Modern Opinion
Whether Copernicus' propositions were "revolutionary" or "conservative" was a topic of debate in the late twentieth century. Thomas Kuhn argued that Copernicus only transferred "some properties to the Sun's many astronomical functions previously attributed to the earth." Other historians have since argued that Kuhn underestimated what was "revolutionary" about Copernicus' work, and emphasized the difficulty Copernicus would have had in putting forward a new astronomical theory relying alone on simplicity in geometry, given that he had no experimental evidence.
In his book The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe, Arthur Koestler puts Copernicus in a different light to what many authors seem to suggest, portraying him as a coward who was reluctant to publish his work due to a crippling fear of ridicule.
Read more about this topic: Copernican Heliocentrism
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or opinion:
“We could hardly believe that after so many ordeals, after all the trials of modern skepticism, there was still so much left in our souls to destroy.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence; without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)