Science in Europe and the enlighteners of Turkistan

In the past many people, among them the Greek scholar Ptolemy of the 2nd century CE, thought that the Earth was the centre of the universe and that the Sun, Moon and stars revolved around it. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), after many years of observation and calculation, wrote that the Earth turns on its axis and moves around the Sun. His book “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres” was published in 1543. The Italian scholar Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) supported the idea and wrote that the universe is infinite and that stars may be suns like ours; for these and other views a church court sentenced him to death in Rome in 1600. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) observed the sky with a telescope he built himself (1609–1610): he saw mountains and craters on the Moon and four moons of Jupiter. These observations strengthened Copernicus’s idea. In 1633 a church court forced Galileo to renounce his views and sentenced him to live under house arrest for the rest of his life. These events show the clash between science and religious views of the time. In time the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo were accepted in science.