Earth is the center of the universe.

 

 I stand outside on a clear night.  I look up to the stars and wonder on all the universe beholds.  I see the stars move through the heavens each year.  Once a month, the moon goes through its phases of waxing and waning.  Everyday the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.  It is clear that the earth  is the center of the universe.  It all appears to revolve around our planet. This is what Roman Catholic believes.

We must remember “Copernicus Nicholaus”

He was a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a heliocentric model of the universe which placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center. Unfortunately, out of fear that his ideas might get him into trouble with the church, Copernicus delayed publication of them.  In 1539, Copernicus took on Rheticus as a student and handed over his manuscript to him to write a popularization of the heliocentric theory, published as Narratio Prima in 1540. Shortly before his death, Rheticus convinced Copernicus to allow publication of his original manuscript, and De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published in 1543. Copernicus proposed his theory as a true description, not just a theory to save appearances. Unlike Buridan and Oresme, he did not think that any theory which saved appearances was valid, instead believing that there could only be a single true theory.

It took the accurate observational work of Brahe, the exhaustive mathematics of Kepler, and the mathematical genius of Newton to take Copernicus's theory as a starting point, and glean from it the underlying truths and laws governing celestial mechanics. Copernicus was an important player in the development of these theories, but his work would likely have likely remained in relative obscurity without the observational work of Brahe. It would have been discarded by the wayside, until subsequent investigation brought it back to light. It is likely, in fact, that given Kepler would have independently arrived at a heliocentric theory just in the process of interpreting Brahe's data, and the scientific revolution would have been born anyway. To a large extent, then, Copernicus has achieved his prominent place in history through what amounted to a lucky, albeit shrewd, guess.

It is therefore more appropriate to view Copernicus's achievements as a preliminary step towards scientific revolution, rather than a revolution in itself.

Sharif