| Chapter 1: | The New Astronomy |
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though Socrates had agreed that musical harmony is to the ear “what astronomy is to the eye,” Aristotle could not accept the notion of music of the spheres, dismissing it as “absurd and extravagant” (Dicks 71).
The empirical observation that individual stars move along perfectly circular tracks at perfectly uniform rates led Aristotle to regard the circle and sphere as the core figures of a divine geometry, as he describes in his treatise, On the Heavens. As such, the figures became part of theological doctrine. Yet at the other end of the spectrum, it was evident that the Earth, though round, was not uniformly smooth, nor were its inhabitants free from sin. Thus, Aristotle developed a theo-cosmological model with a gradient of perfection beginning near zero at the corrupt Earth and increasing outward to the heavens. Between the extremes lay the seven Ancient Planets or Wanderers, whose order had been established by the ancient Babylonians (see figure 1.1).
- G: Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, stars.
Figure 1.1. The bounded geocentric model according to Peter Apian, from Cosmographia (1539).
