SOURCE: "The Theoretician as 'Perpetrator'" in The Genesis of the Copernican World, The MIT Press, 1987, pp. 264-89.

In the following essay, Blumenberg discusses the metaphors of revolution and violence that have characterized assessments of Copernican cosmology through the years.

On the base of the Copernicus monument in Torun stands this inscription: Terrae Motor Solis Caelique Stator [Mover of the Earth and Stayer of the Sun and the Heavens]. The kings of Prussia had owed the monument to Copernicus for a long time. On 12 August 1773—that is, in the year of the astronomer's 300th birthday—Frederick the Great had made this promise in a letter to Voltaire. The only small blemish in this for the king was that the year before, in the first partition of Poland, of all towns the town of Copernicus's birth had escaped him.⁷ It was still more than half a century after the third...