The First Copernican

In the spring of 1539, Georg Joachim Rheticus, a twenty-five-year-old mathematics prodigy from Wittenberg, set off on an arduous three-week journey to northern Poland in order to meet the elderly but not-yet-famous amateur astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. While Copernicus had yet to publish anything on the topic of a new cosmology, rumors had abounded for years about his revolutionary theory (some would call it heretical) that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe, and about a manuscript he had almost completed on the subject. Intending to stay a month, Rheticus spent three…