| Chapter 1: | The New Astronomy |
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Earthlings could see the Sun but not the Central Fire and Counter-Earth, as these were always below their horizon. In the fifth century BC, Ecphantus and Hicetas are reputed to have advocated a rotating Earth in order to account for the apparent daily rotation of the sky, and later, Pythagoreans decided to define the Earth's revolutionary period as one year (Dicks 73). Archytas (428–347 BC) questioned whether the apparent sphere of stars confined physical space, and Plutarch (AD c.46–c.120) credited Heraclides Pontus (c.388–c.315 BC) and the Pythagoreans with the idea of multiple worlds. “Heraclydes and the Pythagoreans hold, that every Star is a world by it selfe, conteining an earth, an aire, and a skie, in an infinit celestiall nature” (Heninger 125). The realm of the stars brought the total number of cosmic entities to the desired magical value of 10. All told, by the middle of the fourth century BC, Pythagoras and his followers had introduced concepts that resurfaced two thousand years later as the essential ingredients of the so-called New Astronomy. These concepts are:
- 1. the Earth rotates on its axis,
- 2. the Earth revolves around the Sun,
- 3. the Universe is potentially infinite.
Coeval with the development of the Pythagorean Worldview, Anaxagoras (c.500–428 BC) and the atomists Leucippus (c.500–428 BC), Democritus (469–c.370 BC), and Epicurus (341–270 BC) proclaimed that the World is populated by an infinite number of atoms—an idea further promoted by the Roman poet Lucretius (c.99–c.55 BC). Surprisingly, these atomists could imagine an infinite Universe populated by monads but could not envision the rotundity of the Earth. Anaxagoras and Democritus thought that the Earth was flat; Democritus believed it was disc-shaped and hollow in the middle, and Leucippus thought it was shaped like a drum (Dicks 80–82). The belief in a flat Earth persisted even into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, demonstrating how slow the pace of progress in cosmological thinking has been over the ages.