The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought by Thomas S. Kuhn

The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought Reviews

• 
  Ted

  Probably a 4.5, made up of a 5 when I first read it (almost 40 years ago) and a 4 when I reread it much more recently. I don't think the book changed, but there is evidence that I did.
  
  Kuhn is one of the thinkers of the History and Philosophy of Science that has written very famous books in both branches of that discipline. This is his contribution to the historical branch, while The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is his very influential (and thus also controversial) contribution to the philosophical branch.
  
  This is a book definitely worth reading from the "history of ideas" shelf of your mental library.
  
  
  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
  Previous review:
  The Plague Camus
  Random review:
  The Kingdom
  Next review:
  Death at La Fenice
  
  Previous library review:
  Newton’s Principia
  Next library review:
  Climate Change Impacts in the U.S. Highlights of report
• 
  Roy Lotz

  There are few phrases more annoying or more effective than “I told you so.”

  
  This is my second encounter with Thomas Kuhn, and again I emerge deeply impressed. To do justice to an event so multifaceted as the Copernican Revolution a scholar must have a flexible mind; and Kuhn is fully equal to the task. He moves seamlessly from scientific data, to philosophical analysis, to historical context, and then back again. The result is a book that serves as an admirable introduction to the basics of astronomy and a thorough overview of the Copernican Revolution, while raising intriguing questions about the nature of scientific progress.
  
  Kuhn first makes an essential point: that the conceptual schemes of science serve both a logical and a psychological function. Their logical function is to economically organize the data (in this case, the position and movement of heavenly objects); their psychological function is to make people feel at home in the universe. Belief is only necessary for this second function. A scientist can use a conceptual scheme perfectly well without believing that it represents how the universe ‘truly is’; but people have an obvious and, apparently, near-universal need to understand their place in, and relation to, the cosmos. Thus, scientists throughout history have insisted on the truth of their systems, despite the history science being littered with the refuse of abandoned theories (to use Kuhn’s expression). Even if this belief cannot be justified philosophically, however, it does provide a powerful emotional impetus to scientific activity.
  
  Another question Kuhn raises is when and why scientists decide that an old paradigm is unsustainable and a new one is required. For centuries astronomers in the Muslim and Western worlds worked within the basic approach laid down by Ptolemy, hoping that small adjustments could finally remove the slight errors inherent in the system. During this time, the flexibility of the Ptolemaic approach—allowing for fine-tuning in deferents, equants, and epicycles—was seen as one of its strengths. Besides, the Ptolemaic astronomy was fully integrated within the wider Aristotelian science of the age; and this science blended perfectly with common everyday notions. The fact that the Ptolemaic science broke down is attributable as much, or more, to factors external to the science as to those internal to it. Specifically, with the Renaissance came the rediscovery of Neoplatonism, with its emphasis on mathematical harmonies—something absent from Aristotelianism—as well as its strain of sun-worship.
  
  Copernicus was one of those affected by the new current of Neoplatonism; and it is this, Kuhn argues, that ultimately made him dissatisfied with the Ptolemaic system and apt to place the sun at the center of his system. We often hear of science progressing as a result of new experiments and empirical discoveries; but no such novel observation played a role in Copernicus’s innovation. Rather, the source of Copernicus’s rejection of an earth-centered universe was its inability to explain why the planets’ orbits are related to the sun’s. His system answered that question. But this was only an aesthetic improvement. It did not lead to more accurate predictions—the essential task of astronomy—and, indeed, it did not even lead to more efficient calculations. The oft-reproduced image of the Copernican universe, consisting of seven concentric circles, is a simplification; his actual system used dozens of circles and was cumbersome and difficult to use.
  
  But the most puzzling feature of Copernicus’s innovation is that it achieves qualitative simplification at the expense of rendering it completely incompatible with the wider worldview. Aristotelian physics cannot explain why a person would not fly off of a moving earth. And, indeed, the entire cosmological picture, such as that painted so convincingly by Dante, ceases to make sense in a Copernican universe. For centuries people had understood the earth as a midpoint between the fires of hell and the perfect heavens above. Now, hell was only metaphorically “below” and heaven only metaphorically “above.” Besides that, the universe had to be expanded to mystifying proportions; the earth became only a small and unimportant speck in an unimaginably vast space. Strangely, however, Copernicus seemed blind to most of these consequences of his innovation. A specialist concerned only with creating a harmonious system, his attempt to render it physically plausible or theologically palatable is, at best, half-hearted.
  
  This leads to the irony that one of the greatest intellectual revolutions in history started with a man concerned with technical minutiae inaccessible to the vast majority of the public, who had access to no fundamentally new data, whose system was neither more accurate nor more efficient than its predecessor, and whose main concern was qualitative harmoniousness. Copernicus was no radical and had no notion of upsetting the established authority; he himself would likely have been appalled at the Newtonian universe that was the end result of this process.
  
  Yet this simple innovation, once proposed, had ripple effects. Though the earth’s motion was near universally rejected as a fact, its use in a serious astronomical work kept it alive as an option. And this new option could not be laughed away when, in the next generation under Tycho Brahe, better observations and novel phenomena upset the Ptolemaic world order. The heavens could no longer be seen as perfect and unchanging when Brahe proved that supernovae and comets do not exhibit a parallax (as in, they do not to change location when the observer moves), and thus could not be atmospheric phenomena. Further, Brahe’s unprecedentedly accurate observations of the planets were incompatible with any Ptolemaic system. This seems to be one of many cases in the history of science when novel observations followed, rather than preceded, a theoretical innovation.
  
  Granted, this incongruence led Brahe to propose his own earth-centered system, the Tychonic, rather than adopt a sun-centered universe. But this new system used Copernican mathematics, and embodied the Copernican harmonies. In any case it is hard to see how the Tychonic system could ever have been anything but a stopgap, since the jump from Ptolemy to Brahe was scarcely easier than the jump from Ptolemy to Copernicus. Besides, it struck many as dynamically implausible that everything in the universe would orbit the sun except the earth and the moon.
  
  Kepler and Galileo were among those unconvinced by the Tychonic system. The two very different men were both of an independent turn of mind, and their work finally made the Copernican universe unequivocally superior. Kepler particularly made the decisive step with his three laws: that planets orbit in ellipses with the sun at a foci, that they sweep out equal areas in equal times, and that they orbit the sun in a ratio of the 3/2 power (the orbital axis to the orbital time). But in Kepler we find further ironies. Far from the dispassionate lover of truth, Kepler was a Neoplatonic mystic, bursting with occult hypotheses. Many parts of his work strike the modern reader as scarcely more rational than the ravings of a conspiracy theorist. Yet the hard core of Kepler’s astronomical work lifted Copernicanism into a league of its own for accuracy of prediction and efficiency of calculation. If the orbits of the planets were related to the sun in such simple, elegant ways, it was difficult to see how earth could be at the center of it all.
  
  This is my best attempt at summarizing the most salient points of the book. But of course there is far more in here, most of it worthwhile. I particularly enjoyed Kuhn’s chapter on the oft-ignored medieval research into physics, such as the impetus theory in the work of Nicole Oresme. The only weak point of the book was the rather brief epilogue to Copernicus. In particular, I would have appreciated an entire chapter devoted to Newton, since it was his Principia that was, in Kuhn’s phrase, the “capstone” of the revolution. But on the whole I think this is a superlative book, serious yet accessible, informative while brief. Kuhn captures the reality of scientific progress, which is far less neat that we may like to believe. Most striking is how a revolution which was guided by many extra-logical considerations—the Neoplatonic belief in celestial harmonies, the desire for mathematical elegance, the weakening of the religious worldview, the need to feel at home in the universe—fueled a process which, taken as a whole, resulted in a science definitively better than the Ptolemaic system it replaced.
  
  Kuhn makes no mistake about this. Here is what the reputed relativist has to say:
  

  The last two and one-half centuries have proved that the conception of the universe which emerged from the Revolution was a far more powerful intellectual tool than the universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy. The scientific cosmology evolved by seventeenth-century scientists and the concepts of space, force, and matter that underlay it, accounted for both celestial and terrestrial motions with a precision undreamed of in antiquity. In addition, they guided many novel and immensely fruitful research programs, disclosing a host of previously unsuspected natural phenomena and revealing order in fields of experience that had been intractable to men governed by the ancient world view.
• 
  Graeme Rodaughan

  An extremely accessible book on the Copernican revolution.
  
  From Wiki:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coperni...
  

  "Copernicus removed Earth from the center of the universe, set the heavenly bodies in rotation around the Sun, and introduced Earth's daily rotation on its axis."

  
  And, that certainly set the cat amongst the pigeons. I still think that many in our modern civilization hanker for a world in which humanity, and each one of us is - at the center of the universe. (The lust for significance is strong within our modern culture.)
  
  This paradigm shift was only equaled by Darwin and Einstein.
  
  This book has had a profound impact on my own thinking about how any culture evolves (or stagnates) over time. This book is indispensable if you want to understand human culture and society.
• 
  Katie

  Oh man, this book is wonderful. I'm a bit biased: it manages to touch on pretty much everything that I like and weave them together in a way that's fascinating and compelling. While I'm not a scientist myself - a pretty intense aversion to math when I was in high school turned me away from that - I absolutely love science and think it's fascinating, so anytime I come across a history of science book I always feel like I'm in a for a bit of a treat. Unfortunately, it can occasionally be difficult to find books that manage to be both good science books and good history books. This one does.
  
  Kuhn is probably most famous for
  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book I may have to go back and look at again. I remember reading it and thinking that he had a really good idea, but squandered a bit of it by making his work much more impenetrable than it needed to be. Now I'm thinking that may have been on me, though, because this work is beautifully written and persistently clear in its narrative. Kuhn takes a look at the Copernican Revolution and asks two main questions: why did it take so long to occur? And why did it ever occur at all? Kuhn provides an answer that I found really convincing and compelling, drawing on not only the traditional scientific developments leading up the 15th century but also the wider cultural changes that were occurring, from the Protestant Reformation to the resurgence of Neoplatonism.
  
  Also, as if he needed to win my heart over even more, Kuhn manages to offer a fair and sensitive assessment of medieval science and its role leading up to Copernicus. Yay!
• 
  Andrew

  Whereas The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book of bold claims about the very nature of science itself, The Copernican Revolution is a much humbler effort-- the account of one revolution, and how it came to pass, and how the ideas of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton all intersected in early modern Europe. While his follow-up to The Copernican Revolution attempted to rephrase philosophical terms, this is a more of a straightforward piece of scientific nonfiction. Great storytelling, great history, interesting analysis of the role metaphor took (and continues to take) in the scientific endeavor.
• 
  Barbaros Sulakoglu

  Copernicus ile başlayan Newton'la sonuçlanan ve inançtan bilime, felsefeden politikaya bir çok disiplini etkileyen, insanlığı bugüne taşıyan muazzam bir devrimi okudum. . .
• 
  Ari

  This book is one of the most inspiring -- and most humbling -- books that I've read in quite some time.
  
  I've been interested in astronomy since I was a kid, so the story of Copernicus and Kepler is one I thought I knew. But Kuhn brings out several aspects I hadn't understood before. Kuhn draws attention to something that's often overlooked: Ptolemaic astronomy isn't actually quite compatible with Aristotelian cosmology. The inconsistency wasn't noticed because mathematical astronomy at the time was a very narrow technical field, whose practitioners weren't interested in pushing on physics and who in turn escaped notice from the mainstream of natural philosophy.
  
  Kuhn also points out something else that should be better known: the Church condemned heliocentrism very late. Copernicus's book is published in 1546. By the time it was condemned in the 1620s, a huge pile of evidence had been discovered in favor of it, and professional opinion was swinging decisively behind it.
  
• 
  Xander

  This book is by far the most accessible and enlightening book I have ever read on this subject. It is hard to pin this book down on one topic though. It is an introduction to astronomy (ancient and modern), it is a story about the building and destruction of world views, it is an informative account of the scientific revolution and its implications for mankind. And to top it off: it is written in a very clear and concise style.
  
  Read 265 pages and you're fully informed. Not much else to say about it.
  
  
• 
  Elizabeth

  I'm not sure I understood any of the science and math but this book was fabulous in laying out the intellectual history of the time. I really loved reading those sections.
• 
  Catherine

  I was not expecting to like this, because science. I loved it, because SCIENCE!
• 
  Crito

  It would be wrong to approach this as a case study for
  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, or at least prove a dull exercise in it. Instead this book should be understood foremost as a fantastic work of scholarship, which manages to be accessible without sacrificing rigor of technical exposition, and which has a wide breadth while remaining economical and focused. While Kuhn doesn't refrain from commentary, what he succeeds in doing is to underline the implications and importance of the key question of the Copernican Revolution given the facts: what reason would a scientist (or philosopher) have for preferring the Copernican model over the Ptolemaic? With access to the same dataset Copernicus offered a rough geometric equivalent of the Ptolemaic system which, despite dispatching aspects of Ptolemaic astronomy which Copernicus thought superfluous and ugly, was ultimately not more simple or accurate in respect to the data. Why prefer one and dispatch the other? Often we arrive at better models by simply pushing the rigor of our current ones. As Chomsky put it in Syntactic Structures, "By pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deeper understanding of the ... data." In contrast, Copernicus's innovation was not so directly iterative, and as Kuhn points out, was as much flavored by ideological (Neoplatonic) underpinnings as the scholastic understanding of the Ptolemaic model (Aristotelian). It then becomes the legwork of scientists and philosophers to make sense of this, and while you can see how this prefigures Kuhn's SSR, he isn't pushing that angle as much as you would expect if you took this as a case study for that book. Instead it outlines the history (scientific, philosophical, and sociological) which is relevant to the question. And in the meantime you learn a lot about astronomy and the development of science in the process. Strong Recommendation.
• 
  Carlos

  Having thoroughly enjoyed “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Kuhn, I was excited to read this book. However, while there certainly was an interesting argument in this book but it was a bit overwhelmed by the force with which Kuhn wanted to reader to understand its astronomical foundations. These started out simple enough with discussions about solar dials and basic astronomical observations, however they progressively increased to the point that Kuhn himself decided to make a technical appendix to deal with them. Given that, it surprised me that Kuhn still felt compelled to include ever more complex discussions of Ptolemaic epicycles and the like in the main body of the text instead of relegating them to the appendix where the interested reader might peruse them at length. Similarly, Kuhn drowned his main argument for the development of the Copernican Revolution by trying to link it through succeeding generations of scientist to Newton’s work, increasing yet again the discussions of evolving mathematical techniques. I found all of this distracting because his main argument could be readily understood without such mathematical emphasis. His discussions of the evolving intellectual climate prior to Copernicus’ work, the innovations as well as limitations of Copernicus own work as well as the subsequent work by Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were simply amazing. It is this aspect of the book that kept me reading. Kuhn really fleshes out the intellectual world that permeated Copernicus’ thought and strives to explain why the Copernican revolution happened when it did or happened at all. It honestly felt as if this work needs a good editor to make an abridged edition to make it shine.
• 
  Brook

  This book brought the clarity I needed to fully appreciate Kuhn's main thesis he would develop throughout his lifetime in Structure and beyond. What I felt was lacking from Structure was a fully developed, concrete example where I could see his ideas of paradigm shift in progress in an actual historical moment. It's clear from reading this book that this was his original case study, and the transformation he generalized to speak about other scientific revolutions.
  
  For anyone interested in Kuhn's ideas, I would definitely recommend reading this _before_ reading Structure. Structure is basically just an abstraction of what is studied in this text.
  
  I also think this book does a great job and complicating the simple narrative that opposition to Copernican science was simply conservative Church dogma. Aristotelianism, the main scientific influence on Church thought, was a totalizing system explaining everything from the motion of rocks to the germinating of seeds and ever star in the heavens. Each piece of the system depended on all the others, and one could not take down one without destabilizing the others. It also becomes clear as you read that in different epochs, different flavors of explanations are permitted or not permitted. The best example being that Newton believed he had failed to explain gravity, for just positing that particles attracted each other as a matter of their nature was considered "Aristotelian" but was clearly afterward accepted as a valid scientific explanation.
• 
  Justin

  Among the infinite conceptions of the universe, science favors those that are most unified with experience and with each other. In its drive towards oneness, science is a sort of mysticism. New conceptions are often originally conceived by those seeking order despite the lack of experience that shows that it’s actually there. It’s a guess, or a hope, or an ideal that derives coherence in the world and makes sense to the thinker. This was the case for Copernicus, and Aristotle before him. In the early days of modern western thought, it was also the case for those who made progress that revealed Copernicanism to be a better fit with experience than previous conceptions. Of course, anyone doing work towards what has not yet been demonstrated appears a fool to all of whom are not on board with the starry-eyed new view. And dogma will perpetuate potentially false views, whether they have any sort of demonstration or not. Kuhn makes the example of the Copernican Revolution particularly accessible by his thorough description of astronomical observations with which thinkers grappled. The interplay of observation, philosophy, religion, and science across history is fascinating. It’s an illumination of how ideas work. Technology played an important role in the Copernican Revolution, particularly as a catalyst, but was not required. The story that Kuhn presents is one of the clearest cases of thought revolution, and perhaps it is a macrocosm of the churn of ideas in society, or in oneself.
• 
  Dan

  A solid addition to the literature of science history and intellectual history. Kuhn sets out the interesting ways by which the astronomical system of Copurnicus generated the revolution named for him.
  
  The book is interesting in detail and breadth and is fairly easily reading not compromised by philosophical obfuscation. I do not sense that Kuhn is out of his depth at any point. He exaggerates his viewpoint only somewhat. I believe it will interest any non-scientist as well as any scientist not already familiar both with the historical details presented and with their significance in a historical view reaching back to Aristotle and forward to Newton. There are some simple diagrams which require attention, but few of them need to be studied so long as the reader understands from the text their meaning. Similarly, no math is needed. Any layman who believes science is mostly a collection of facts must read this in order to have a sense of a type of process that science is truly about.
  
  Importantly, the Copernican (sun-centered) astronomy, says Kuhn, resulted in no obvious overall simplification over the Ptolemaic system (with epicycles, which are moving circles within orbits and had been adopted along with other unrealities in order to describe the apparent motions of the heavens around the earth). Copernicus did not, for example, eliminate most of the epicycles. While he did simplify some matters, he rendered others more complicated. For example, in order to make his system correspond to observation, he had to add some (unreal) motion not present in Ptolemy. The primary task for Copernicus was to prove mathematically that his system was observationally consistent with Ptolemy, since the received Ptolemaic system was as accurate as current observations allowed and was, as shown by Kuhn, accurate generally to a degree which the Copernican description did not exceed. The superiority his new system was not at all clear.
  
  (It was a problem with the calendar that likely motivated Copernicus to look for a better system. Ironically, It was a church authority who asked him whether he could resolve the problem. Furthermore, his formulation did not finally result in a solution to it.)
  
  Why and how then did the Copernican revolution result? While its influence tends to be considered in terms of its theological and philosophical implications, the answer to the question lies elsewhere, since this was fundamentally a scientific revolution.
  
  This question presents to the historian a challenge which Kuhn masters in this book. He shows that some of the answer lies in the historical significance of modest ad hoc evolutionary accretions made to Ptolemaic astronomy before Copernicus. (More, below.)
  
  Much else lies in the incremental recognition by post-Copernican astronomers of various advantages of this system, quite small advantages early on. These advantages could not be seen until later (initially in large part because of improvements made in the accuracy of astronomical observations after he died). They accumulated and supported one another, along with successive theoretical modifications over time, to the extent that his system largely has been replaced. Today it can as easily be seen as more nearly Ptolemaic than as Newtonian or Einsteinian.
  
  But similar as the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus were, the revolution would not have arisen from a Ptolemaic view, because the evolution of that view would have continued the same way it always had since the time of Ptolemy, by adding additional epicycles and other unrealities whenever necessary in order to fit new data, as indeed Ptolemy had done to the Aristotelian cosmology in order to arrive at his own. Copernicus proved that an abrupt disruption in this kind of evolutionary procession, by moving the center of the universe from earth to sun rather than adding more epicycles, could result in an equally acceptable astronomy. The change in the process itself, this fundamental difference in procedure only, became a leap more important than any immedate astronomical consequences of the new theory.
  
  But this change could not be appreciated at first. In the larger scientific community of the decades after his death, even the sun-centered nature of the theory was largely ignored, as it contradicted the senses, tradition and religious authority. It became preferentially taught because it clearly set out in one elegant treatise the means of making mathematical calculations describing celestial observations. (The Ptolemaic formulation had passed through the centuries in often second-hand accounts and varying translations and re-translations, additions and other editing.) Only as increasingly accurate astronomical data more strongly matched the Copernican universe did the teaching of his system to other scientists become securely established.
  
  Only later as the remaining Ptolemaic elements fell away due to more sophisticated data collection and more ingenious mathematical treatment did the best mathematicians begin to appreciate more fully the scientific value of the new and evolving system. Since the Copernican leap in process had already been proved by him to lead to a defensible scientific result, and the conception was proving even more useful over time, mathematicians were now at liberty to attempt further procedural leaps of imagination in search of better answers. Importantly, they could find increasingly general formulations (like universal gravity) in order to explain and simplify elegantly a greater number of observations, rather than further complicate matters as would result by piling on more epicycles. The revolution is named for Copernicus because he afforded this new liberty of scientific imagination which eventually proved so fruitful.
  
  Only after the newer formulations proved their power could the wider scientific community and then the educated public begin fully to accept the revolution and attempt reasonably to assess what broader implications might be implied by this revolutionary theory.
  
  
• 
  David

  A very, very good book for science and history buffs. I read Kuhn's classic book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, some years ago but found it too philosophical or esoteric for my tastes. The Copernican Revolution offers a much more accessible account of a scientific revolution unfolding through the centuries.
  
  The common-sense, earth-centered Ptolemaic universe inherited by Copernicus was more than just a mental model of how the world was structured in a physical sense. It was a worldview steeped with religious overtones about Man's place on Earth in relation to the perfect heavens above. Beyond the outermost sphere of the stars was God in Heaven who had set that sphere in motion. In turn, that motion set the other planetary spheres in motion above the solid, immobile Earth.
  
  But those perfect circular orbits were not what Ptolemy and many other astronomers through the centuries actually observed. There were inconsistencies in the planets' orbits which didn't fit the worldview. Ptolemy and others added circles (epicycles) to circles to try to account for the irregular motions, adding more and more complexity to the music of the spheres.
  
  Copernicus sought to simplify matters by moving the Sun to the center of the universe, and by moving the now-rotating Earth into orbit around the Sun along with the other planets. He still kept some aspects of the Ptolemaic system, such as the crystalline spheres and some epicycles, but the Copernican system was a bit simpler and a lot more "aesthetic". There was a "new neatness and coherence in the sun-centered astronomy of Copernicus." (Page 171.)
  
  It took the work of other astronomers to fully flesh out the Copernican revolution. Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Galileo added further insights and more accurate observations to further explain a world which was becoming much more interesting and surprising than the old world of spheres within spheres.
  
  Before Galileo, Copernicus' theory was simply a mathematical model used only by technically trained astronomers. But things changed when Galileo pointed his telescope to the night sky and observed the new moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, and the cratered face of our Moon:
  
  

  With the advent of the telescope Copernicanism ceased to be esoteric. It was no longer primarily the concern of highly trained mathematical astronomers. Therefore it became more disquieting and, to some, more dangerous....After Galileo had announced his observations in 1610, Copernicanism could not be dismissed as a mere mathematical device, useful but without physical import. Nor could even the most optimistic still regard the concept of the earth's motion as a temporary lunacy likely to vanish naturally if left to itself. The telescopic discoveries therefore provided a natural and appropriate focus for much of the continuing opposition to Copernicus' proposal. They showed the real cosmological issues at stake more quickly and more clearly than pages of mathematics. (Page 226.)

  
  
  And it was more than learned men who were looking at the new world unfolding above them:
  
  

  The telescope became a popular toy. Men who had never before shown interest in astronomy or in any science bought or borrowed the new instrument and eagerly scanned the heavens on clear nights. The amateur observer became a well-known figure, a subject for both emulation and parody. With him came a new literature. The beginnings of popular science and science fiction are to be discovered in the seventeenth century, and at the start the telescope and its discoveries were the most prominent subjects. That is the greatest importance of Galileo's astronomical work: it popularized astronomy, and the astronomy that it popularized was Copernican. (Page 225.)

  
  
  Official opposition to Copernicanism began in earnest after Galilleo's discoveries which offered evidence supporting the Copernican view of the universe. This opposition grew out of a
  
  

  subconscious reluctance to assent in the destruction of a cosmology that for centuries had been the basis of everyday practical and spiritual life. The conceptual reorientation that, after Kepler and Galileo, meant economy to scientists frequently meant a loss of conceptual coherence to men like Donne and Milton whose primary concerns were in other fields, and some men whose first interests were religious, moral, or aesthetic continued to oppose Copernicanism bitterly for a very long time. (Page 226.)

  
  
  But denying the true nature of the world and how the universe works can only continue for so long:
  
  

  old conceptual schemes do fade away...During the century and a half following Galileo's death in 1642, a belief in the earth-centered universe was gradually transformed from an essential sign of sanity to an index, first, of inflexible conservatism, then of excessive parochialism, and finally of complete fanaticism. By the middle of seventeenth century it is difficult to find an important astronomer who is not Copernican; by the end of the century it is impossible. Elementary astronomy responded more slowly, but during the closing decades of the century Copernican, Ptolemaic, and Tychonic astronomy were taught side by side in many prominent Protestant universities, and during the eighteenth century lectures on the last two systems were gradually dropped. Popular cosmology felt the impact of Copernicanism most slowly of all; most of the eighteenth century was required to endow the populace and its teachers with a new common sense and to make the Copernican universe the common property of Western man. The triumph of Copernicanism was a gradual process, and its rate varied greatly with social status, professional affiliation, and religious belief. But for all its difficulties and vagaries it was an inevitable process. (Page 227.)

  
  
• 
  Elia Mantovani

  "La rivoluzione copernicana" rappresenta uno dei casi-studio le cui tendenze si rtiroveranno poi nella "Struttura". Kuhn esamina la storia della rivoluzione copernicana prendendola molto larga e sottolineando le continuità nella ricerca scientifica dalle cosmologie presocratiche sino al telescopio di Galileo. L'approccio filosofico è puramente kuhniano e cerca infatti di abbraccia un'idea di scienza molto più larga rispetto alle evidenze o alle prove sperimentali. Penso che i passaggi più interessanti possano essere quelli che riguardano la nozione di paradigma (qua ancora "schema concettuale") in quanto già preludenti una prospettiva molto più astratta che troverà concretizzazione nella Struttura. Di fatto la maggior parte del testo è incredibilmente tecnico, a volte addirittura inaccessibile senza nozioni scientifiche radicate.
• 
  Fernando Pestana da Costa

  A wonderful work about the Copernican revolution in which this landmark event in the history of Science (and of Ideas) is put into perspective by a masterful presentation of previous worldviews (the two spheres universe, the Ptolomaic system, the Aristotelian universe and its scholastic critiques) and of the Copernic system, with its immense physical and philosophical consequences. The opposition to Copernicism (at times of a rabid violence) as well as its progressive acceptance and the scientific inquires originated by the attempts to reconcile it with the physics (attained, only much latter, by Newton) is masterfully narrated in this classic of the History of Science that can still be read with much pleasure and profit more than fifty years after its first edition, in English, in 1957.
• 
  Yelp!

  The Copernican Revolution, though not as widely known as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and thus not as often recommended to students or science enthusiasts, is a masterpiece. I give it such high praise because it does not simply explain the role of said revolution in the historical context of astronomy and physics, but attempts to give its readers a deeper understanding of the meaning of scientific breakthroughs. While doing that, the author tries to map the entire age he writes about, and it this book begins to transcend his role as philosopher and historian of science, in order to become a humanist.
• 
  Paul Sheckarski

  What a remarkable achievement. I struggle to fix my mind to mathematical problems and concepts, yet this text elucidated many astronomical and mathematical concepts for me. Even when explaining the several competing conceptual models I did not find myself frustrated or ready to give up. Indeed, the comparison and contrasts made between those competing models was highly illuminating.
  
  I also found the author's repetition useful, as this was for me an elementary introduction to the history of these scientific and metaphysical ideas. The repetition helped layer in and form a firm foundation in my mind for the argument the author made about the structure of scientific revolutions.
• 
  Tom Schulte

  Excellent and accessible overview of astronomy and conceptual frameworks from antiquity to the post-Copernican luminaries like Kepler, Tycho Brahe and Galileo. The entire presentation of the development of thought in this area is a fascinating tale. One minor thing that stood out to me in this era of surprisingly lively flat earth chatter is that Aristotle and Copernicus were among the great minds that echoed the beliefs of their time that the worlds is a sphere based on basic, naked eye observation of the lunar phases, eclipses and the changing sky at different latitudes.
• 
  Roo Phillips

  Wow. One of those books where you are left in total awe that someone can comprehend, analyze, and synthesize so much. Kuhn superbly breaks down the scientific revolution that facilitated our progress from ancient to modern thought. It isn't long (<300 pages), but it is dense. Not overly technical, but deep. Every word counts. It took months to get through, and I would only recommend it if you love history of science and philosophy. But if you do, this is a must read.
• 
  Mitch

  Nothing especially mind-bending if you're familiar with SSR, but it's good to see the theory put to work. Unlike SSR, which can be infuriatingly sloppy and imprecise at points, this book is solid throughout. Kuhn is at his best when he sticks to sociology and steers clear from talk of justification. Fortunately, this book does just that.
  
  Recommended for anyone interested in the history or philosophy of science.
• 
  James Koehler

  A very in-depth look into what fueled the Copernican revolution, what surrounded it, and its consequences. Kuhn explains the role conceptual schemes have in science and demonstrates their power with the history of Copernicus and his dependency on Ptomely and Aristotle. But, alongside this history, it develops the revolution that science always undergoes, the constant destruction of the faulty alongside the construction of the better.
• 
  Kürşat K.

  Tıpkı 'Bilimsel Devrimlerin Yapısı'nda olduğu gibi gerçekten insanı 'aydınlatan' bir kitap. Kendi adıma Kopernik'e kadar insanların neden Dünya merkezli bir sistemi kabul ettiklerini güzel ve ayrıntılı bir şekilde anlatıyor. Genel olarak, yazarın fizikçi olmasından dolayı da biraz ağır, ancak yine de çok önemli bir kitap...
• 
  Rohit

  Geometry, common sense and observations to understand astronomy.
• 
  Jonathan Hall

  A good introduction to the history of western astronomy concerned with how it affected (and was affected by) other areas of thought. Goes through Newton.