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Twenty-first-century cosmologists, historians and archeologists continue to seek a true portrait of the great astronomer and his contribution
In 2005 they dug up the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus. At least, they thought it was him, and they wanted to be sure. So the Polish archaeologists at work in the red brick cathedral in Frombork - where Copernicus had served as administrator and in his spare time hatched a new cosmology - turned to the police for help. Without divulging the name of the "victim," they sent the skuU to the central forensic lab in Warsaw. And the resulting computerenhanced reconstruction of a craggy 70-year-old man so closely matched Copernicus's own younger self-portrait that the researchers declared themselves 97 percent certain this was truly the face of the iconic astronomer. Even more recent evidence, based on DNA samples, suggests they were right.
But people have been probing Copernicus's remains for much longer than a few years. He is widely acclaimed as the founder of modern science - the first to get the ball rolling, almost literally. He proposed in the early 1500s that the sphere on which we live is not at the center of the universe but instead belongs to a class of round, rotating bodies known as planets, which circle about the Sun. Such are his prestige and fascination that for 400 years scientists have claimed him as a patron. Today, however, there appear to be fresh opportunities for discerning Copernicus's scientfic legacy - along with his facial features - with enhanced clarity.
In the middle of the 20th century, astronpmer Hermann Bondi evoked the image of Copernicus to support his and two Cambridge colleagues' steady-state cosmology. Bondi coined the term "Copernican principle" (CP) to sum up the idea that Earth "is not in a central, specially favoured position" in the universe. Since that time, the CP has continued to be endorsed by scientists even though steady-state cosmology has not.
In 1973, the year of Copernicus's quincentenary, Stephen Hawking and George Ellis pubUshed The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time and enlisted the Copernican principle to serve Big-Bang cosmology. The geometry of this expanding universe (on a large scale) is such that it would appear the same in aU directions no matter where the...