Not all the comments were flattering. Luther denounced Copernicus as the fool who will turn the whole science of astronomy upside down. In 1531 a satirical play was produced about him in Elbing, Prussia, by a local schoolmaster. In Rome things went better, for the time being at least. In 1533 John Widmanstad, a papal secretary, lectured on Copernicuss theory before Pope Clement VII and several cardinals. Widmanstads hand was behind the letter that Cardinal Schonberg sent in 1536 from Rome to Copernicus, urging him to publish his thoughts, or at least to share them with him.
It was a futile request. Probably nobody knew exactly how far Copernicus had progressed with his work until Georg Joachim , a young scholar from Wittenberg, arrived in Frauenburg in the spring of 1539. When he returned to Wittenberg, he had already printed an account, known as the Narratio prima, of Copernicuss almost ready book. Rheticus was also instrumental in securing the printing of Copernicuss book in Nuremberg, although the final supervision remained in the care of Andrew Osiander, a Lutheran clergyman. He might have been the one who gave the work its title, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which is not found in the manuscript. But Osiander certainly had written the anonymous preface, in which Copernicuss ideas were claimed as mere hypotheses by their author, or convenient mathematical formalism that had nothing to do with the physical reality.
The printed copy of his work, in six books, reached Copernicus only a few hours before his death on May 24, 1543. The physics of Copernicus was still Aristotelian and could not, of course, cope with the twofold motion attributed to the earth. But Copernicus could have done a better job as an observer. He added only 27 observations, an exceedingly meager amount, to the data he took over uncritically from Ptolemy and from more recent astronomical tables. The accuracy of predicting celestial phenomena on the basis of his system did not exceed the accuracy achieved by Ptolemy. Nor could Copernicus provide proof for the phases of Mercury and Venus that had to occur if his theory was true. The telescope was still more than half a century away. Again, Copernicus could only say that the stars were immensely far away to explain the absence of stellar parallax due to the orbital motion of the earth. Here, the observational evidence was not forthcoming for another 300 years. Also, while Ptolemy actually used only 40 epicycles, their total number in Copernicuss system was 84, hardly a convincing proof of its greater simplicity.
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