First Move, Copernicus

Nowadays, all of us who are taught the history of science learn that Nicolaus Copernicus, in 1543, put the sun at the universe's center and demoted Earth into just another planet. As far as astronomy goes, that's true. But Copernicus himself meant something quite different, and profoundly geological. Consider the very first sentence of his Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, dedicating the book to Pope Paul III: "I can easily conceive, most Holy Father, that as soon as some people learn that in this book which I have written concerning the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, I ascribe certain motions to the Earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected." Elevating Earth from the universe's fixed dead zone into a mobile body, exactly on a par with the planets—indeed, turning Earth into a planet—was his most profound scientific breakthrough. The idea that Earth was demoted has been called "the Copernican cliché" by historians of science.

In March's issue of Geology, Walter Alvarez and Henrique Leitão describe this key point of the "Copernican revolution" and urge that geologists claim it as part of their own history. The heliocentric theory that Copernicus is usually lauded for is actually a failure—the sun is not the center of the universe any more than Earth was. But, they point out, "the planetary-Earth concept was correct; there has never been any serious reason since then to think that Earth is not a planet."

Discovery News also published a story based on this paper adding the welcome, long-standing argument by Eldridge Moores that geology should be taught in secondary school as the central basic science. Geology is the historical wellspring of physics and chemistry, not some lesser "applied" branch of those fields. And geology provided the strongest evidence for biological evolution in the years before genetics was well understood; even today fossils are essential to evolutionary research.

Background:
"Earth" versus "the world"
Earth in the 1600s
Geology and evolution