To Copernicus

It’s easy now. We paint murals on our kids rooms: stars here, the sun here. The earth travels. Goodnight, moon.

But when you are the one to realize that everyone is wrong and you are right, there is no good night.

"Astronomer Copernicus, Conversations with God" by Jan Matekeo

He wanders the stone streets of Rome, cataloging the motion of the stars, charting them each night. He shreds, piece by piece, Ptolemy's complicated web of moving stars and sun, a fixed earth. One night, he sees it: the sun at the center, the stars are fixed and the planets, the planets, move.

The earth moves.

He is dizzy. He tries to walk downstairs but the vertigo stops him. Heliocentric. Perfect. Simple. Terrifying. He has to write it down. The table seems to move a little. Trust everywhere seems fractured.

The rule in science is that when two theories compete, the simpler theory wins. And when he draws his map of the universe, it looks cleaner, fewer circles, but is it more simple? They will want to know why we don’t fly off into space, why the earth isn’t ripped to shreds given the force or why, when something is tossed in the air or dropped from very high, it is not left behind by the earth’s movement.

None of that matters. He knows the truth. He dedicates the book to the pope in hopes that will garner some favor, but he does not want to defend it; he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t want to live with the questions, so he waits until he is dying, sends the book off for printing.

Mathematics is written for mathematicians, he says. I cannot help you if you don’t understand this, he says. The stars are so much farther than we can imagine. We are not the center. Forgive me for this truth.