SOURCE: "Tycho Brahe's Critique of Copernicus and the Copernican System" in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. LI, No. 3, July-Sept., 1990, pp. 355-77.

Below, Blair discusses astronomer Tycho Brahe 's ambivalence toward Copernican cosmology. Brahe admired Copernicus's desire for mathematical simplicity in his calculations of the motions of the heavenly bodies, but he could not accept Copernicus's theory of heliocentrism.

For Luther he was the "fool who wanted to turn the art of astronomy on its head"¹; for François Viète he was the paraphraser of Ptolemy and "more a master of the dice than of the (mathematical) profession"²; for nearly every intellectual in the century following De revolutionibus Copernicus was a figure to be evaluated and criticized, if not always understood. Tycho Brahe's critique of Copernicus is not summed up in any pithy statement but rather spread throughout his life's work. Yet it reveals the constant...