2015-02-13 BBC:星光七纪元-9（在线收听）

But when a star is born and starts its life story, scientists have discovered that something else very important can begin. The first person to get an inkling of the second story of creation was Nicolas C, the father of modern astronomy, an accidental social revolutionary, in 1543 he published a book that overturned more than 1,000 years of astronomical thought, the belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

Well, this is exciting, this is one of the most important books in the history of science, you can see from the title page that it's C's six books on the revolution of heavenly spheres, as well as being astronomically explosive, it was also explosive in terms of changing humankind's understanding of its place in the universe, and we can see that i think quite clearly, if we look at the famous diagram here and you can see that here at the centre is not the Earth as people had thought for thousands of years, but sol Latin for Sun, and here is the Earth going around the central Sun in this revolutionary new conception of the universe.

Earth had been relegated from the centre of the universe to just the third rock circling the Sun, the traditional story of how the cosmos was constructed had been shaken to its foundations, and in the 16th century this had deeply subversive implications.