Sobre as origens da ciência moderna

R. Hardy explica: "Copernicus is not someone you would have picked to make an astronomical revolution. He did not have obvious ambition; he was a scholar, and he wanted to do his researches and to be left alone. His researches were not even professional; he was an astronomer by avocation. He was trained as a doctor (he was trusted as a healer), and had official duties as a canon in the Catholic church. His attack on the Earth-centered picture of the solar system was mathematical, and his complicated computations had the benefit of being simpler than those required for the geocentric model. Copernicus had the ideas, and the mathematics behind them, but he did not publish. He was busy with his canon's duties and did not have the scholastic's freedom to devote all his time to his studies or publications. He was worried that his theory might be wrong in places, or at best was incomplete, so he kept quiet about it. When his ideas leaked out, they brought him unwanted attention, so that his supervisor heard about the mistress he kept and ordered her out, and also he became associated with the Lutherans who were gaining numbers at the time. It was, indeed, a Lutheran who teamed up with Copernicus to see the treatise _On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres_ prepared for print.