Nicolaus Copernicus (19.02.1473-24.05.1543) was an outstanding Polish astronomer and the creator of the heliocentric system of the world. He was born in Toruń. He studied at the University of Kraków (1491—95) and at universities in Italy. In 1503 he returned to Poland and was secretary and physician to his uncle, Bishop Watzenrode, after whose death he settled in Frombork.
Copernicus rejected Ptolemy's geocentric system of the world, generally accepted at that time, according to which the Earth is the central body of the Universe while the Sun, all the planets and the sphere of the fixed stars revolve around it, and he created a new, heliocentric system of the world, according to which the Earth, like the other planets, revolves around the Sun, and the apparent daily movement of the celestial vault is merely a consequence of the rotation of the Earth about its axis. The new system of the world revealed the nature of the apparent movements of the planets, deriving them from the simplest motions of the celestial bodies around the Sun and from the rotation of the Earth on which the observer stands. This was not a simple replacement of one scheme of the structure of the planetary system by another. Established truths that were held to be self-evident had to be “broken”. Foremost among such ideas was the postulate that the Earth is motionless, and that the complex character of the planetary motions is something given from on high and not subject to explanation. The idea of the central position of man in nature had to be abandoned. Finally, it was necessary to come out against the centuries-old authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy, and against the church as well, which had canonised the old system of the world and made it a component part of its world view. This was a scientific feat that destroyed the foundations of the medieval religious world view, freed science from theology and scholasticism and led to a revolution in natural science.
Copernicus set out his system of the world, on which he worked for more than 30 years, in the work “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”, published in the year of his death. In 1616 the book was banned by the Catholic Church, but the new ideas made their way irresistibly. Copernicus's discovery gave natural science the impetus to move along a new path.