Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler: Redefining Our Place in the Universe October 2, 2009

For centuries, religious belief and philosophical reasoning had placed man and his earthly home at the center of the universe. Changing that deep-seated and psychologically compelling conviction took courage, persistence, and a dedication to new methods of scientific observation and measurement on the part of three provincial scholars from Torun in Poland, Pisa in Italy, and Weil der Stadt in Germany. It also took more than 150 years of controversy and confrontation spanning most of the 16th and 17th centuries, from Copernicus' life work first published as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543 to Newton's Principia in 1687. Those years of controversy succeeded beyond belief, leading to today's astronomical shifts in understanding an expanding universe that may contain millions of life-supporting planets in our galaxy alone.