NICOLAUS COPERNICUS: With Google's head-turning Doodle animation, the ...

(The astronomer called it his “Sketch of Hypothesis Made by Nicolaus Copernicus on the Heavenly Motions.”) The “Small Commentary” offered big-idea axioms, including — according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — that “the earth is only the

An animated Google Doodle today celebrates Nicolaus Copernicus, the Renaissance astronomer who pushed forward the (at the time) radical idea that Earth wasn't the center of the universe. Instead, he theorized Earth and other planets revolve around the

It celebrates Nicolaus Copernicus, the famous mathematician and astronomer from Poland who, during the Renaissance, came up with the heliocentric model, which placed the sun (as opposed to the Earth) at the center of

Google's Doodle for February 19 is a stately animation of the movement of the planets around the sun. The lovely diagram illustrates the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish astronomer whose observations of the planets led him to the conclusion

Copernicus never solved one other glitch. In his view, orbits were round, and that caused problems because observations kept showing planets in places that didn't fit this theory. The realization that orbits are elliptical (sort of stretched-out