The Celestial Sphere

Abstract

THE GREEK TRADITION Human beings have long looked up at the sky and pondered its mysteries. Evidence of the long struggle to understand its secrets may be seen in remnants of cultures around the world: the great Stonehenge monument in England, the structures and the writings of the Maya and Aztecs, and the medicine wheels of the Native Americans. However, our modern scientific view of the universe traces its beginnings to the ancient Greek tradition of natural philosophy. Pythagoras (ca. 550 b.c.) first demonstrated the fundamental relationship between numbers and nature through his study of musical intervals and through his investigation of the geometry of the right angle. The Greeks continued their study of the universe for hundreds of years using the natural language of mathematics employed by Pythagoras. The modern discipline of astronomy depends heavily on a mathematical formulation of its physical theories, following the process begun by the ancient Greeks. In an initial investigation of the night sky, perhaps its most obvious feature to a careful observer is the fact that it is constantly changing. Not only do the stars move steadily from east to west during the course of a night, but different stars are visible in the evening sky, depending upon the season. Of course the Moon also changes, both in its position in the sky and in its phase. More subtle and more complex are the movements of the planets, or “wandering stars.” The Geocentric Universe Plato (ca. 350 b.c.) suggested that to understand the motions of the heavens, one must first begin with a set of workable assumptions, or hypotheses. It seemed obvious that the stars of the night sky revolved about a fixed Earth and that the heavens ought to obey the purest possible form of motion. Plato therefore proposed that celestial bodies should move about Earth with a uniform (or constant) speed and follow a circular motion with Earth at the center of that motion. This concept of a geocentric universe was a natural consequence of the apparently unchanging relationship of the stars to one another in fixed constellations.