NICOLAUS COPERNICUS Copernicus was a Polish astronomer, best known for his theory that the Sun and not the Earth is at the centre of the universe. Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in Thorn (modern day Torun) in Poland. His father was a merchant and local official. When Copernicus was 10 his father died, and his uncle, a priest, ensured that Copernicus received a good education. In 1491, he went to Krakow Academy, now the Jagiellonian University, and in 1496 travelled to Italy to study law. While a student at the University of Bologna he stayed with a mathematics professor, Domenico Maria de Novara, who encouraged Copernicus' interests in geography and astronomy. During his time in Italy, Copernicus visited Rome and studied at the universities of Padua and Ferrara, before returning to Poland in 1503. For the next seven years he worked as a private secretary to his uncle, now the bishop of Ermland. The bishop died in 1512 and Copernicus moved to Frauenberg, where he had long held a position as a canon, an administrative appointment in the church. This gave him more time to devote to astronomy. Although he did not seek fame, it is clear that he was by now well known as an astronomer. In 1514, when the Catholic church was seeking to improve the calendar, one of the experts to whom the pope appealed was Copernicus. Copernicus' major work 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' ('On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres') was finished by 1530. Its central theory was that the Earth rotates daily on its axis and revolves yearly around the sun. He also argued that the planets circled the Sun. This is known as the Heliocentric (or sun-centered) theory. This challenged the long held view that the Earth was stationary at the centre of the universe with all the planets, the Moon and the Sun rotating around it. This theory contradicted many peoples religious views. And as a result he did not publish his findings until the last year of his life. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' was published in early 1543 and Copernicus died on 24 May in the same year. His findings laid the foundation for researchers to follow.
Transcript
NICOLAUS COPERNICUS
Copernicus was a Polish astronomer, best known for his theory that the Sun and not the Earth is at the centre of the universe.
Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in Thorn (modern day Torun) in Poland. His father was a merchant and local official. When Copernicus was 10 his father died, and his uncle, a priest, ensured that Copernicus received a good education. In 1491, he went to Krakow Academy, now the Jagiellonian University, and in 1496 travelled to Italy to study law. While a student at the University of Bologna he stayed with a mathematics professor, Domenico Maria de Novara, who encouraged Copernicus' interests in geography and astronomy.
During his time in Italy, Copernicus visited Rome and studied at the universities of Padua and Ferrara, before returning to Poland in 1503. For the next seven years he worked as a private secretary to his uncle, now the bishop of Ermland.
The bishop died in 1512 and Copernicus moved to Frauenberg, where he had long held a position as a canon, an administrative appointment in the church. This gave him more time to devote to astronomy. Although he did not seek fame, it is clear that he was by now well known as an astronomer. In 1514, when the Catholic church was seeking to improve the calendar, one of the experts to whom the pope appealed was Copernicus.
Copernicus' major work 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' ('On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres') was finished by 1530. Its central theory was that the Earth rotates daily on its axis and revolves yearly around the sun. He also argued that the planets circled the Sun. This is known as the Heliocentric (or sun-centered) theory. This challenged the long held view that the Earth was stationary at the centre of the universe with all the planets, the Moon and the Sun rotating around it. This theory contradicted many peoples religious views. And as a result he did not publish his findings until the last year of his life.
De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' was published in early 1543 and Copernicus died on 24 May in the same year. His findings laid the foundation for researchers to follow.
GALILEO GALILEI
Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist and astronomer. He was born in Pisa on February 15, 1564. Galileo's father, Vincenzo Galilei, was a well-known musician. Vincenzo decided that his son should become a doctor.
In 1581, Galileo was sent to the University of Pisa to study medicine. While a student at the university, Galileo discovered that he had a talent for mathematics. He was able to persuade his father to allow him to leave the university to become a tutor in mathematics. He later became a professor of mathematics.
In 1609, Galileo heard about the invention of the spyglass, a device which made distant objects appear closer. Galileo used his mathematics knowledge and technical skills to improve upon the spyglass and build a telescope. Later that same year, he became the first person to look at the Moon through a telescope and make his first astronomy discovery. He found that the Moon was not smooth, but mountainous and pitted - just like the Earth! He subsequently used his newly invented telescope to discover four of the moons circling Jupiter, to study Saturn, to observe the phases of Venus, and to study sunspots on the Sun.
Galileo's observations strengthened his belief in Copernicus' theory that Earth and all other planets revolve around the Sun. Most people in Galileo's time believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the Sun and planets revolved around it.
The Catholic Church, which was very powerful and influential in Galileo's day, strongly supported the theory of a geocentric, or Earth-centered, universe. After Galileo began publishing papers about his astronomy discoveries and his belief in a heliocentric, or Sun-centered, Universe, he was called to Rome to answer charges brought against him by the Inquisition (the legal body of the Catholic Church). Early in 1616, Galileo was accused of being a heretic, a person who opposed Church teachings. Heresy was a crime for which people were sometimes sentenced to death. Galileo was cleared of charges of heresy, but was told that he should no longer publicly state his belief that Earth moved around the Sun. Galileo continued his study of astronomy and became more and more convinced that all planets revolved around the Sun. In 1632, he published a book that stated, among other things, that the heliocentric theory of Copernicus was correct. Galileo was once again called before the Inquisition and this time was found guilty of heresy. Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1633. Because of his age and poor health, he was allowed to serve his imprisonment under house arrest. Galileo died on January 8, 1642.
Life of Bacon:Francis Bacon was born on January 22, 1561 in London, England. Bacon served as attorney general and Lord Chancellor of England, resigning amid charges of corruption. His more valuable work was philosophical. Bacon took up Aristotelian ideas, arguing for an empirical, inductive approach, known as the scientific method, which is the foundation of modern scientific inquiry.
Life of Descartes: René Descartes was born was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye, France. He was extensively educated, first at a Jesuit college at age 8, then earning a law degree at 22, but an influential teacher set him on a course to apply mathematics and logic to understanding the natural world. This approach incorporated the contemplation of the nature of existence and of knowledge itself, hence his most famous observation, “I think; therefore I am.”
ISAAC NEWTON
EARLY LIFE OF ISAAC NEWTONIsaac Newton was born on 4 January 1643 in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. His father was a prosperous farmer, who died three months before Newton was born. His mother remarried and Newton was left in the care of his grandparents. In 1661, he went to Cambridge University where he became interested in mathematics, optics, physics and astronomy. In October 1665, a plague epidemic forced the university to close and Newton returned to Woolsthorpe. The two years he spent there were an extremely fruitful time during which he began to think about gravity. He also devoted time to optics and mathematics, working out his ideas about 'fluxions' (calculus).
CONTRIBUTION TO SCIENCE:
ANDREAS VESALIUS
Early Life and Education:Born in Brussels, Belgium in a family of physicians and pharmacists, Andreas Vesalius’s father was
court apothecary to Charles V of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor. Vesalius learned medicine from the University of Louvain and the University of Paris. He later obtained his medical degree from the University of Padua in 1537. After his graduation, Vesalius became very interested in anatomy.
Contributions and Achievements:During that time, scholars thought that the work of the ancient Greek physician Galen was an
authority when it came to human anatomy. As Greek and Roman laws had disallowed the dissection of human beings, Galen had evidently reasoned out analogies related to human anatomy after studying pigs and apes. Vesalius knew that it was absolutely essential to analyze real corpses to study the human body.Vesalius resurrected the use of human dissection, regardless of the strict ban by the Catholic Church. He soon began to realize that Galen’s work was an evalution of the dissection of animals, not human beings. Vesalius once demonstrated that men and women have the same number of ribs, contrary to the biblical story of Adam and Eve which tells that Eve was brought into existence from one of Adam’s ribs, and that men had one less rib as compared to women. Vesalius proved that belief wrong.
Vesalius published his influential book aboout human anatomy “De Humani Commis Fabrica” (The Structure of The Human Body) in 1543. It contained over 200 anatomical illustrations. The work was the earliest known precise presentation of human anatomy. It disgraced several of Galen’s doctrines, for instance the Greek belief that blood has the ability to flow between the ventricles of the heart, and that the mandible, or jaw bone, was made up of more than one bones. Particularly, his visual representation of the muscles was found to be very accurate. The seven volumes of the book laid down a solid understanding of human anatomy as the groundwork for all medical practice and curing.
Later Life and Death:Andreas Vesalius was appointed as a court physician to Charles V of Spain and his family.
Vesalius’s bravery and intelligence, however, made many conservative physicians and Catholic clergy his worst enemies. They charged him of being involved in body snatching.
He was accused of murder in 1564 for the dissection of a Spanish noble who, his disputants said, was still alive. Vesalius was also accused of atheism. King Philip II, however, reduced his sentence to a pilgrimage of penitence to the Holy Land. Regrettably on his way back, his vessel was badly harmed by a storm. Vesalius was rescued from the sea, but he died shortly thereafter.
EDWARD JENNERJenner was an English doctor, the pioneer of smallpox vaccination and the father of immunology.
Edward Jenner was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire on 17 May 1749, the son of the local vicar. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to a local surgeon and then trained in London. In 1772, he returned to Berkeley and spent most the rest of his career as a doctor in his native town.
In 1796, he carried out his now famous experiment on eight-year-old James Phipps. Jenner inserted pus taken from a cowpox pustule and inserted it into an incision on the boy's arm. He was testing his theory, drawn from the folklore of the countryside, that milkmaids who suffered the mild disease of cowpox never contracted smallpox, one of the greatest killers of the period, particularly among children. Jenner subsequently proved that having been inoculated with cowpox Phipps was immune to smallpox. He submitted a paper to the Royal Society in 1797 describing his experiment, but was told that his ideas were too revolutionary and that he needed more proof. Undaunted, Jenner experimented on several other children, including his own 11-month-old son. In 1798, the results were finally published and Jenner coined the word vaccine from the Latin 'vacca' for cow.
Jenner was widely ridiculed. Critics, especially the clergy, claimed it was repulsive and ungodly to inocculate someone with material from a diseased animal. A satirical cartoon of 1802 showed people who had been vaccinated sprouting cow's heads. But the obvious advantages of vaccination and the protection it provided won out, and vaccination soon became widespread. Jenner became famous and now spent much of his time researching and advising on developments in his vaccine. Jenner carried out research in a number of other areas of medicine and was also keen on fossil collecting and horticulture. He died on 26 January 1823.
DIRECTIONSYou and your group will complete a poster for your assigned Scientist or Enlightenment Philosopher. Your Poster must include the following:
Name of your figure – Large and Colorful and at the top of your Poster The Printed image NEATLY glued to the Poster
o Must have a nice border surrounding
o Must have a section below explaining the major events of your figures life. (See example)
3 Bullet points CLEARLY explaining your figures contribution to the Scientific Revolution or the Enlightenment
o Their main contribution should be explained carefully!! An image depicting your figures contribution!
GROUP ROLES
Artist: Draws the image depicting your figures contribution
Researcher: Highlights and finds information for the writer (and biographer if necessary) ALSO creates the title at the top of the POSTER (Make sure it is neat)
All members of the group should assist each other where it is necessary. Every single poster should be Neat, Colorful, and Complete All members of the group must Contribute equally and must work together the ENTIRE TIME Make sure you REALLY KNOW the information that you are adding!!
