Each of Copernicus’ arguments concerns the planets, those heavenly bodies that moved against the fixed patterns of the distant stars. He demonstrated that the principal complications in the planetary motions could be elegantly explained by attributing movement to the earth itself. From a geometric point of view, Copernicus’ arguments were highly compelling, but to the great majority of his contemporaries, any claims for physical reality seemed ridiculous. If the earth were spinning daily on its axis, a stone thrown upward would surely land in another county. As the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe would say later in the sixteenth century, "The Copernican arrangement nowhere offends the principles of mathematics, but it casts the earth, a lazy, sluggish body unfit for motion, into a movement as fast as the aetherial torches [i.e., the stars themselves]."
Commentary by Owen Gingerich, searchable English translation and Latin live text.
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