Nicolaus Copernicus

1473-1543 Astronomer/Scientist

By Richard E. Noble

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polack in denial. It seems that he would rather have been a German. But there is no recorded historical documentation confirming the notion that Copernicus ever roamed about the streets of his hometown, Thorn on the Vistula, telling dumb Polack jokes. Whether he was proud of it or not, he was born in Polish territory to a Polish father who was, himself, born in Cracow. For some reason none of the biographies that I’ve read seem to want to mention his mother. I’ll bet she was Jewish and nobody wants to admit it.
Nicolaus was obviously a lazy S.O.B. who didn’t want to get a real job. He spent most of his life sucking a free education out of the Roman Catholic Church. He went to school for about twenty-seven damn years. First he studied mathematics, then astronomy, and finally he got off the pot and became a doctor. I’ll bet his mom and dad were happy - though they were probably dead by that time.
Nicolaus, besides being a lazy screw-off who didn’t want to work and sucked up one scholarship after another for his FREE perpetual education, wasn’t really much of a hero either. He had discovered, early on in his free education in math and astronomy that the earth wasn’t really the center of the universe. He figured out, that the earth was actually moving on it axis and in orbit around the sun. So, does he tell anybody about it? Hell no. He sits on the darn information until he is just about to croak. Why? Because he was afraid to get locked in his room for life or get his little tootsies toasted by the Pope and the Inquisition.
It seems that the Church had declared that this guy named Ptolemy who had compiled a book that he called The Almagest, which he basically gleaned and plagiarized from nearly everybody in the scientific world who came before him, was the sole authority on the subject. Ptolemy’s notion that the earth didn’t move and everything else did, supposedly confirmed some story in the Bible. Since the Bible was the revealed word of God Ptolemy had to be right and everybody else wrong. Ptolemy’s version of the universe, or at least our little part of it, had Jupiter and Mars doing hook shots and fast breaks to the right and the left all about the heavens. Nobody at the time had a problem with this because, as many people still contend today, if that’s the way God wants it to be, that is the way it will be, by golly. Copernicus used his trigonometry and his geometry and his astronomy to point out that if the earth were really moving, all of these planetary shenanigans would be logically explainable and confirmable mathematically.
Well, Copernicus got his “De revolutionibus” published on his death bed in 1543 and in just a few short years later, 1838 or so, the Catholic Church finally agreed with him. I don’t know about you, but that certainly gives me hope with regards to the Catholic point of view on birth control, abortion, and pedophilia.
Copernicus was a “liberal”. Worse than that, he was a “humanist°. And the conservative/republicans of his day have Anna Schillings to prove it. What did a sixty five year old, like Copernicus, need a pretty, little, twenty year old housekeeper like Anna for, anyway? Why, it’s Bill Clinton all over again, Yogi. Besides, Copernicus stole most of what he had to say from Plato, Philalaus, and Aristarchus. Liberals, they’re all the same.