Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer and Curtis Wilson on the Origin of Nicholas Copernicus's Heliocentrism.

AbstractWhat moved Copernicus to switch from the time-honored geocentric to a heliocentric setup for the planetary system? He himself did not explain this momentous move in any detail—his only comments about it suggest that Ptolemy’s complete solution to the problem of nonuniform motion, the equant model, led him to propose Earth’s annual motion around the Sun. The most widely accepted accounts of the origin of Copernicus’s theory dismiss or dispute any direct relation between the principle of uniform motion and the heliocentric theory. Two scholars, the Polish expert on Copernicus Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer (1855–1929) and the American historian of astronomy Curtis Wilson (1921–2012), constructed detailed arguments about how Copernicus’s rejection of Ptolemy’s solution led him to his theory. The principal aim of this essay is to reintroduce Birkenmajer’s and Wilson’s voices to the discussion of the origin of Copernicus’s heliocentrism.