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All the spheres rotate around the Sun, which is near the centre of the Universe. The distance between the Earth and the Sun is an insignificant fraction of the distance from the Earth and the Sun to the stars, so parallax is not observed in the stars. The stars are immovable; their apparent daily motion is caused by the daily rotation of the Earth.
Isaac Newton's rotating spheres argument attempts to demonstrate that true rotational motion can be defined by observing the tension in the string joining two identical spheres. The basis of the argument is that all observers make two observations: the tension in the string joining the bodies (which is the same for all observers) and the rate ...
Eudoxus, son of Aeschines, was born and died in Cnidus (also transliterated Knidos), a city on the southwest coast of Anatolia. [3] The years of Eudoxus' birth and death are not fully known but Diogenes Laërtius gave several biographical details, mentioned that Apollodorus said he reached his acme in the 103rd Olympiad (368– 365 BC), and claimed he died in his 53rd year.
In the fully developed Aristotelian system, the spherical Earth is at the center of the universe, and all other heavenly bodies are attached to 47–55 transparent, rotating spheres surrounding the Earth, all concentric with it. (The number is so high because several spheres are needed for each planet.)
Roger Joseph Boscovich SJ (Croatian: Ruđer Josip Bošković, pronounced [rûd͡ʑer jǒsip bôʃkoʋit͡ɕ]; Italian: Ruggiero Giuseppe Boscovich; [2] Latin: Rogerius (Iosephus) Boscovicius; [3] 18 May 1711 – 13 February 1787) was a physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, diplomat, poet, theologian, Jesuit priest, and a polymath from the Republic of Ragusa. [4]
A sphere is the only stable shape for a non-rotating, gravitationally self-attracting liquid. The outward acceleration caused by Earth's rotation is greater at the equator than at the poles (where is it zero), so the sphere gets deformed into an ellipsoid, which represents the shape having the lowest potential energy for a rotating, fluid body ...
One scheme of the celestial spheres. The total number of celestial spheres was not fixed. In this 16th-century illustration, the firmament (sphere of fixed stars) is eighth, a "crystalline" sphere (posited to account for the reference to "waters ... above the firmament" in Genesis 1:7) is ninth, and the Primum Mobile is tenth.
Latitude was measured from the equator, as it is today, but Ptolemy preferred to express it as the length of the longest day rather than degrees of arc (the length of the midsummer day increases from 12h to 24h as you go from the equator to the polar circle). He put the meridian of 0 longitude at the most western land he knew, the Canary Islands.