New to Penguin Classics, the astonishing story of the Copernican Revolution, told through the words of the ground-breaking scientists who brought it about In the late fifteenth century, it was believed that the earth stood motionless at the centre of a small, ordered cosmos. Just over two centuries later, everything had changed. Not only was the sun the centre of creation, but the entire practice of science had been revolutionised. This is the story of that astonishing transformation, told through the words of the astronomers and mathematicians at its heart. Bringing together excerpts from the works and letters of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and others for the first time, The Dawn of Modern Cosmology is the definitive record of one of the great turning points in human history. Edited with Translations, Notes and an Introduction by Aviva Rothman

Johanne Kepler's "Harmonice mundi" was planned in 1599 as a sequel to the "Mysterium cosmographicum." In 1618 Kepler discovered the third law of planetary motion relating to the periodic times of the planets to their mean distances from the sun - a crowning achievement that enabled him to bring the "Harmonice mundi" to completeion. The authors have presented and interpreted Kepler's Latin text to readers of English, by putting it into "the kind of clear but earnest language which we suppose Kepler would have used if he had been writing today."