The Earth-centered
Universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy held sway on Western thinking for almost 2000
years. Then, in the 16th century a new idea was proposed by the Polish
astronomer Nicolai Copernicus (1473-1543).
The Heliocentric System
In a book called On the
Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies (that was published as Copernicus lay on his
deathbed), Copernicus proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of
the Solar System. Such a model is called a heliocentric system. The ordering of
the planets known to Copernicus in this new system is illustrated in the
following figure, which we recognize as the modern ordering of those planets.
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