Video credits: Science Channel, "Viewing the Universe for the First Time"
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Assuming you're the center of anything except your own life can be a misleading proposition. Take for example the ancients', and particularly Ptolemy's, observation that the Earth was the center of the universe. Now we call it the geocentric model, then it was the basis of their cosmology and served to inform religion, science, and philosophy. Ptolemy's model was called the Almagest (AD 150) and the "system persisted, with minor adjustments, until the Earth was displaced from the centre of the universe in the 16th and 17th centuries by the Copernican system and by Kepler’s laws of planetary motion" (Brittanica).
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| Sacrobosco, Tractatus de Sphaera (1550), Wikipedia |
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By the 16th century the system was beginning to fall apart, as described in Universe (William J. Kaufmann III, W.H. Freeman & Company, New York, 1985):
...Tiny errors and inaccuracies that were unnoticeable in Ptolemy's day compounded and multiplied over the years, especially with regard to precession. Fifteenth century astronomers made some cosmetic adjustments to the Ptolemaic system. However, the system became less and less satisfying as more complicated and arbitrary details were added to keep it consistent with the observed motions of the planets.
Individual investigators, such as Aristarchus of Samos, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe, theorized that the bodies observed from Earth and Earth itself moved around the sun, but could not prove it. It wasn't until Galileo Galilei looked through the new telescope that it all came together. Here is a page of his notes on Jupiter.
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| Galileo, notes on moons of Jupiter, StrongBrains |
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Two references looking at the depth of the "cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus and others" are Celestial spheres at Wikipedia and Medieval cosmology at Luminarium Encyclopedia.
-- Marge
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