Before diving into a historical overview of the scientific understanding of the planets, stars and other celestial bodies, Kuhn prefaces the main ideas in The Copernican Revolution (in Chapter 1) by arguing that the story of the shift from a geocentric understanding of the universe to a heliocentric one offers a great deal of insight far beyond the specifics of that shift.

Here, regarding the Copernican Revolution he notes: "...it has an additional significance which transcends its specific subject: it illustrates a process that today we badly need to understand.

"[1] Kuhn stresses that our lack of familiarity with the process of development of science is a dangerous gap in our knowledge because without it, we cannot expect to reasonably assess the success or accuracy of scientific ideas and theories.

For example, Kuhn shows how a “two sphere universe” - the model that saw the earth as a small sphere at the center of the universe with an outer sphere or stars that rotates (and the sun traveling in between) provided a framework that matched observations, allowed for mathematical predictions about the locations of stars in the sky at a future date, simplified what otherwise seemed to be the confounding movement of the sun, provided a simple explanation for many observed phenomena, explained differences in observations that were made from different places on Earth etc.

Kuhn develops this convincingly by walking the reader through a range of observations about the movement of the sun and stars and details about how these corresponded to the model of the universe.

After using the first chapter to show how primitive conceptions of the celestial spheres satisfied many requirements for a scientific theory, Kuhn highlights the most vexing issues with the model.

"[9] While the stars generally moved in lockstep, in predictable and organized fashion, the planets seemingly had a much more complex motion.