On the Revolutions
Nicolaus Copernicus hesitated for a long time to make his heliocentric theory public and publish it in book form. He finally decided to do so in 1539, as a result of discussions with the Bishop of Chelmno, Tiedemann Gies, and his only pupil, Jerzy Joachim Rheticus, at the castle in Lubawa. The manuscript of the work explaining the heliocentric theory was titled De revolutionibus… , or On Revolutions…, and left Frombork in September 1541. Rheticus delivered the manuscript to the well-known publishing house of Johannes Petreius in Nuremberg, which specialized in publishing scientific works. Printing began in mid-1542 and was completed in the spring of 1543. In a letter to Rheticus, Bishop Giese wrote that Copernicus saw the final version of his work on the day of his death, May 21, 1543.
The observatory was described by Elias Olsen Morsing, the envoy of Danish astronomer Tycho de Brahe. With the permission of the Frombork canons, he took Copernicus’ instruments to Denmark. However, they were destroyed at the Tycho de Brahe’s observatory on the island of Ven as a result of a huge fire.
For more than 100 years, the pavimentum has been the subject of searches carried out by various groups of archaeologists. The first explorations were carried out even before World War II, followed by others in the 1960s. In 2009, the excavations were carried out at the garden of the St. Stanislaus’ canonry in Frombork (where the astronomer used to live), but the pavimentum was not found.
In 2018, an interesting concept was put forward by Michal Juszczakiewicz and Robert Szaj during the making of the documentary film “Secrets of Copernicus’ astronomy” produced by the Nicolaus Copernicus Foundation. During the making of the film, archaeological GPR surveys were carried out in places where the researchers indicated the traces of pavimentum might be found. The surveys ruled them out as the possible location of the observatory remains. Work is currently underway to verify Juszczakiewicz and Szaj’s hypothesis of a different location of Nicolaus Copernicus’ pavimentum.
