The Copernican Principle
The Copernican Principle
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.2
—Douglas Adams
Is the Earth an uninteresting speck in a mundane solar system, residing within a run-of-the-mill galaxy within a pointless universe? This is the Copernican Principle.
The principle, named after the fifteenth-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, is a philosophical outgrowth of his discovery of a heliocentric universe. The dominant scientific view at the time had Earth as the physical center of the universe. Subsequent folklore had it that the geocentric view placed Earth (hence man) in an exalted position.3 Thus Copernicus is said to have knocked man off his throne. The more mundane and unspectacular our little patch of the universe seems, the more it seems to support an accidental view of our origins. This anecdote (revisionist history included) underlies the Principle and fits with a Western philosophical movement called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a thought system based on the view that outside reality can be objectively known and is ultimately discoverable. It also endorsed a materialistic view of the universe; this discovery is done through unfettered reason. The older view that scientific investigation should include consideration of a final cause, a purpose, was overthrown.