Today's entry takes us southwards, down to the Museum Campus(right in front of the Adler Planetarium, to be specific.). Standing in front of the building is a small plaza, and in the center of this plaza is a statue of Nicolaus Copernicus. For those of you that don't know, Copernicus was a Polish astronomer who made the utterly groundbreaking claim that the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. Okay, so it doesn't sound super groundbreaking, except for the fact that Copernicus did the bulk of his work in the early part of the 16th Century, a time in which the Church was the ultimate end all be all. Unfortunately, the whole concept of heliocentrism was not really accepted within the church, and going against the teachings of the church was not something you wanted to do back then In fact, this fear partially contributed to him delaying the publication of his final masterpiece by more than ten years. And even when his book finally did come out, he included an inscription dedicating the work to the Pope, so as to deflate any controversy.
As to the statue, it was given to Chicago by the Copernicus Foundation and the Polish-American Congress in 1973 to commemorate the 500th Anniversary of Coperinus' birth, and was placed outside of the Adler Planetarium. One fun fact about the statue is that in one of his hands, the statue his holding an astrolabe. That astrolabe has twice been stolen by folks who think that kind of stuff is funny. The astrolabe has since been equipped to deter it's theft, such as the addition of laser beams(not really)
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