In 2005 archaeologists digging beneath Frombork Cathedral in Poland found a jawless skeleton of a man around 70 years old. DNA from hairs tucked inside a 16th-century book in a Swedish library confirmed it was Nicolaus Copernicus. This episode rebuilds his biography from that cold case backward, beginning in the merchant city of Torun, the death of his father when he was ten, and the powerful uncle Lucas Watzenrode, a prince-bishop whose enemies called him the devil incarnate, who secured a lucrative cathedral canonry for his nephew and funded years of study in Krakow, Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara.

We look at why the Ptolemaic system of epicycles struck Copernicus as too ugly to be true, how his training in canon law and medicine shaped a diagnostic approach to the cosmos, and the surprisingly action-packed middle of his life directing the d ...