Celestial Sphere - History

History

The ancients assumed the literal truth of stars attached to a celestial sphere, revolving about the Earth in one day, and a fixed Earth. The Eudoxan planetary model, on which the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic models were based, was the first geometric explanation for the "wandering" of the classical planets. The outer most of these "crystal spheres" was thought to carry the fixed stars. Eudoxus used 27 concentric spherical solids to answer Plato's challenge: "By the assumption of what uniform and orderly motions can the apparent motions of the planets be accounted for?"

Read more about this topic:  Celestial Sphere

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.
    Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)

    The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
    Karl Marx (1818–1883)

    Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
    Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)