Nicolaus Copernicus

Copernicus was born 1473, before Columbus found America, and died 1543, the same year as he published On The Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, the document that for the first time laid down the Heliocentric Theory. He was born February 19 in Torun (Thorn) of the Kingdom of Poland in Royal Prussia. He never married or had children. His Polish name Mikolaj Kopernik means one who is working with copper, his father's trade. His native tongue was German and nationality did not play much of a role at the time of Copernicus.

He began studying astronomy at the Krakow Academy, later Jagiellonian University, and collected a body of books on the subject that later become war booty to the Swedes during the Deluge and that now are stored at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. Copernicus worked for the Church and did astronomy as a hobby. He dedicated the De Revolutionibus to Pope Paul III.

In 1633 Galileo Galilei was convicted on grave suspicion of heresy for "following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of the Holy Scripture", and was placed in house arrest for the remainder of his life. People had read and agreed on the idea before this event but since the Catholic Church was the heavyweight in "science" it took some time for the matter to percolate. The Catholic Church's 1758 Index of Prohibited Books omitted the general prohibition of works defending heliocentrism, but retained the specific prohibitions of the uncensored versions of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and Galilei's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Those prohibitions were finally dropped from the 1835 Index.