Nicolaus Copernicus (born 542 years ago on February 19, 1473) knew that mankind had no desire to be moved from the center of the universe, and he tried his best to delay it. His heliocentric theories that refuted the popular views of his day were worked out during his time as a civil servant along the Baltic Coast in present day Poland, when he was supposed to be consumed by economic and administrative duties but couldn't keep from focusing on less earthbound ideas.

Copernicus dragged his feet on making his views public, perhaps intuiting some of the sharp resistance he would meet. He finally published his work “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” in 1543, right before his death. He would never witness the upheaval it caused, although even that was delayed by the thick, technical language he used which made his work inaccessible to many readers. A small first printing of 400 didn’t even sell out.

But it didn’t take long for readers to slice through Copernicus’ thick writing to the heart of his contention: Earth revolved around the sun. Man was no longer at the center of everything. It wouldn’t stand. Popular imagination places the Pope at the head of the backlash, but this was a moment of religious unity: Protestants and Catholics alike hated what Copernicus stood for. Martin Luther called him a fool who ignored the clear account of Joshua stopping the sun in its tracks, and another Protestant theologian mocked him as the “astronomer who moves the earth and stops the sun.”

The brunt of the backlash would fall on other men who followed in Copernicus’ orbit, like Galileo. Maybe Copernicus delayed publication so long because he just didn’t want to deal with it, in which case it would be hard to blame him. Copernicus might have been looking out for his own well-being, which would have been threatened by men trying to protect their own power in turn. We might not be at the center of everything anymore, but we’re still pretty self-centered. Not even Copernicus could change that.

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