Abstract
Alexandria, the city created by Alexander the Great on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, became a lively centre of learning during the centuries following Alexander’s death and remained so till Roman times. Outstanding geometricians, among them the great Euclid, lived and worked there, and so did the outstanding astronomers of this era. And there was obviously communication between the two. The astronomers would analyse their astronomical data using the geometricians’ theorems. Astronomers and geometricians were convinced that the postulates of (Euclidian) geometry reflected the reality of physical space, which they assumed was one and the same over the entire universe.
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Notes
- 1.
A. D. Ritchie, History and Methods of the Sciences, The Edinburgh University Press, 1965; page 62. For more on the methods of physics from antiquity to modern times (including many references to original texts) see: G. Holton and S. G. Brush, Introduction to Concepts and Theories in Physical Science, 2nd Edition, Princeton University Press, 1985.
- 2.
According to Copernicus the sun is not only at the centre of the solar system but also at the centre of the universe (with the fixed stars in the outermost celestial sphere). The centre of the earth is, according to Copernicus, only the centre of gravity and of the lunar sphere. He also asserted that the distance between the earth and the sun is negligibly small compared to the distance between the sun and the fixed stars. And that explains the absence of parallax (difference in the apparent position of two stars on the celestial sphere when viewed from different positions, in this case due to the orbiting of the earth. A very small such parallax was observed (using a powerful telescope) in 1838.
- 3.
For more on Copernicus see: I. Crow, Copernicus, Tempus Publishing Ltd, 2003.
- 4.
A. Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, page 427.
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Modinos, A. (2014). Astronomy Paves the Way. In: From Aristotle to Schrödinger. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00750-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00750-2_3
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