Despite that, it was a priest who brought back the idea that the Earth moves around the Sun. A geocentric worldview became engrained in Christian theology, making it a doctrine of religion as much as natural philosophy. For Aristotle, this meant that the Earth had to be stationary, and the planets, the Sun, and the fixed dome of stars rotated around Earth.įor nearly 1,000 years, Aristotle’s view of a stationary Earth at the center of a revolving universe dominated natural philosophy, the name that scholars of the time used for studies of the physical world. He saw no sign that the Earth was in motion: no perpetual wind blew over the surface of the Earth, and a ball thrown straight up into the air doesn’t land behind the thrower, as Aristotle assumed it would if the Earth were moving. One camp thought that the planets orbited around the Sun, but Aristotle, whose ideas prevailed, believed that the planets and the Sun orbited Earth. The ancient Greek philosophers, whose ideas shaped the worldview of Western Civilization leading up to the Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth century, had conflicting theories about why the planets moved across the sky.
The world has scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “Of all discoveries and opinions, none may have exerted a greater effect on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus. “We revolve around the Sun like any other planet.” -Nicolaus Copernicus
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