Nicholas Copernicus
In the post-middle ages, not every people agreed with the geocentric model which Ptolemy has proposed. The Church was very strong at this time and they supported the geocentric view for centuries so no one was able to disagree with them. During the Middle Ages, many people were burned because they have been spreading unconventional ideas. He lived from 1473 to 1543 and was born to a wealthy family in Poland. He was interested about astronomy and so he was considered Poland’s premier astronomer. Scientists believed that the Earth was fixed at the center of the universe and surrounded by several rotating spheres which were the planets, Sun and Moon. Copernicus proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the Solar System. This statement was called the heliocentric system. He convinced that the Earth was also a planet. Since he categorized as a planet, he also believed that Earth was rotation like the other planets. Then, he made a new model with the Sun in the middle. In this new ordering of his statement, the Earth is in the third outward from the Sun, and the Moon is in orbit around the Earth, not the Sun. The stars are distant objects that do not revolve around the Sun. Also he assumed that the Earth rotate once in 24 hours. However this change caused much unrest among the authorities. Copernicus was a perfectionist plus he didn’t like the public spotlight. Maybe he was afraid that his statement would upset the Catholic Church. As a result, he did not officially publish his new model, demanded that he felt it required further study.