A committee of Polish Americans commissioned this sculpture to honor Mikolaj Kopernik, known to most English speakers as Nicolaus Copernicus, on the 500th anniversary of his birth. Kopernik was the Renaissance astronomer who boldly theorized that the earth and other planets rotate around the sun. Sculptor Dudley Talcott symbolizes the sun with stainless steel disks and the earth’s orbit with a 16-foot ring.