In the 16th century, a Polish astronomer named Copernicus suggested
that all those same motions could be explained by imagining that the earth
was turning around once a day and orbiting around the sun once a year.
This explanation was rejected by nearly everyone because it violated common
sense and required the universe to be unbelievably large. Worse, it flew
in the face of the belief, universally held at the time, that the earth
was at the center of the universe.
| See Content Standard G History and
Nature of Science (grades 9-12): Historical Perspectives.
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