Government and way of seeing the universe
The Copernicus Revolution is the title with which is usually known the scientific revolution that occurs in Western Europe, represented in astronomy by the passage of the traditional geocentric Ptolemaic system to the innovative heliocentric Copernican system, initiated in the sixteenth century by Nicolaus Copernicus ( whose work De revolutionibus, does not allude to the traditional concept of revolution, but to the one of cycle or circular trajectory of the celestial bodies) and culminated in the XVII century by Isaac Newton. Largely as a result of this revolution, the intellectual panorama of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is considered the crisis of European consciousness and will open the eighteenth century as a century of lights or the Enlightenment.
The expression Copernican revolution or Copernican turn has become popularly synonymous with radical change in any field.
The transformation of Western society from medieval to modern, in its aspect of change of mentality towards modernity, meant a new consideration of nature from a new scientific thought, allowed by the use of human reason without subjection to the principle of authority. Since the Renaissance, humanist anthropocentrism has replaced the theocentrism of scholasticism. The Baroque will revalue the senses and experience as a source of knowledge. Rationalism and Empiricism will be two opposite philosophical orientations, but complementary.
