The year is 1543. A seventy-year old Polish clergyman named Mikolaj Kopernik (Latinized "Nicolaus Copernicus") publishes his lifelong work, Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. In it, he offers an explanation of the possibility that the sun, not the Earth, is at the center of the solar system. He receives the first published copy on his deathbed.

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)