Copernicus was wrong - but you already know that!
Fri 19 Sept
|Institute of Astronomy
For this year's Michael Penston lecture, Dr Piers Bursill-Hall, will be enlightening us on Copernicus and his work. As is usual, we will be taking a collection at the meeting to contribute to the RAS Michael Penston fund to support up and coming early career astronomers
Time & Location
19 Sept 2025, 20:00 – 21:30
Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Rd, Cambridge CB3 0HA, UK
About The Event
You will have been taught that Copernicus’ de Revolutionibus (1543) finally overcame millennia of superstition and bad science, and proposed a model of the solar system with the Sun at the centre: heliocentricity overthrew the age-old incorrect model of geocentricity, therefore incurring the ire of the Catholic Church, and ushering in the Scientific Revolution and - in effect – the origins of modern science. Unfortunately, everything in the previous sentence is incorrect (except that yes, geocentricity goes back a long way). And no, nobody thought the earth was flat.
Copernicus gave two models of the solar system, both were completely inadequate to contemporary eyes, and are completely wrong to modern eyes: a qualitative physical model (the famous onion skin nested spheres), and a heliocentric version of Ptolemy’s reasonably accurate mathematical model, with the sun fixed at the centre instead of the earth fixed at the centre. However, the physical model…