Why Copernican Revolutions?

The wandering stars and planets, have been visible to us all for all of time. Only in 1543 did Nicholas Copernicus establish a heliocentric system with the planets orbiting the sun, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, truly a revolution in thinking and understanding. This was the Copernican Revolution from which the secondary meaning of revolution, a complete change or fundamental reconstruction has been derived.

The Milky Way has been clearly visible to all for all time but its structure remained unknown until Hubble resolved the spiral nebula, M31 in 1923. In 1924 he showed, using Cepheid variable stars that these spiral nebulae were well beyond the stars visible to us and lay outside the Milky Way, our own spiral nebula.

With the advent of infra-red telescopes in the 1980s and 1990s we have peered through the dust at the centre of our galaxy to reveal stars revolving around an unseen object, a super massive black hole, Sagittarius-A. Copernicus would no doubt be pleased to know that his original revolutionary thinking was still being extended to further develop our understanding of the Universe we live in.

Copernican Revolutions is no less an attempt to revolutionise the teaching of physics in school classrooms. Copernican Revolutions offers superior professional development to support you in the teaching of physics whether you are a non specialist teacher of physics at the beginning of your career or a specialist with many years of experience. The guiding principle behind everything offered by Copernican Revolutions is to develop the explanatory power of physics so that your students can construct a coherent working model of the world they live in at their own cognitive level.