Celestial spheres

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 fixed stars and the planets are
accounted for by treating them as embedded in rotating spheres made of an aetherial, transparent fifth element (quintessence), like
jewels set in orbs. Since it was believed that the fixed 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 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 rarefied matter nested one within the other, each one in complete
contact with the sphere above it and the sphere below.[2] When scholars applied Ptolemy's 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 million miles).[3] The nested sphere model's distances to the Sun and planets differ
significantly from modern measurements of the distances,[4] and the size of the universe is now known to be inconceivably large and
possibly infinite.[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 Copernicus's
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.

Geocentric celestial spheres; Peter Apian's

Cosmographia (Antwerp, 1539)

Contents
1 History
1.1 Early ideas of spheres and circles
1.2 Emergence of the planetary spheres
1.3 Middle Ages
1.3.1 Astronomical discussions
1.3.2 Philosophical and theological
discussions
1.4 Renaissance
2 Literary and symbolic expressions
3 See also
4 Notes
5 Bibliography
6 External links

History
Early ideas of spheres and circles
In Greek antiquity the ideas of celestial spheres and rings first 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 fire enclosed in tubes of condensed air; these rings constitute the rims of rotating chariot-like wheels pivoting on the Earth at their centre. The fixed
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 fire wholly encompassing the Earth, which had disintegrated into many individual rings.[8] Hence, in
Anaximanders's 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.
Following Anaximander, his pupil Anaximenes (c. 585528/4) held that the stars, Sun, Moon, and planets are all made of fire. 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 leaves because of their breadth.[9] And whilst the fixed 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 fixed stars to the region most distant from the Earth. The
most enduring feature of Anaximenes' cosmos was its conception of the stars being fixed on a crystal sphere as in a rigid frame, which became a fundamental principle of cosmology down
to Copernicus and Kepler.
After Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Parmenides all held that the universe was spherical.[10] And much later in the fourth century BC Plato's Timaeus proposed that the body of
the cosmos was made in the most perfect and uniform shape, that of a sphere containing the fixed stars.[11] But it posited that the planets were spherical bodies set in rotating bands or
rings rather than wheel rims as in Anaximander's cosmology.

Emergence of the planetary spheres

Instead of bands, Plato's 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 five planets, thus making 26 spheres in all.[12][13]Callippus modified this system, using five 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 Aristotle's 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 unified planetary system,[19] whereas in the models of Eudoxus and Callippus
each planet's 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 fifth 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]
In his Almagest, the astronomer Ptolemy (fl. ca. 150 AD) developed geometrical predictive models of the motions of the stars and planets and
extended them to a unified 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 Ptolemy's 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 offset 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] Ptolemy's 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 fixed 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 secondary spheres
within them. The planetary spheres were followed by the stellar sphere containing the fixed 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 al-Bitruji, placed the sphere of Venus above the Sun and that of Mercury below it.[31]

Middle Ages

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.

Astronomical discussions
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. AlFarghn'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 Ptolemy's
Almagest, the Tashil al-Majisti, believed to be written by Thbit ibn Qurra, presented minor variations of Ptolemy's 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]
Around the turn of the millennium, the Arabic astronomer and polymath Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) presented a development of Ptolemy's geocentric epicyclic models in terms of nested
spheres. Despite the similarity of this concept to that of Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses, al-Haytham's presentation differs in sufficient detail that it has been argued that it reflects 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 Ptolemy's 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 Ptolemy's 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 refinement, he
added the planet's 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 Bacon's 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]
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.
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 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]
Christian and Muslim philosophers modified Ptolemy's system to include an unmoved outermost region, the empyrean heaven, which came to be identified as the dwelling place of God
and all the elect.[49] Medieval Christians identified the sphere of stars with the Biblical firmament and sometimes posited an invisible layer of water above the firmament, 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 consider them solid in the sense of hard. The consensus was that the celestial spheres were made of some kind of continuous fluid.[52]
Later in the century, the Islamic theologian Adud al-Din al-Iji (12811355), under the influence of the Ash'ari doctrine of occasionalism, which maintained that all physical effects were
caused directly by God's will rather than by natural causes, rejected philosophy and astronomy,[53] and maintained that the celestial spheres were "imaginary things" and "more tenuous
than a spider's web".[54] Al-Iji's rejection of astronomy was, in turn, challenged by al-Sharif al-Jurjani (13391413), who maintained that "even if they do not have an external reality, yet
they are things that are correctly imagined and correspond to what [exists] in actuality".[54]
Medieval astronomers and philosophers developed diverse 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, identified with the angels of revelation.[56] The outermost moving sphere, which moved with the daily motion affecting all
subordinate spheres, was moved by an unmoved mover, the Prime Mover, who was identified with God. Each of the lower spheres was moved by a subordinate spiritual mover (a
replacement for Aristotle's multiple divine movers), called an intelligence.[57]

Renaissance
Early in the sixteenth century Nicolaus Copernicus drastically reformed the model of astronomy by displacing the Earth from its central place in
favour of the Sun, yet he called his great work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres). Although
Copernicus does not treat the physical nature of the spheres in detail, his few allusions make it clear that, like many of his predecessors, he
accepted non-solid celestial spheres.[58] Copernicus rejected the ninth and tenth spheres, placed the orb of the Moon around the Earth and moved
the Sun from its orb to the center of the world. The planetary orbs circled the center of the world in the order Mercury, Venus, the great orb
containing the Earth and the orb of the Moon, then the orbs of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Finally he retained the eighth starry sphere, which he
held to be unmoving.[59]
The English almanac maker, Thomas Digges, delineated the spheres of the new cosmological system in his Perfit Description of the Caelestiall
Orbes (1576). Here he arranged the "orbes" in the new Copernican order, expanding one sphere to carry "the globe of mortalitye", the Earth, the
four elements, and the Moon; and expanding the starry sphere infinitely upward to encompass all the stars, and also to serve as "the court of the
Great God, the habitacle of the elect, and of the coelestiall angelles."[60]
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,

Thomas Digges' 1576 Copernican

heliocentric model of the celestial orbs

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 Rothmann's 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 fluid 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
first became common sometime between the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus in 1542 and Tycho Brahe's publication of his cometary
research in 1588.[64][65]
Kepler's diagram of the celestial
spheres, and of the spaces between
them, following the opinion of
Copernicus (Mysterium
Cosmographicum, 2nd ed., 1621)

In Johannes Kepler's early Mysterium cosmographicum, he considered the distances of the planets, and the consequent gaps required between the
planetary spheres implied by the Copernican system, which had been noted by his former teacher, Michael Maestlin.[66] Kepler's Platonic
cosmology filled the large gaps with the five Platonic polyhedra, which accounted for the spheres' measured astronomical 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 planet's orbit thereby defined the lengths of the radii of the inner
and outer limits of its celestial sphere and thus its thickness. In Kepler's 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 Kepler's cosmology.

Literary and symbolic expressions

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 insignificance. 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]

"Because the medieval universe is finite, 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

Some late medieval figures 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

Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the

highest Heaven; from Gustave Dor's
illustrations to the Divine Comedy,
Paradiso Canto 28, lines 1639

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 Aristotle's De caelo produced for Oresme's patron, King Charles V, employed the same motif. He drew
the spheres in the conventional order, with the Moon closest to the Earth and the stars highest, but the
spheres were concave upwards, centered on God, rather than concave downwards, centered on the Earth.[71]
Below this figure Oresme quotes the Psalms that "The heavens declare the Glory of God and the firmament
Nicole Oresme, Le livre du Ciel et du
Monde, Paris, BnF, Manuscrits, Fr.
565, f. 69, (1377)

showeth his handiwork."[72]

The late-16th-century Portuguese epic The Lusiads vividly portrays the celestial spheres as a "great machine of the universe" constructed by God.[73] The explorer Vasco da Gama is
shown the celestial spheres in the form of a mechanical model. Contrary to Cicero's representation, da Gama's tour of the spheres begins with the Empyrean, then descends inward toward
Earth, culminating in a survey of the domains and divisions of earthly kingdoms, thus magnifying the importance of human deeds in the divine plan.

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

Notes
1. Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, p. 440.

3. Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 28-40.

2. Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, p. 251.

4. Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 437-8.

5. Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, p. 3

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

6. Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 37, 40.

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

7. See chapter 4 of Heath's Aristarchus of Samos 1913/97 Oxford University Press/Sandpiper Books

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

Ltd; see p.11 of Popper's The World of Parmenides Routledge 1998

8. Heath ibid pp268
9. See chapter 5 of Heaths 1913 Aristarchus of Samos
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, Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato, pp. 547

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

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" (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0QYQ/is_2_2/ai_n9532826/), Islam &

12. Neugebauer, History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, vol. 2, pp. 67785.

13. Lloyd, "Heavenly aberrations," p. 173.

Science 2, retrieved 2010-03-02

14. Neugebauer, History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, vol. 2, pp. 67785.

49. Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 3823.

15. Dreyer, History of the Planetary Systems, pp. 901, 1212

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

16. Lloyd, Aristotle, p. 150.

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

17. Larry Wright, "The Astronomy of Eudoxus: Geometry or Physics," Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science, 4 (1973): 16572.

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

53. Huff, Toby (2003), The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West, Cambridge

18. G. E. R. Lloyd, "Saving the Phenomena," Classical Quarterly, 28 (1978): 202222, at p. 219.
19. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1073b11074a13, pp. 882883 in The Basic Works of Aristotle Richard

University Press, p. 175, ISBN 0-521-52994-8

54. pp. 5557 of Ragep, F. Jamil (2001). "Freeing Astronomy from Philosophy: An Aspect of Islamic

McKeon, ed., The Modern Library 2001

Influence on Science". Osiris. 2nd Series 16 (Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions):

20. "The final cause, then, produces motion by being loved, but all other things move by being moved"

4971. Bibcode:2001Osir...16...49R (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001Osir...16...49R).

Aristotle Metaphysics 1072b4.

doi:10.1086/649338 (https://dx.doi.org/10.1086%2F649338). ISSN 0369-7827 (https://

21. Neugebauer, History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, pp. 11112, 148

22. Pedersen, Early Physics and Astronomy p. 87 (http://books.google.com.au/books?
id=z7M8AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA87#v=onepage&q=&f=false,)

www.worldcat.org/issn/0369-7827). JSTOR 301979 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/301979).

55. Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, p. 541.
56. Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, p. 527.

23. Crowe, Theories of the World, pp.45, 4950, 72,

57. Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 52645.

24. Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein, pp.6364, 81.

58. Nicholas Jardine, "The Significance of the Copernican Orbs," Journal for the History of Astronomy,

25. Taliaferro, Translator's Introduction to the Almagest, p,1; Dreyer, History of the Planetary Systems,
pp.160 (http://www.archive.org/stream/historyofplaneta00dreyuoft#page/160/mode/1up/), 167

13(1982): 168194, esp. pp. 1778.

59. Hilderich von Varel (Edo Hildericus), Propositiones Cosmographicae de Globi Terreni

(http://www.archive.org/stream/historyofplaneta00dreyuoft#page/167/mode/1up/).

Dimensione, (Frankfurt a. d. Oder, 1576), quoted in Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein,

26. Neugebauer, History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, vol. 2, pp. 917926.

"Realism and Instrumentalism in Sixteenth Century Astronomy: A Reappraisal, Perspectives on

27. Andrea Murschel, "The Structure and Function of Ptolemy's Physical Hypotheses of Planetary

Science 6.3 (1998): 232258, pp. 2423.

Motion," (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1995JHA....26...33M) Journal for the History of

60. Koyre, From the Closed World, pp. 28-30.

Astronomy, 26(1995): 3361.

61. Michael A. Granada, "Did Tycho Eliminate the Celestial Spheres before 1586?" Journal for the

28. Francis R. Johnson, "Marlowe's "Imperiall Heaven," ELH, 12 (1945): 3544, p. 39

29. Bruce S. Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens: Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian

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

Renaissance, (Leiden: Brill) 2007, pp. 3645

30. In his De Revolutionibus Bk1.10 Copernicus claimed the empirical reason why Plato's followers put

Spheres," The British Journal for the History of Science, 28 (1995): 385403, pp. 3901.
63. Michael A. Granada, "Did Tycho Eliminate the Celestial Spheres before 1586?" Journal for the

the orbits of Mercury and Venus above the Sun's was that if they were sub-solar, then by the Sun's
reflected light they would only ever appear as hemispheres at most and would also sometimes

History of Astronomy, 37 (2006): 126145, pp. 1328.

64. Grant, "Celestial Orbs," 2000, pp. 1856.

eclipse the Sun, but they do neither. (See p521 Great Books of the Western World 16 Ptolemy

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

CopernicusKepler)

66. Grasshoff, "Michael Maestlin's Mystery".

31. al-Birj. (1971) On the Principles of Astronomy, 7.15965, trans. Bernard R. Goldstein, vol. 1, pp.
1235. New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr. ISBN 0-300-01387-6

67. See Judith Field, Kepler's geometric cosmology for details of Kepler's cosmology
68. See p5145 of Kepler's 1630 Epitome of Copernican Astronomy Vol.1 Bk4.2.3 for his arguments

32. Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 29-31.

33. Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, p. 31.

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:

34. Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 31-2.

35. Y. Tzvi Langermann (1990), Ibn al Haytham's On the Configuration of the World, p. 1125, New

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,

York: Garland Publishing.

36. Edward Rosen (1985), "The Dissolution of the Solid Celestial Spheres", Journal of the History of

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.[1] (http://

Ideas 46 (1), p. 1331 [1920, 21].

37. Bernard R. Goldstein, Al-Bitrj: On the Principles of Astronomy, New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr.,

expositions.bnf.fr/ciel/grand/1-025.htm)
72. Ps. 18: 2; quoted in Nicole Oresme, Le livre du ciel et du monde, edited and translated by A, D.

1971, vol. 1, p. 6.
38. Bernard R. Goldstein, Al-Bitrj: On the Principles of Astronomy, New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr.,

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External links
Working model and complete explanation of the Eudoxus's Spheres (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SFzDYSqR_4)
Dennis Duke, Animated Ptolemaic model of the nested spheres (http://www.csit.fsu.edu/~dduke/ptolemy.html)
Henry Mendell, Vignettes of Ancient Mathematics: Eudoxus of Cnidus (http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/hmendel/Ancient%20Mathematics/Eudoxus/Astronomy/
EudoxusHomocentricSpheres.htm) Ptolemy, Almagest (http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/hmendel/Ancient%20Mathematics/VignettesAncientMath.html#Ptolemy)

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