Finally We Shall Place The Sun

Nicolaus Copernicus wrote this in Book I of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543), the work in which he proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, lies at the center of the planetary system. The book was dedicated to Pope Paul III and published in the final year of Copernicus's life; according to legend, he received the first printed copy on the day he died. The heliocentric model it described — refined over the following century by Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton — transformed humanity's understanding of its place in the cosmos.