Nicolaus Copernicus gave the world perhaps the most important scientific insight of the modern age, the theory that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun, and that the earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours--nearly everyone then believed that a perfectly still earth rested in the middle of the cosmos, where all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. A transcendent genius, Copernicus was also a flawed and conflicted person. During...