The New Cosmology

Abstract

It was not that astronomy came to a complete standstill during the Middle Ages. Many Arab and Jewish astronomers, working largely in Spain under the Islamic conquest but also in Persia and Turkey, made extensive observations of the stars and planets and used these observations to refine astronomical tables and almanacs. Even more significantly, these scholars rediscovered many of the Greek works in mathematics and astronomy and translated them into Arabic and thence into Latin. It is mainly through these translations that our knowledge of Greek science became possible. But important as these contributions were, they did not change man’s fundamental picture of the universe. This picture was essentially the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic one, according to which the immovable earth is at the center of a finite universe, made up of spherical shells in which the planets and stars are embedded.

Open the door through which we may look into the limitless, unified firmament!

—Giordano Bruno (1548–1600)