Preparing for the Miraculous

130 eleven talksthe Sun. For in this most beautiful temple who could placethis lamp in any other better place than one from which itcan illuminate all other things at the same time? This Sunsome people call appropriately the light of the World, othersits Soul or Ruler. [Hermes] Trismegistos calls it the VisibleGod, Sophocles’ Electra calls it the All-Seeing. Thus theSun, sitting on its Royal Throne, guides the revolving familyof the stars.” 12 The mentality of Nicolaus Copernicusseems to have been rather different from the gross materialisticevaluation of nature which uses his name in theformulation of the Copernican Principle.What is more, Copernicus, as often thought, did not reducethe Ptolemaic number of circles required to make thesolar system go round, he increased it from forty to forty-eight,as painstakingly counted by Arthur Koestler in Sleepwalkers.And Copernicus stuck to the inviolability of the circle, sinceclassical times the paragon of heavenly perfection and thereason why Copernicus still needed so many cycles and epicyclesto make his model fit the data of observation. Therefore,“when we talk today about ‘the Copernican system’ weusually mean a system of the universe quite different fromthat described in Copernicus’ De revolutionibus ... It shouldbe more properly be called ‘Keplerian’ or at least ‘Keplero-Copernican’ ... It has been well said that the significance ofCopernicus lay not so much in the system he propounded asin the fact that the system he did propound would ignite thegreat revolution in physics that we associate with the namesof Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton. The so-calledCopernican revolution was really a later revolution of Galileo,Kepler, and Newton.” 13 In fact, Galileo’s “spyglass” or“optick tube” did more for the acceptance of the heliocentricsystem than Copernicus’ famous book.12 Derek Gjertsen: Science and Philosophy, p. 155.13 J. Bernard Cohen: The Birth of a New Physics, pp. 25 and 52.