The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order is a 704-page book written by Robert S. Westman and published by University of California Press (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London) in 2011 and in 2020 (paperback).
When Copernicus first hit on his theory around 1510, European society at all social levels was consumed with chronic warfare, the syphilis pandemic and recurrence of the bubonic plague, and, soon thereafter, Martin Luther’s break with the Catholic church.
Copernicus knew Pico’s work, possibly as early as the year of its publication in Bologna, the city in which he lived with the astrological prognosticator and astronomer, Domenico Maria di Novara (1454-1504).
Astronomer-astrologers at Wittenberg, most notably Erasmus Reinhold (1511-1553) and his many students, read De revolutionibus selectively, ignoring the re-ordering of the planets and, instead, extracted from Copernicus’s work those calculational models that could be geometrically transformed into the framework of a stationary earth.
The appearance of unforeseen, singular, celestial novelties between 1572 and 1604 pushed a handful of astronomer-astrologers to consider whether alternative planetary orderings, including those of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Nicolaus Reimars Baer (1551-1600) and Paul Wittich (1546-1586) could better explain the unanticipated phenomena.
This consideration of alternatives was the first major instance of underdetermination in the history of science (where the same observational evidence equally supports two, logically different hypotheses), although the historical agents were unaware of the epistemological generality of that problem.
It resulted in new kinds of controversies and raised unprecedented questions about weighting the criteria for adjudicating among different hypotheses, including ancient authority, scriptural compatibility, simplicity, explanatory breadth, predictive accuracy and physical coherence.
And the failure of the high-profile third-generation proponents Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1638) to forge a cooperative and productive alliance around their defense of the Copernican theory is a particularly notable instance of this larger pattern of disunity.
But while court patronage allowed for rhetorical and philosophical diversity, it fails to explain why particular figures, like Galileo, adopted specific theoretical claims, such as the Copernican hypothesis.
The main social locus of change of belief was not some twentieth-century-like “scientific community,” but the master-disciple relationship that was rooted in the all-male-cultures of the universities and modeled on the paternalistic structures of the family.
Kepler’ Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (1618–21) and Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) consolidated a critical mass of novel physical claims and arguments developed between the 1580s and the telescopic discoveries of 1610-13.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and Robert Hooke (1635-1702) were members of a generation that encountered the Copernican Question not directly through Copernicus’s De revolutionibus but as a controversy already matured and refracted through the midcentury literature of the heavens and natural philosophy.
Ultimately, however, he rejected the claims of astrology as a form of idolatry, much as did Pico—based upon the projection of human qualities onto the stars and planets—and contrary to Newton’s belief in the power of God to act directly in the world without need of intermediaries.
These endings occurred through no single proof and with audiences as variously overlapping as almanac readers, practicing astrologers, planetary table makers, extraterrestrializers, itinerant scientific lecturers and, of course, philosophizing astronomers and high-end, new-style natural philosophers.”[7] 17.
Newton’s powerful achievement was his construction of a natural philosophy of mathematizable forces in which the sun’s position at or near the center of the planets could be deduced rather than assumed as a premise, as Copernicus had done: “The Copernican system is proved a priori,” Newton wrote, “for if the common center of gravity is calculated for any position of the planets it either falls in the body of the Sun or will always be very close to it.”[7] And, unlike Copernicus, Tycho Brahe or Kepler in the long sixteenth century, he made no effort to fix astrology.