Talk:Commentariolus

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Odd

If you click on "Narratio Prima", you get another article. The grammar in the same sentence is bad. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.41.51.240 (talk) 12:58, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This has now been corrected. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.36.237.118 (talk) 09:54, 7 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

1854

The best way of seeing what the 1854 edition contains is to look at it. This should show if it contains the Commentariolus. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.36.237.118 (talk • contribs) 19:53, March 7, 2009

No doubt. If you have access to a copy, and understand Polish well enough to identify its contents, then by all means consult it and amend the article accordingly.

—David Wilson (talk · cont) 15:39, 7 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The Commentariolus was originally in Latin. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.153.143.31 (talk) 15:54, 27 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The original was written sometime before 1514, not in 1854. If a version did appear in the 1854 Warsaw edition of De Revolutionibus it would not necessarily have been in the same language as the original. I appear to have been under the impression that it would have been a Polish translation—on what, if any, grounds, I do not recall. In fact, according to this reference, the 1854 Warsaw edition contained both Latin and Polish versions of the various texts it contains, although the Commentariolus is not mentioned as being one of them.

David Wilson (talk · cont) 01:44, 28 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

An electronic version of the 1854 Warsaw edition of De Revolutionibus is now accessible on the website of the Harvard University library. The Commentariolus doesn't seem to be listed in the index, and I was unable to find any trace of it in the body of the publication. I'm therefore beginning to suspect that Koyré was mistaken when he stated that a copy was published—even "very badly"—in this edition of De Revolutionibus.

David Wilson (talk · cont) 10:29, 29 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Factual inconsistencies between articles

Information in this article differs from information in Nicolaus Copernicus. Most strikingly, Nicolaus Copernicus says that "Commentariolus" was distributed in 1514. This article says the date of publication is unknown. I do not have the sources. Could someone please check the sources, find the correct facts, and harmonize these two articles and others that discuss "Commentariolus", including Copernican heliocentrism. Also, it should be possible to find out (from Rosen or Gingerich) and state definitively when surviving manuscripts were discovered and published. I believe the answer is two copies were discovered, both of the ones referred to in the footnote in this article. Finally, there is some information about "Commentariolus" in Nicolaus Copernicus that is not in this article, including a listing of the 7 points. This article should contain everything that Wikipedia has to say about "Commentariolus". I'm posting the same message on Talk: Nicolaus Copernicus. Thanks. Finell (Talk) 11:10, 21 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Anonymous?

The article on De revolutionibus orbium coelestium mentions that the Commentariolus was anonymous, but the article on Nicolaus Copernicus seems to imply that the booklet mentioned its author's name. Which is true? Also, if the Commentariolus was anonymous, how was it deduced that Copernicus wrote it? CielProfond (talk) 01:33, 12 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

User:CielProfond has just volunteered to do the research he calls for. There are only about three copies to read. They are in Copernicus's style. The text is very short. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.54.202.247 (talk) 09:45, 26 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The title of the Commentariolus might have been added by a scribe. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C0:FCF6:4801:C6F:139D:918C:BEF2 (talk) 07:13, 27 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

40-page outline?

When I changed a characterisation of the Commentariolus from "six-page" to "forty-page" back in 2009, I was relying on a statement by Victor Thoren on p.99 of his biography of Tycho Brahe, The Lord of Uraniborg. However, this is almost certainly an error on Thoren's part. In the introduction to his 1973 translation of the Commentariolus, cited in the article, Noel Swerdlow says that it is "scarcely eight folios in length". Even if all of them were written on both sides, they would have to be rather large folios for just eight of them to accomodate a 40-page treatise.

More decisively, the Polish Academy of Sciences has published facsimiles of all three surviving 16th-century manuscripts on pp.208–52 of volume IV of its edition of Copernicus's collected works. The Vienna manuscript (admittedly incomplete) comprises 19 pages on 10 folios, the Stockholm manuscript, which had been bound into Johannes Hevelius's copy of De revolutionibus, comprises 16 pages, and the Aberdeen manuscript, which had similarly been bound into Duncan Liddel's copy of the same work, comprises 10 pages on 6 folios.
David Wilson (talk · cont) 13:56, 18 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Parallax

This revision added a summary of the seven postulates listed in the second section of the Commentariolus. The fourth postulate was originally written (and remained that way for 14 years) to indicate that the purpose of this postulate was to ensure there was no parallax in the distant stars, which seems entirely false for several reasons: 1. Copernicus never mentioned parallax in this context, anywhere within the Commentariolus or De Revolutionibus. 2. Copernicus still had a very Aristotelian idea of the cosmos, and believed the stars remained fixed within an outer sphere. If the stars were all arranged within a 2D sphere, there could be no parallax. 3. The actual postulate, which is what really should matter here anyway, does not mention parallax. Swerdlow's (1973) translation, e.g., is: "The ratio of the distanceb between the sun and earth to the height of the sphere of the fixed stars is so much smaller than the ratio of the semidiameter of the earth to the distance of the sun that the distance between the sun and earth is imperceptible compared to the great height of the sphere of the fixed stars." Rosen's (1937) translation is similar. 4. The reason for this postulate is unclear to me from just the Commentariolus itself. However, the reasoning is actually given clearly in De Revolutionibus Book I, Chapter 6. And that chapter was written by Copernicus to actually parallel Ptolemy's Book I, Chapter 6, which discusses essentially the same reason: if Earth, in Ptolemy's system, or Earth's orbit, in Copernicus's system, did NOT have effectively the ratio of a point to the stellar sphere, then from different locations on Earth (Ptolemy) or Earth's orbit (Copernicus) the apparent speeds of stars would appear different from uniform circles. Also, the horizon would not precisely bisect the stellar sphere. 5. The concept that the universe is a 3D space filled with stars all at various distances was introduced by Bruno in 1584. Rothmann and Brahe also discussed this later that decade, with Brahe famously arguing that he'd measured the distances to the stars and found them to be too close for the Earth to be orbiting the Sun because of parallax. But all of this is 40 years AFTER Copernicus. The notion that Copernicus was hedging against Brahe's eventual argument against heliocentrism misrepresents him and hides his actual motivation. And it subtly undermines the significance of Bruno's contribution to the development of cosmology during the Scientific Revolution, suggesting that Copernicus already had a similar idea when he did not. Copernicus was very much an Aristotelian thinker. In fact, his entire reason for all of this, as he explained in the Commentariolus was because he was dissatisfied with Ptolemy's introduction of the equant, as it was not consistent with the principle of uniform circular motion. As Copernicus put it, "a system of this sort seemed neither sufficiently absolute nor sufficiently pleasing to the mind" (from Rosen's translation). At best, one could argue that Copernicus quietly made the concept thinkable, by fixing the stars and explaining that the motions of the Sun and stars are relative, due to Earth's motions. That is what made it thinkable for people like Bruno to later imagine that the heavenly bodies aren't all bound within crystalline spheres, but distributed throughout 3D space.

Regardless of everything I've said here, the bottom line is really point 3 above. The postulate should accurately represent the actual postulate as written, and should not speculate about or sneak in a suggested reason for it, whether that reason is correct or (I've argued here) not. Daryl G Janzen (talk) 02:31, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@UrielAcosta please read. You just reverted the article to include text that is inaccurate and highly misleading. Daryl G Janzen (talk) 02:35, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]