galileo because he was advocating for something already seen as problematic, even if not officially banned. In their SEP entry on Galileo, Machamer and Miller write:

Meanwhile, it had become known that Copernicanism was under scrutiny by Church authorities. Galileo lectured and lobbied against its condemnation, expanding his Letter to Castelli into the widely circulated Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina in 1615 and travelling to Rome late that year. Nevertheless, in March 1616, Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs was suspended (i.e., temporarily censored), pending correction, by the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books. Galileo himself was called to an audience with Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a leading theologian and member of the Roman Inquisition, who admonished him not to teach or defend Copernican theory. (The details of this episode are far from straightforward, and remain disputed even today. See Shea and Artigas 2003; Fantoli 2005.)

In any event, it's not as simple or tidy as "Galileo got banned, so they had to ban Copernicus, too." Nor, I think, is it as simple as "Galileo was a scientific realist, and Copernicus was an instrumentalist."
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 10:34 PM on January 9 [2 favorites]

Copernicus was a Vatican insider and very careful and canny about toeing the line, including only sending his work for printing when he was at the end of his life. And most importantly he was working before the Counter-Reformation, though conscious of the currents that were leading to it. From the council of Trent on, the Church came down hard on everyone challenging its authority in any manner, even related to the scientific theories it promoted.

I know Luther is more famous, but Hus was the one to actually start a revolution in his name in his country in the early 15th century. Because the Church burned him. For Copernicus's dad this would have been a key childhood memory, everyone talking about the news from just across the border - it's 400 km between Cracow and Prague and the Czech religious wars didn't really go away until the remarkable peace of Kutna Hora in 1485 where the Catholic Church basically said "just keep quieter about your theological differences". (Guess why Luther, born in 1483, felt freer to criticise the church and put up his own plaque. To the point he triggered the Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation and further burnings.)

So yeah. If Copernicus's aim was to distribute his science without getting banned or burned, he clearly got away with it for a century.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:22 PM on January 9 [5 favorites]

I agree that the reactions are different primarily because of timing. Copernicus published and died before the Council of Trent and the counter-reformation. Galileo was after. (Also, Copernicus was savvier, but I don't think it was possible to be savvy enough to get away with it in 1610.)
posted by plonkee at 6:19 AM on January 10 [3 favorites]