Copernican Principle

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, demonstrating that Earth orbits the Sun rather than sitting at the center of the universe. Four centuries later, cosmologist Hermann Bondi coined the term "Copernican principle" in 1952 to generalize this insight: humans occupy no privileged position in the cosmos. Astrophysicist J. Richard Gott extended the principle temporally in a 1993 Nature paper, arguing that our moment in time is equally unspecial.