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In his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus proposed the notion of the moving earth: that the sun, and not the earth, is the centre of the universe. This was a highly controversial claim which led to serious confrontations with the church and had a wide-ranging impact on the way we now view the world.

The Moving Earth tells the story of a unique revolution in Renaissance Europe. Setting out from Copernicus’s theory, over the next couple of centuries a network of new natural scientists turned all the usual notions of the universe upside down. Tycho Brahe’s pioneering measurements of the celestial bodies was followed by Kepler’s proof of the elliptical orbits of the planets, Galileo’s epoch-making observations by telescope, and was completed by Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. Newton himself wrote of this achievement, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

The new view of the world emerged through vicious opposition from the Christian church and did not gain general acceptance till long afterwards. In Italy the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his heretical ideas of an infinite universe containing other solar systems. Later, Galileo was brought up before the Inquisition in Rome and sentenced to house arrest for life. Tycho Brahe also fell out of favour and had to abandon his observatory, Uraniborg, when an orthodox Lutheran regime under Christian IV came to power in Denmark.

These cosmographical clashes shook the entire world order and can be traced right up to the present day: it was only in 1992 that Pope Johannes Paul II officially apologised for the way Galileo was put on trial.

But the Copernican revolution did not only mean that a new view of the world was established: the observations of Tycho Brahe and Galileo along with Kepler and Newton’s mathematical laws were the start of modern scientific method. Thus the renaissance ideal of “learning from nature” and not merely going by the hypotheses of antiquity resulted in the natural sciences as we know them today.

Surprisingly, it was a process in which the new religious and occult alchemistic ideas of the renaissance also played an important part. Previously people had believed in Aristotle’s theory of two separate worlds: the divine heavens were unchanging, while the earthly world was the one that changed. But inspired by Plato the world now became viewed as a single divine unity bound by magical links: this inspired the burgeoning new scientists to believe that they should be able to understand the heavens and earth on the basis of the same laws of nature.

Tycho Brahe observed a new star, Stella Nova, flaring in the sky that had hitherto been regarded as immutable. Kepler saw his laws for the planetary system as a manifestation of a divine mathematical order throughout nature. And Newton found the occult force he sought: gravity, which operates in the heavens and on earth alike.

Today satellites explore the outermost reaches of the solar system and astronomers use space telescopes to observe precisely what sent Giordano Bruno to the stake: planets in other solar systems many light years away. It all began with Copernicus’s revolutionary idea of looking at the world in a new way.

The Moving Earth features interviews with:

John Robert Christianson. Luther College, USA

Owen Gingerich, Harvard University

Gorge Coyne, Vatican Observatory

Patricia Fara & Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge