How did Nicolaus Copernicus come up with his ideas?

Answer 1

That the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the reverse. Copernicus was a catholic priest and at the time the church taught that the sun revolved around the earth. So to avoid controversy, he claimed that his idea was just to simplify a number of astronomical calculations. It was Galileo that established the heliocentric system and was forced to retract of be tortured.

Answer 2

Before Copernicus, the intellectual world had firm belief in the Ptolemaic system, which argued that the sun, moon, stars, planets, and heavens orbited an immobile Earth. Copernicus, using mathematical calculations, proposed a simple, but radical, idea: Ptolemy was wrong because the earth was not immobile nor was it the center of the planetary system. Copernicus argued that the earth rotated in its axis and orbited, with the other planets, around the sun.

He contradicted the Ptolemaic system by arguing that the center of the earth is not the center of the universe, but rather the celestial revolve about the sun as their mid-point, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe. This faced many questions regarding why the sun moves position everyday. Copernicus answered these with the conjecture that the sun's movement comes from the movement of the earth and our sphere (our revolution and rotation).

Answer 3

Apart from his own many years of astronomical observations, it was primarily reading a book by astronomer George von Peuerbach that set him thinking about the subject. He verified his doubts by the close study of the works of several classical astronomers and all this made him start to seriously question if the earth could be the fixed center of the universe. Also, a lot of mathematical work done by him also proved to him that the math was at odds with an earth-centered universe.

In the years 1501 to 1503 that he studied in Padua, Italy, his theory probably already got its more or less definite form, which he then set out to verify thoroughly before finally publishing his theory in 1543.

Answer 4

Copernicus created the Heliocentric Theory. The Theory stated that all the planets orbited around the sun.

Answer 5

nicholas copernicus believed and taught that the center of the universe was the sun, not the earth, as the early church taught