In this passage from book one of his "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" (1543), Nicholas Copernicus describes the physical makeup of the cosmos as he sees it, with the Earth having been replaced by the Sun as the center. Chief among the reasons he expresses here, such a radical shift in cosmology are spacial symmetry, mathematical ordering, and a feeling that the Sun, which is a visible emblem of life-giving divinity, should hold a central place in the system. It is crucial to Copernicus's argument that he convince readers that all the apparent movements of the stars arid planets can be accounted for by the relative motions of the earth and planets and by the great distance between the Sun and the stars

The first and highest of all is the sphere of the fixed stars, which contains itself arid...