Celestial spheres

Not to be confused with celestial sphere. For other uses, lion miles).[3] The nested sphere models distances to the
see Celestial (disambiguation).
Sun and planets dier signicantly from modern measurements of the distances,[4] and the size of the universe is now known to be inconceivably large and possibly
innite.[5]
Albert Van Helden has suggested that from about 1250
until the 17th century, virtually all educated Europeans
were familiar with the Ptolemaic model of nesting
spheres and the cosmic dimensions derived from it.[6]
Even following the adoption of Copernicuss heliocentric model of the universe, new versions of the celestial
sphere model were introduced, with the planetary spheres
following this sequence from the central Sun: Mercury,
Venus, Earth-Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

1 History
For more details on the causes of the motions of the
celestial spheres, see Dynamics of the celestial spheres.
Geocentric celestial spheres; Peter Apians Cosmographia
(Antwerp, 1539)

1.1 Early ideas of spheres and circles

The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by
Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus and others. In these celestial models the apparent motions of the
xed stars and the planets are accounted for by treating
them as embedded in rotating spheres made of an aetherial, transparent fth element (quintessence), like jewels
set in orbs. Since it was believed that the xed stars did
not change their positions relative to one another, it was
argued that they must be on the surface of a single starry
sphere.[1]

In Greek antiquity the ideas of celestial spheres and rings

rst appeared in the cosmology of Anaximander in the
early 6th century BC.[7] In his cosmology both the Sun
and Moon are circular open vents in tubular rings of re
enclosed in tubes of condensed air; these rings constitute
the rims of rotating chariot-like wheels pivoting on the
Earth at their centre. The xed stars are also open vents in
such wheel rims, but there are so many such wheels for the
stars that their contiguous rims all together form a continuous spherical shell encompassing the Earth. All these
wheel rims had originally been formed out of an original sphere of re wholly encompassing the Earth, which
had disintegrated into many individual rings.[8] Hence,
in Anaximanderss cosmogony, in the beginning was the
sphere, out of which celestial rings were formed, from
some of which the stellar sphere was in turn composed.
As viewed from the Earth, the ring of the Sun was highest, that of the Moon was lower, and the sphere of the
stars was lowest.

In modern thought, the orbits of the planets are viewed

as the paths of those planets through mostly empty space.
Ancient and medieval thinkers, however, considered the
celestial orbs to be thick spheres of rareed matter nested
one within the other, each one in complete contact with
the sphere above it and the sphere below.[2] When scholars applied Ptolemys epicycles, they presumed that each
planetary sphere was exactly thick enough to accommodate them.[2] By combining this nested sphere model with
astronomical observations, scholars calculated what became generally accepted values at the time for the distances to the Sun (about 4 million miles), to the other
planets, and to the edge of the universe (about 73 mil-

Following Anaximander, his pupil Anaximenes (c. 585

528/4) held that the stars, Sun, Moon, and planets are all
made of re. But whilst the stars are fastened on a revolving crystal sphere like nails or studs, the Sun, Moon,
and planets, and also the Earth, all just ride on air like
1

leaves because of their breadth.[9] And whilst the xed

stars are carried around in a complete circle by the stellar
sphere, the Sun, Moon and planets do not revolve under
the Earth between setting and rising again like the stars
do, but rather on setting they go laterally around the Earth
like a cap turning halfway around the head until they rise
again. And unlike Anaximander, he relegated the xed
stars to the region most distant from the Earth. The most
enduring feature of Anaximenes cosmos was its conception of the stars being xed on a crystal sphere as in a rigid
frame, which became a fundamental principle of cosmology down to Copernicus and Kepler.

HISTORY

element, the aether. Each of these concentric spheres is

moved by its own god an unchanging divine unmoved
mover, and who moves its sphere simply by virtue of being loved by it.[20]

After Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and

Parmenides all held that the universe was spherical.[10]
And much later in the fourth century BC Platos Timaeus
proposed that the body of the cosmos was made in the
most perfect and uniform shape, that of a sphere containing the xed stars.[11] But it posited that the planets
were spherical bodies set in rotating bands or rings rather
than wheel rims as in Anaximanders cosmology.

1.2

Emergence of the planetary spheres

Instead of bands, Platos student Eudoxus developed a

planetary model using concentric spheres for all the planets, with three spheres each for his models of the Moon
and the Sun and four each for the models of the other
ve planets, thus making 26 spheres in all.[12][13] Callippus
modied this system, using ve spheres for his models of
the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars and retaining
four spheres for the models of Jupiter and Saturn, thus
making 33 spheres in all.[13] Each planet is attached to
the innermost of its own particular set of spheres. Although the models of Eudoxus and Callippus qualitatively describe the major features of the motion of the
planets, they fail to account exactly for these motions
and therefore cannot provide quantitative predictions.[14]
Although historians of Greek science have traditionally considered these models to be merely geometrical
representations,[15][16] recent studies have proposed that
they were also intended to be physically real[17] or have
withheld judgment, noting the limited evidence to resolve
the question.[18]
In his Metaphysics, Aristotle developed a physical cosmology of spheres, based on the mathematical models of
Eudoxus. In Aristotles fully developed celestial model,
the spherical Earth is at the centre of the universe and
the planets are moved by either 47 or 55 interconnected
spheres that form a unied planetary system,[19] whereas
in the models of Eudoxus and Callippus each planets individual set of spheres were not connected to those of the
next planet. Aristotle says the exact number of spheres,
and hence the number of movers, is to be determined
by astronomical investigation, but he added additional
spheres to those proposed by Eudoxus and Callippus, to
counteract the motion of the outer spheres. Aristotle considers that these spheres are made of an unchanging fth

Ptolemaic model of the spheres for Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and

Saturn with epicycle, eccentric deferent and equant point. Georg
von Peuerbach, Theoricae novae planetarum, 1474.

In his Almagest, the astronomer Ptolemy (. ca. 150

AD) developed geometrical predictive models of the motions of the stars and planets and extended them to a unied physical model of the cosmos in his Planetary hypotheses.[21][22][23][24] By using eccentrics and epicycles,
his geometrical model achieved greater mathematical detail and predictive accuracy than had been exhibited by
earlier concentric spherical models of the cosmos.[25] In
Ptolemys physical model, each planet is contained in two
or more spheres,[26] but in Book 2 of his Planetary Hypotheses Ptolemy depicted thick circular slices rather than
spheres as in its Book 1. One sphere/slice is the deferent,
with a centre oset somewhat from the Earth; the other
sphere/slice is an epicycle embedded in the deferent, with
the planet embedded in the epicyclical sphere/slice.[27]
Ptolemys model of nesting spheres provided the general
dimensions of the cosmos, the greatest distance of Saturn being 19,865 times the radius of the Earth and the
distance of the xed stars being at least 20,000 Earth
radii.[26]
The planetary spheres were arranged outwards from the
spherical, stationary Earth at the centre of the universe in this order: the spheres of the Moon, Mercury,
Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. In more detailed models the seven planetary spheres contained other

1.3

Middle Ages

secondary spheres within them. The planetary spheres

were followed by the stellar sphere containing the xed
stars; other scholars added a ninth sphere to account
for the precession of the equinoxes, a tenth to account
for the supposed trepidation of the equinoxes, and even
an eleventh to account for the changing obliquity of the
ecliptic.[28] In antiquity the order of the lower planets was
not universally agreed. Plato and his followers ordered
them Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, and then followed the
standard model for the upper spheres.[29][30] Others disagreed about the relative place of the spheres of Mercury
and Venus: Ptolemy placed both of them beneath the Sun
with Venus above Mercury, but noted others placed them
both above the Sun; some medieval thinkers, such as alBitruji, placed the sphere of Venus above the Sun and that
of Mercury below it.[31]

1.3
1.3.1

Middle Ages
Astronomical discussions

The Earth within seven celestial spheres, from Bede, De natura

rerum, late 11th century

A series of astronomers, beginning with the Muslim astronomer al-Farghn, used the Ptolemaic model of nesting spheres to compute distances to the stars and planetary spheres. Al-Farghn's distance to the stars was
20,110 Earth radii which, on the assumption that the radius of the Earth was 3,250 miles, came to 65,357,500
miles.[32] An introduction to Ptolemys Almagest, the
Tashil al-Majisti, believed to be written by Thbit ibn
Qurra, presented minor variations of Ptolemys distances
to the celestial spheres.[33] In his Zij, Al-Battn presented
independent calculations of the distances to the planets on
the model of nesting spheres, which he thought was due to
scholars writing after Ptolemy. His calculations yielded a
distance of 19,000 Earth radii to the stars.[34]

3
Around the turn of the millennium, the Arabic astronomer and polymath Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) presented a development of Ptolemys geocentric epicyclic
models in terms of nested spheres. Despite the similarity
of this concept to that of Ptolemys Planetary Hypotheses,
al-Haythams presentation diers in sucient detail that
it has been argued that it reects an independent development of the concept.[35] In chapters 1516 of his Book of
Optics, Ibn al-Haytham also said that the celestial spheres
do not consist of solid matter.[36]
Near the end of the twelfth century, the Spanish Muslim astronomer al-Bitrj (Alpetragius) sought to explain
the complex motions of the planets without Ptolemys
epicycles and eccentrics, using an Aristotelian framework of purely concentric spheres that moved with differing speeds from east to west. This model was much
less accurate as a predictive astronomical model,[37] but
it was discussed by later European astronomers and
philosophers.[38][39]
In the thirteenth century the astronomer, al-'Uri, proposed a radical change to Ptolemys system of nesting
spheres. In his Kitb al-Hayh, he recalculated the distance of the planets using parameters which he redetermined. Taking the distance of the Sun as 1,266 Earth
radii, he was forced to place the sphere of Venus above
the sphere of the Sun; as a further renement, he added
the planets diameters to the thickness of their spheres.
As a consequence, his version of the nesting spheres
model had the sphere of the stars at a distance of 140,177
Earth radii.[34]
About the same time, scholars in European universities
began to address the implications of the rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle and astronomy of Ptolemy. Both astronomical scholars and popular writers considered the
implications of the nested sphere model for the dimensions of the universe.[40] Campanus of Novara's introductory astronomical text, the Theorica planetarum, used
the model of nesting spheres to compute the distances
of the various planets from the Earth, which he gave as
22,612 Earth radii or 73,387,747 100/660 miles.[41][42]
In his Opus Majus, Roger Bacon cited Al-Farghn's distance to the stars of 20,110 Earth radii, or 65,357,700
miles, from which he computed the circumference of the
universe to be 410,818,517 3/7 miles.[43] Clear evidence
that this model was thought to represent physical reality is the accounts found in Bacons Opus Majus of the
time needed to walk to the Moon[44] and in the popular
Middle English South English Legendary, that it would
take 8,000 years to reach the highest starry heaven.[45][46]
General understanding of the dimensions of the universe
derived from the nested sphere model reached wider audiences through the presentations in Hebrew by Moses
Maimonides, in French by Gossuin of Metz, and in Italian by Dante Alighieri.[47]

4
1.3.2

1
Philosophical and theological discussions

Philosophers were less concerned with such mathematical

calculations than with the nature of the celestial spheres,
their relation to revealed accounts of created nature, and
the causes of their motion.

HISTORY

verse theories about the causes of the celestial spheres

motions. They attempted to explain the spheres motions
in terms of the materials of which they were thought to
be made, external movers such as celestial intelligences,
and internal movers such as motive souls or impressed
forces. Most of these models were qualitative, although a
few incorporated quantitative analyses that related speed,
motive force and resistance.[55] By the end of the Middle
Ages, the common opinion in Europe was that celestial
bodies were moved by external intelligences, identied
with the angels of revelation.[56] The outermost moving
sphere, which moved with the daily motion aecting all
subordinate spheres, was moved by an unmoved mover,
the Prime Mover, who was identied with God. Each
of the lower spheres was moved by a subordinate spiritual mover (a replacement for Aristotles multiple divine
movers), called an intelligence.[57]

Adi Setia describes the debate among Islamic scholars in

the twelfth century, based on the commentary of Fakhr
al-Din al-Razi about whether the celestial spheres are
real, concrete physical bodies or merely the abstract circles in the heavens traced out by the various stars and
planets. Setia points out that most of the learned, and
the astronomers, said they were solid spheres on which
the stars turn and this view is closer to the apparent
sense of the Qur'anic verses regarding the celestial orbits. However, al-Razi mentions that some, such as the
Islamic scholar Dahhak, considered them to be abstract.
Al-Razi himself, was undecided, he said: In truth, there
is no way to ascertain the characteristics of the heavens 1.4
except by authority [of divine revelation or prophetic traditions]. Setia concludes: Thus it seems that for al-Razi
(and for others before and after him), astronomical models, whatever their utility or lack thereof for ordering the
heavens, are not founded on sound rational proofs, and
so no intellectual commitment can be made to them insofar as description and explanation of celestial realities
are concerned.[48]

Renaissance

Christian and Muslim philosophers modied Ptolemys

system to include an unmoved outermost region, the
empyrean heaven, which came to be identied as the
dwelling place of God and all the elect.[49] Medieval
Christians identied the sphere of stars with the Biblical rmament and sometimes posited an invisible layer
of water above the rmament, to accord with Genesis.[50]
An outer sphere, inhabited by angels, appeared in some
accounts.[51]
Edward Grant, a historian of science, has provided evidence that medieval scholastic philosophers generally
considered the celestial spheres to be solid in the sense of
three-dimensional or continuous, but most did not con- Thomas Digges 1576 Copernican heliocentric model of the cesider them solid in the sense of hard. The consensus was lestial orbs
that the celestial spheres were made of some kind of conEarly in the sixteenth century Nicolaus Copernicus drastinuous uid.[52]
tically reformed the model of astronomy by displacing
Later in the century, the Islamic theologian Adud al- the Earth from its central place in favour of the Sun,
Din al-Iji (12811355), under the inuence of the yet he called his great work De revolutionibus orbium
Ash'ari doctrine of occasionalism, which maintained that coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres).
all physical eects were caused directly by Gods will Although Copernicus does not treat the physical nature of
rather than by natural causes, rejected philosophy and the spheres in detail, his few allusions make it clear that,
astronomy,[53] and maintained that the celestial spheres like many of his predecessors, he accepted non-solid cewere imaginary things and more tenuous than a spi- lestial spheres.[58] Copernicus rejected the ninth and tenth
ders web.[54] Al-Ijis rejection of astronomy was, in spheres, placed the orb of the Moon around the Earth and
turn, challenged by al-Sharif al-Jurjani (13391413), moved the Sun from its orb to the center of the world.
who maintained that even if they do not have an external The planetary orbs circled the center of the world in the
reality, yet they are things that are correctly imagined and order Mercury, Venus, the great orb containing the Earth
correspond to what [exists] in actuality.[54]
and the orb of the Moon, then the orbs of Mars, Jupiter,
Medieval astronomers and philosophers developed di- and Saturn. Finally he retained the eighth starry sphere,

5
which he held to be unmoving.[59]

lutionibus in 1542 and Tycho Brahes publication of his

[64][65]
The English almanac maker, Thomas Digges, delineated cometary research in 1588.
the spheres of the new cosmological system in his Per- In Johannes Kepler's early Mysterium cosmographicum,
t Description of the Caelestiall Orbes (1576). Here he he considered the distances of the planets, and the conarranged the orbes in the new Copernican order, ex- sequent gaps required between the planetary spheres impanding one sphere to carry the globe of mortalitye, the plied by the Copernican system, which had been noted
Earth, the four elements, and the Moon; and expanding by his former teacher, Michael Maestlin.[66] Keplers Plathe starry sphere innitely upward to encompass all the tonic cosmology lled the large gaps with the ve Platonic
stars, and also to serve as the court of the Great God, the polyhedra, which accounted for the spheres measured ashabitacle of the elect, and of the coelestiall angelles.[60] tronomical distance.[67] In his mature celestial physics,
the spheres were regarded as the purely geometrical spatial regions containing each planetary orbit rather than
as the rotating physical orbs of the earlier Aristotelian
celestial physics. The eccentricity of each planets orbit
thereby dened the lengths of the radii of the inner and
outer limits of its celestial sphere and thus its thickness.
In Keplers celestial mechanics the cause of planetary motion became the rotating Sun, itself rotated by its own motive soul.[68] However, an immobile stellar sphere was a
lasting remnant of physical celestial spheres in Keplers
cosmology.

2 Literary and symbolic expressions

Keplers diagram of the celestial spheres, and of the spaces between them, following the opinion of Copernicus (Mysterium
Cosmographicum, 2nd ed., 1621)

In the course of the sixteenth century, a number

of philosophers, theologians, and astronomers, among
them Francesco Patrizi, Andrea Cisalpino, Peter Ramus,
Robert Bellarmine, Giordano Bruno, Jernimo Muoz,
Michael Neander, Jean Pena, and Christoph Rothmann,
abandoned the concept of celestial spheres.[61] Rothmann
argued from the observations of the comet of 1585 that
the lack of observed parallax indicated that the Comet
was beyond Saturn, while the absence of observed refraction indicated the celestial region was of the same material as air, hence there were no planetary spheres.[62]
Tycho Brahe's investigations of a series of comets from
1577 to 1585, aided by Rothmanns discussion of the
comet of 1585 and Michael Maestlin's tabulated distances
of the comet of 1577, which passed through the planetary orbs, led Tycho to conclude[63] that the structure of
the heavens was very uid and simple. Tycho opposed
his view to that of very many modern philosophers
who divided the heavens into various orbs made of hard
and impervious matter. Edward Grant found relatively
few believers in hard celestial spheres before Copernicus,
and concluded that the idea rst became common sometime between the publication of Copernicuss De revo-

Because the medieval universe is nite, it has a shape,

the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety....
The spheres ... present us with an object in which the
mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony.
C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, p. 99
In Cicero's Dream of Scipio, the elder Scipio Africanus
describes an ascent through the celestial spheres, compared to which the Earth and the Roman Empire dwindle
into insignicance. A commentary on the Dream of Scipio by the late Roman writer Macrobius, which included
a discussion of the various schools of thought on the order
of the spheres, did much to spread the idea of the celestial
spheres through the Early Middle Ages.[69]
Some late medieval gures noted that the celestial
spheres physical order was inverse to their order on the
spiritual plane, where God was at the center and the Earth
at the periphery. Near the beginning of the fourteenth
century Dante, in the Paradiso of his Divine Comedy, described God as a light at the center of the cosmos.[70]
Here the poet ascends beyond physical existence to the
Empyrean Heaven, where he comes face to face with God
himself and is granted understanding of both divine and
human nature. Later in the century, the illuminator of
Nicole Oresme's Le livre du Ciel et du Monde, a translation of and commentary on Aristotles De caelo produced
for Oresmes patron, King Charles V, employed the same

4 NOTES
kingdoms, thus magnifying the importance of human
deeds in the divine plan.

3 See also
Christian angelic hierarchy
Firmament
Geocentric model
History of the Center of the Universe
Musica universalis
Primum Mobile
Sphere of re

Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven; from Gustave
Dor's illustrations to the Divine Comedy, Paradiso Canto 28,
lines 1639

4 Notes
[1] Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, p. 440.
[2] Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, p. 251.
[3] Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 28-40.
[4] Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 437-8.
[5] Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, p. 3
[6] Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 37, 40.
[7] See chapter 4 of Heaths Aristarchus of Samos 1913/97
Oxford University Press/Sandpiper Books Ltd; see p.11
of Poppers The World of Parmenides Routledge 1998
[8] Heath ibid pp268
[9] See chapter 5 of Heaths 1913 Aristarchus of Samos

Nicole Oresme, Le livre du Ciel et du Monde, Paris, BnF,

Manuscrits, Fr. 565, f. 69, (1377)

[10] For Xenophanes and Parmenides spherist cosmologies

see Heath ibid chapter 7 and chapter 9 respectively, and
Popper ibid Essays 2 & 3.
[11] F. M. Cornford, Platos Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato,
pp. 547

motif. He drew the spheres in the conventional order, [12] Neugebauer, History of Ancient Mathematical Astronwith the Moon closest to the Earth and the stars highomy, vol. 2, pp. 67785.
est, but the spheres were concave upwards, centered on
God, rather than concave downwards, centered on the [13] Lloyd, Heavenly aberrations, p. 173.
Earth.[71] Below this gure Oresme quotes the Psalms
[14] Neugebauer, History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy,
that The heavens declare the Glory of God and the rvol. 2, pp. 67785.
mament showeth his handiwork.[72]
[15] Dreyer, History of the Planetary Systems, pp. 901, 1212

The late-16th-century Portuguese epic The Lusiads

vividly portrays the celestial spheres as a great machine [16] Lloyd, Aristotle, p. 150.
of the universe constructed by God.[73] The explorer
Vasco da Gama is shown the celestial spheres in the form [17] Larry Wright, The Astronomy of Eudoxus: Geometry or
Physics, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 4
of a mechanical model. Contrary to Ciceros represen(1973): 16572.
tation, da Gamas tour of the spheres begins with the
Empyrean, then descends inward toward Earth, culmi- [18] G. E. R. Lloyd, Saving the Phenomena, Classical Quarterly, 28 (1978): 202222, at p. 219.
nating in a survey of the domains and divisions of earthly

[19] Aristotle, Metaphysics 1073b11074a13, pp. 882883 in

The Basic Works of Aristotle Richard McKeon, ed., The
Modern Library 2001

[39] Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 5636.

[20] The nal cause, then, produces motion by being loved,

but all other things move by being moved Aristotle Metaphysics 1072b4.

[41] Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 434-8.

[21] Neugebauer, History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy,

pp. 11112, 148

[43] Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, p. 36.

[22] Pedersen, Early Physics and Astronomy p. 87

[23] Crowe, Theories of the World, pp.45, 4950, 72,
[24] Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein, pp.6364, 81.
[25] Taliaferro, Translators Introduction to the Almagest, p,1;
Dreyer, History of the Planetary Systems, pp.160, 167.
[26] Neugebauer, History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy,
vol. 2, pp. 917926.

[40] Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 433-43.

[42] Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 33-4.

[44] Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, p. 35.

[45] Lewis, The Discarded Image, pp. 97-8.
[46] Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, p. 38.
[47] Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 37-9.
[48] Adi Setia (2004), Fakhr Al-Din Al-Razi on Physics and
the Nature of the Physical World: A Preliminary Survey,
Islam & Science 2, retrieved 2010-03-02
[49] Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 3823.

[27] Andrea Murschel, The Structure and Function of

Ptolemys Physical Hypotheses of Planetary Motion,
Journal for the History of Astronomy, 26(1995): 3361.

[50] Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, pp. 24950.

[28] Francis R. Johnson, Marlowes Imperiall Heaven, ELH,

12 (1945): 3544, p. 39

[52] Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 32830.

[29] Bruce S. Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens: Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance, (Leiden: Brill) 2007, pp. 3645

[53] Hu, Toby (2003), The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West, Cambridge University Press, p.
175, ISBN 0-521-52994-8

[30] In his De Revolutionibus Bk1.10 Copernicus claimed the

empirical reason why Platos followers put the orbits of
Mercury and Venus above the Suns was that if they were
sub-solar, then by the Suns reected light they would
only ever appear as hemispheres at most and would also
sometimes eclipse the Sun, but they do neither. (See
p521 Great Books of the Western World 16 Ptolemy
CopernicusKepler)

[54] pp. 5557 of Ragep, F. Jamil (2001). Freeing Astronomy from Philosophy: An Aspect of Islamic Inuence on Science. Osiris. 2nd Series 16 (Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions): 49
71. Bibcode:2001Osir...16...49R. doi:10.1086/649338.
ISSN 0369-7827. JSTOR 301979.

[31] al-Birj. (1971) On the Principles of Astronomy, 7.159

65, trans. Bernard R. Goldstein, vol. 1, pp. 1235. New
Haven: Yale Univ. Pr. ISBN 0-300-01387-6
[32] Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 29-31.
[33] Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, p. 31.
[34] Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 31-2.
[35] Y. Tzvi Langermann (1990), Ibn al Haythams On the
Conguration of the World, p. 1125, New York: Garland Publishing.
[36] Edward Rosen (1985), The Dissolution of the Solid Celestial Spheres, Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1), p.
1331 [1920, 21].
[37] Bernard R. Goldstein, Al-Bitrj: On the Principles of Astronomy, New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1971, vol. 1, p.
6.
[38] Bernard R. Goldstein, Al-Bitrj: On the Principles of Astronomy, New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1971, vol. 1, pp.
405.

[51] Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, p. 250.

[55] Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, p. 541.

[56] Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, p. 527.
[57] Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 52645.
[58] Nicholas Jardine, The Signicance of the Copernican
Orbs, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 13(1982):
168194, esp. pp. 1778.
[59] Hilderich von Varel (Edo Hildericus), Propositiones Cosmographicae de Globi Terreni Dimensione, (Frankfurt a.
d. Oder, 1576), quoted in Peter Barker and Bernard
R. Goldstein, Realism and Instrumentalism in Sixteenth
Century Astronomy: A Reappraisal, Perspectives on Science 6.3 (1998): 232258, pp. 2423.
[60] Koyre, From the Closed World, pp. 28-30.
[61] Michael A. Granada, Did Tycho Eliminate the Celestial
Spheres before 1586?" Journal for the History of Astronomy, 37 (2006): 126145, pp. 1279.
[62] Bernard R. Goldstein and Peter Barker, The Role of
Rothmann in the Dissolution of the Celestial Spheres,
The British Journal for the History of Science, 28 (1995):
385403, pp. 3901.

5 BIBLIOGRAPHY

[63] Michael A. Granada, Did Tycho Eliminate the Celestial

Spheres before 1586?" Journal for the History of Astronomy, 37 (2006): 126145, pp. 1328.

Duhem, Pierre. Le Systme du Monde: Histoire des

doctrines cosmologiques de Platon Copernic, 10
vols., Paris: Hermann, 1959.

[64] Grant, Celestial Orbs, 2000, pp. 1856.

Duhem, Pierre. Medieval Cosmology: Theories of

Innity, Place, Time, Void, and the Plurality of
Worlds, excerpts from Le Systme du Monde, translated and edited by Roger Ariew, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987 ISBN 0-226-16923-5

[65] Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 3458.

[66] Grassho, Michael Maestlins Mystery.
[67] See Judith Field, Keplers geometric cosmology for details
of Keplers cosmology
[68] See p5145 of Keplers 1630 Epitome of Copernican Astronomy Vol.1 Bk4.2.3 for his arguments that the Sun has
a driving soul on p896 of the Encyclopdia Britannica
edition
[69] Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, transl.
by William Harris Stahl, New York: Columbia Univ. Pr.,
1952; on the order of the spheres see pp. 1625.
[70] C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to
Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1964, p. 116. ISBN 0-521-09450-X
[71] Nicole Oreseme, Le livre du Ciel et du Monde, 1377,
retrieved 2 June 2007.
[72] Ps. 18: 2; quoted in Nicole Oresme, Le livre du ciel et
du monde, edited and translated by A, D. Menut and A.
J. Denomy, Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Pr., 1968, pp.
2823.

Dreyer, John Louis Emil (2007) [1905]. History of

the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler. New
York, NY: Cosimo. ISBN 1-60206-441-5.
Eastwood, Bruce, Astronomy in Christian Latin
Europe c. 500 c. 1150, Journal for the History
of Astronomy, 28(1997): 235258.
Eastwood, Bruce, Ordering the Heavens: Roman
Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance, Leiden: Brill, 2007. ISBN 978-90-0416186-3.
Eastwood, Bruce and Gerd Graho, Planetary Diagrams for Roman Astronomy in Medieval Europe,
ca. 800-1500, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 94, pt. 3, Philadelphia, 2004.
ISBN 0-87169-943-5

[73] Luiz vaz de Cames, The Lusiads, translated by Landeg

White. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Field, J. V., Keplers geometrical cosmology.

Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988 ISBN
0-226-24823-2

Golino, Carlo (ed.)Galileo Reappraised University

of California Press 1966

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Grassho, Gerd (2012). Michael Maestlins Mystery: Theory Building with Diagrams. Journal for the History of Astronomy 43: 5773.
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9
Heath, Thomas Aristarchus of Samos Oxford University Press/Sandpiper Books Ltd. 1913/97
Jarrell, R.A. The contemporaries of Tycho Brahe in
Taton & Wilson (eds)1989
Koyr, Alexandre: Galileo Studies (translator
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Koyr, Alexandre (1957). From the Closed World to
the Innite Universe. Forgotten Books. ISBN 9781-60620-143-5. Retrieved 8 May 2012.
Kepler, Johannes, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Bks 4 & 5), published in Great Books of the
Western World : 16 Ptolemy Copernicus Kepler, Encyclopdia Britannica Inc. 1952
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Lindberg, David C. (1992). The Beginnings of Western Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Lindberg, David C. (ed) Science in the Middle Ages
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1978. ISBN 0-22648233-2
Linton, Christopher M. (2004). From Eudoxus
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Lloyd, G. E. R., Aristotle: The Growth and Structure
of his Thought, pp. 133153, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1968. ISBN 0-521-09456-9.
Lloyd, G. E. R., Heavenly aberrations: Aristotle
the amateur astronomer, pp. 160183 in his Aristotelian Explorations, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
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Mach, Ernst The Science of Mechanics Open Court
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Pederson, Olaf (1993) [1974]. Early Physics and

Astronomy: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40340-5.
Popper, Karl The World of Parmenides Routledge
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Rosen, Edward Three Copernican Treatises Dover
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Sambursky, S. The Physical World of Late Antiquity
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Sorabji, Richard Matter, Space and Motion London:
Duckworth, 1988 ISBN 0-7156-2205-6
Sorabji, Richard (ed) Philoponus and the Rejection
of Aristotelian Science London & Ithaca NY 1987
Sorabji, Richard The Philosophy of the Commentators, 200600 AD: Volume 2 Physics Duckworth
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Taliaferro, R. Catesby (1946). Translators Introduction to the Almagest. In Hutchins (1952, pp.14).
R. Taton & C. Wilson (eds.)The General History of
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Thoren, Victor E., Tycho Brahe in Taton & Wilson
1989
Van Helden, Albert (1985). Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley. Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press. ISBN 0-226-84882-5.

6 External links

Maier, Annaliese, At the Threshold of Exact Science:

Selected Writings of Annaliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy, edited by Steven Sargent,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1982.

Working model and complete explanation of the Eudoxuss Spheres

McCluskey, Stephen C., Astronomies and Cultures

in Early Medieval Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Pr., 1998. ISBN 0-521-77852-2

Henry Mendell, Vignettes of Ancient Mathematics:

Eudoxus of Cnidus Ptolemy, Almagest

Neugebauer, Otto, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, 3 vols., New York: Springer, 1975.
ISBN 0-387-06995-X

Dennis Duke, Animated Ptolemaic model of the

nested spheres

10

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