Customer Reviews

Nicolaus Copernicus

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The only brief account, using understandable modern terminology, of what Ptolemy and Copernicus really did. Epicycles are just data anaylsis (Fourier series), they don't imply any underlying theory of mechanics (Mainzer got this wrong!). Copernicus did not prove that the earth moves, he made the equivalent of a coordinate transformation and showed that an earth-centered system and a sun-centered system describe the data with about the same number of epicycles. For the reader who wants to understand the history of ideas of motion, this is the only book aside from Barbour's far more exhaustive treatment.

This is a small book but has great insight into the subject matter. I found the last chapter especially helpful. Because of the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment and yet the positive result of the Michelson-Gale experiment, it is about time the geocentric view point was given greater respect. The Tyconic system might be closer to reality after all.

What makes Sir Fred Hoyle's work on Nicolaus Copernicus so interesting is that it does not despise the old Ptolemaic theory of a geocentric universe. "Indeed Copernicus had to struggle long and hard over many years before he equaled Ptolemy, and in the end the Copernican theory did not greatly surpass that of Ptolemy" ( P. 3 ) Hoyle points out in many places throughout this work, that in pure terms of kinematic models, it is immaterial whether one uses the heliocentric or geocentric forms of representation.
Hoyle gives a brief account of Copernicus' personal life in Chapter II. He traces Copernicus' career from his birth in Silesia in 1473 to his death in Frauenburg in 1543. The development of Copernicus' heliocentric model is carefully investigated from the first publication "Commentariolus" to its culmination in "de revolutionibus".
In the other two chapters of the book, Hoyle examines in mathematical terms the heliocentric theory of Aristarchus and the Copernican and Ptolemaic models of the solar system. In the epilogue, which looks at the two models with respect to the 20th century, Hoyle states that one cannot say that the "....Copernican theory is `right' and the Ptolemaic theory `wrong'....". It is simply that using the Ptolemaic model rather than the Copernican one would have been futile within any desire to make scientific progress.