The Copernican Toolkit

Open-source tools for scientists who take Earth's motion seriously.

---

The Problem

Modern physics treats laboratories as inertial frames. They are not.

Every mass on Earth — every molecule in every cell — is embedded in a complex, periodic acceleration field driven by Earth's spin, lunar gravity, and solar orbit. These motions produce real, calculable strain cycles: jerk, snap, and higher-order dynamics that oscillate with diurnal, lunar, and annual periodicities.

The Born-Oppenheimer approximation, foundational to quantum chemistry, separates nuclear and electronic motion by assuming nuclei are slow and heavy. This is powerful — and it may have blinded us to the very dynamics that biology exploits. The low-energy, slowly-developing strain cycles of Earth-bound frames operate at timescales and energy scales that molecular biology cares deeply about.

Physical "constants" may not be constant at all — they may be mean values averaged over the inherent dynamic cycles that all Earth-bound masses possess.

Life evolved in these dynamics. What if life depends on them?

This is the question that drives The Copernican Project, a Berkeley-based research organization working at the intersection of biophysics, nuclear physics, chronobiology, and gravitational biology.

The Mission

The Copernican Toolkit is the open-source arm of this effort. We are building tools, datasets, and computational frameworks that enable scientists and developers to:

1. Quantify the real dynamical environment of Earth-bound experiments
2. Detect periodicities in biological data that correlate with gravitational and orbital cycles
3. Model how strain fields couple to molecular-scale processes
4. Challenge assumptions baked into standard computational chemistry and biophysics

This is not a company. This is a movement — an invitation to take Copernicus seriously, all the way down to the molecules.

Toolkit Modules

earthframe — Earth-Bound Reference Frame Dynamics (v0.1 — available now)

Compute the full dynamical environment of any point on Earth's surface:

• Velocity fields: spin, orbital, and combined tangential velocities at any latitude
• Acceleration profiles: centripetal, Coriolis, and tidal accelerations
• Jerk & snap: third- and fourth-order dynamics — the periodicities physics usually ignores
• Strain cycles: diurnal, lunar, and annual periodicity decomposition
• Visualizations: publication-ready plots of the dynamics your lab sits in

from earthframe import EarthFrame

# Berkeley, CA
frame = EarthFrame(latitude=37.8716, longitude=-122.2727)

# What dynamics is this frame experiencing right now?
state = frame.now()
print(state.velocity)        # Combined tangential velocity (m/s)
print(state.acceleration)    # Net non-inertial acceleration (m/s²)
print(state.jerk)            # Rate of change of acceleration (m/s³)

# Visualize 24 hours of dynamics
frame.plot_dynamics(hours=24, save="berkeley_dynamics.png")

# Get strain cycle periodicities
cycles = frame.strain_spectrum(days=365)
cycles.plot()

Coming Next

Module	Description	Status
periodicity	Time-series tools for detecting circadian, circalunar, and annual cycles in biological data	Planned
isomerdb	Curated database of nuclear isomeric states at biologically relevant energies (<10 eV)	Planned
isotope-tools	Heavy isotope fractionation analysis for metabolic pathway studies	Planned
spacebio	Tools for analyzing biological data from altered-gravity environments (ISS, parabolic flight)	Planned

Installation

pip install copernican-toolkit

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/thecopernicanproject/copernican-toolkit.git
cd copernican-toolkit
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Quick Start

See the notebooks/ directory for interactive examples:

• 01_your_lab_in_motion.ipynb — Compute the dynamics at your location
• 02_jerk_and_snap.ipynb — Why higher-order dynamics matter for biology
• 03_strain_periodicities.ipynb — Annual strain spectrum decomposition

Contributing

We welcome contributions from physicists, biologists, data scientists, and anyone who thinks Earth's motion matters more than we've assumed.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

The Copernican Project

The Copernican Toolkit is developed by The Copernican Project, a Berkeley-based research organization producing the theoretical framework and experimental results identifying how gravitational, electromagnetic, and nuclear dynamics are united within cell environments.

Research areas:

• The Gravitational Connection — Earth's dynamics drive evolution and metabolism
• The Nuclear Connection — Nuclear isomeric states participate in enzymatic catalysis
• The Chirality Connection — Homochirality explained through Earth's spin and EM properties
• Biological Challenges of Space — Why metabolic processes lose order without proper gravitational dynamics

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.

Citation

If you use the Copernican Toolkit in your research, please cite:

@software{copernican_toolkit,
  title = {The Copernican Toolkit: Open-Source Tools for Earth-Bound Reference Frame Dynamics},
  author = {The Copernican Project},
  url = {https://github.com/thecopernicanproject/copernican-toolkit},
  year = {2026}
}

---

"And yet it moves." — Galileo Galilei

So does everything on it. Let's finally account for that.