Copernican Heliocentrism - Modern Opinion

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.