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Polish Science Day marked

19.02.2021 15:00
Introduced in 2020, Polish Science Day honours the country’s scientists, inventors and researchers, and their contribution to Polish and world science.
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Jan Matejkos painting Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God
Jan Matejko's painting 'Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God' Wikimedia Commons, public domain

The date chosen for the day is not accidental. One of Poland's - and the world's - greatest scholars was born on February 19, 1473. Nicholas Copernicus, a mathematician and astronomer, is known as the man who “stopped the sun and moved the Earth.”

In his work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, printed in 1543, he formulated a model that placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the centre of the universe.