Early cosmologies, or worldviews, envisioned a universe subject to the whims of gods and were anthropocentric: focused on the role and fate of human beings. As such, cosmology and religion were often intertwined.
For two millennia, the Aristotelian physical cosmology of rotating spheres carrying the sun, moon, planets, and stars around the central earth permeated Western thought. The natural place for earthy material was at the center of the universe, and earthy material tended to move to its natural place. Planetary spheres rotated because that was their natural motion. Aristotle's teleological exp…
The match between Ptolemy's reported observations and his theory is too good to be true, and the Almagest has been called the greatest fraud in the history of science. It is not a modern scientific research paper, however, but a textbook, and it is in this context that Ptolemy should be judged. He made many observations; errors largely canceled each other out; and he thus obtained an accura…
Ptolemy's planetary theory matched observations, but in Copernicus's opinion, it violated the standard of uniform circular motion. Also, Ptolemy's scheme did not automatically produce phenomena that followed naturally in Copernicus's heliocentric model. An unauthorized foreword to Copernicus's 1543 De revolutionibus orbium coelestium presented the heliocentric th…
Tycho Brahe's (1546–1601) observations of comets coursing through the solar system shattered the Aristotelian crystalline spheres, and his observation of a nova, a star flaring up in brightness, pierced Aristotelian belief in an unchangeable heaven. Belief in uniform circular motion died next when Kepler used Brahe's observations to show that planets travel around the sun in e…
At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was generally thought that the Earth's galaxy was some ten thousand light-years across and that the solar system was near the center of the galaxy. This vision of the universe was soon replaced with a revolutionary new conception. Harlow Shapley at the Mount Wilson Observatory showed that the galaxy is hundreds of thousands of light-years in dia…
Berendzen, Richard, Richard Hart, and Daniel Seeley. Man Discovers the Galaxies. New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Crowe, Michael J. Modern Theories of the Universe: From Herschel to Hubble. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. ——. Theories of the World from Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution. New York: Dover Publications, 1990. Duhem, Pierre. To Save the Phenomena, an…
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