HackingTheUniverse

You are browsing the archives of copernicus.

Tycho Brahe was born in 1546 in Sweden. He was an astronomer and alchemist who is known for his contributions to astronomy. While he was probably the last astronomer to work mostly without a telescope, he revolutionized the use of precise instrumentation in astronomy. Because of this precision, he was able to discover and document [...]

Aristarchus was born on the island of Samos in Greece around -0310. He was a mathematician and philospher and probably the first on record to propose that the Earth circled around the Sun instead of the other way around. He wrote a work titled, “On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon” which [...]

Born in 1401 in Kues, Germany, Nicholas became known as Nicholas of Kues or Nicholas of Cusa (Latin version of Kues) and was a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. Nicholas attended the University of Padua in Italy and received his doctorate degree in canon law there. In addition to being a religious scholar and [...]

Born in 1571 in the Stuttgart region of Germany, Johannes Kepler was a mathematician and astronomer. Kepler became the first published defender of the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. He described planetary orbits as platonic solids and then realized that the orbits are eliptical. Kepler studied the golden ration and wrote this about it: “Geometry has [...]

Isaac Newton was born in 1643 in Linconshire, England. He made exceptional contributions to physics, mathematics and astronomy and was also accomplished in philosophy and theology. His laws of motion and gravity became landmarks for centuries. He and Liebnitz independently developed calculus. He investigated the refraction of light and created the first working reflecting telescope. [...]

Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy in 1564. He was an astronomer, physicist, mathematician and philospher. Galileo made improvements to the newly invented telescope and then used it to discover and make observations of the moons around Jupiter and published his findings advocating the heliocentric ideas authored by Copernicus. Galileo taught at the University [...]

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in 1473 in Poland. He is known as the first astronomer to claim that the Sun is at the center of the solar system with the Earth rotating about it. Copernicus studied at the Universities of Bologna and Padua in Italy. He studied astronomy with a famous astronomer of the time [...]