Christopher Columbus rattled the establishment. In 1492 he sailed west from Spain to discover a new trade route to the Far East, but instead he followed the stars to the Caribbean Basin. At the time, Nicolaus Copernicus was a nineteen-year-old astronomer working on a radical theory that placed the sun at the center of the solar system and not the earth. It was a revolutionary concept because it challenged Aristotle. Scientists and philosophers held true to Aristotle’s principle that the earth was the fixed center of the universe.