| The Copernican Revolution was a revolution in ideas, a transformation in man's conception of the universe and of his own relation to it. Again and again this episode in the history of Renaissance thought has been proclaimed an epochal turning point in the intellectual development of Western man. Yet the Revolution turned upon the most obscure and recondite minutiae of astronomical research. How can it have had such significance? What does the phrase "Copernican Revolution" mean? In 1543, Nicholas Copernicus proposed to increase the accuracy and simplicity of astronomical theory by transferring to the sun many astronomical functions previously attributed to the earth. Before his proposal the earth had been the fixed center about which astronomers computed the motions of stars and planets. A century later the sun had, at least in astronomy, replaced the earth as the center of planetary motions, and the earth had lost its unique astronomical status, becoming one of a number of moving planets. Many of modern astronomy's principal achievements depend upon this transposition. A reform in the fundamental concepts of astronomy is therefore the first of the Copernican Revolution's meanings. Astronomical reform is not, however, the Revolution's only meaning. Other radical alterations in man's understanding of nature rapidly followed the publication of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus in 1543. Many of these innovations, which culminated a century and a half later in Newtonian conception of the universe, were unanticipated by-products of Copernicus' astronomical theory. Copernicus suggested the earth's motion in an effort to improve the techniques used in predicting the astronomical positions of celestial bodies. For other sciences his suggestion simply raised new problems, and until these were solved the astronomer's concept of the universe was incompatible with that of other scientists. During the seventeenth century, the reconciliation of these other sciences with Copernican astronomy was an important cause of the general intellectual ferment now known as the scientific revolution. Through the scientific revolution science won the great new role that it has since played in the development of Western society and Western thought. Even its consequences for science do not exhaust the Revolution's meanings. Copernicus lived and worked during a period when rapid changes in political, economic, and intellectual life were preparing the bases of modern European and American civilization. His planetary theory and his associated conception of a sun-centered universe were instrumental in the transition from medieval to modern Western society, because they seemed to affect man's relation to the universe and to God. Initiated as a narrowly technical, highly mathematical revision of classical astronomy, the Copernican theory became one focus for the tremendous controversies in religion, in philosophy, and in social theory, which, during the two centuries following the discovery of America, set the tenor of the modern mind. Men who believed that their terrestrial home was only a planet circulating blindly about one of an infinity of stars evaluated their place in the cosmic scheme quite differently than had their predecessors who saw the earth as the unique and focal center of God's creation. The Copernican Revolution was therefore also part of a transition in Western man's sense of values. ... Because the Copernican theory is in many respects a typical scientific theory, its history can illustrate some of the processes by which scientific concepts evolve and replace their predecessors. In its extrascientific consequences, however, the Copernican theory is not typical: few scientific theories have played so large a role in nonscientific thought. But neither is it unique. In the nineteenth century, Darwin's theory of evolution raised similar extrascientific questions. In our own century, Einstein's relativity theories and Freud's psychoanalytic theories, provide centers for controversies from which may emerge further radical reorientations of Western thought. Freud himself emphasized the parallel effects of Copernicus' discovery that the earth was merely a planet and his own discovery that the unconscious controlled much of human behavior. Whether we have learned their theories or not, we are the intellectual heirs of men like Copernicus and Darwin. Our fundamental thought processes have been reshaped by them, just as the thought of our children or grandchildren will have been reshaped by the work of Einstein and Freud. We need more than an understanding of the internal development of science. We must also understand how a scientist's solution of an apparently petty, highly technical problem can on occasion fundamentally alter men's attitudes toward basic problems of everyday life. | — Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought | Indexes/16 |
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We must also understand how scientists solution is obviously a little trick, highly technical issues, and sometimes radically change the attitude of men basic issues of everyday life.
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