Publication Details

Abstract

The author elaborates in his paper the history of the struggle of copernicanism with anticopernicanism in Slovakia. The struggle had been lasting for almost one and a half centuries, abruptly from the first half of the 17th till the end of the 17th centuries, when heliocentrism won and started to be popularized. The author has noticed the scientific and ideological side of this struggle. It was Tycho de Brahe, Riccioli and others who were long opposing Copernicus scientifically. But in the second half of the 18th century Newton's teaching was being assepted and with it also the corrected heliocentrism of Copernicus. From the ideological point of view it is interesting that Copernicus was put through in Slovakia by protestant laymen and catholic priests who all got into conflict with the biblical geocentrism. As they could not refuse the bible as mistaken, they took recourse to its alegorical interpretation that was usual everywhere then. Although this attempt was subjectively reactionary, objectively it contributed to the general tendency of relativization, de-deification and humanization of the bible.