114 Sentences With "celestial spheres" | Random Sentence Generator

I mean you are flying through the celestial spheres aboard something out of Railroad Tycoon.

Back then, the stars and planets were attached to "celestial spheres" which were how they rotated around the earth.

Another wall features a display of coins from various eras, with astrological symbols like celestial spheres — which placed Earth at the center of the cosmos — used to indicate the emperor's authority.

We are not exactly sure of their function, but it is highly likely that they were used for teaching and were equipped with boards, writing materials, geometric instruments, globes and celestial spheres.

In considering the physics of the celestial spheres, scholars followed two different views about the material composition of the celestial spheres. For Plato, the celestial regions were made "mostly out of fire"Plato, Timaeus 40a2–4Cornford 1957, p. 118. on account of fire's mobility.Plato, Timaeus, 55d-56a.

He maintained that the celestial spheres were "imaginary things" and "more tenuous than a spider's web".pp. 55-57 of His views were challenged by al-Jurjani (1339–1413), who argued that even if the celestial spheres "do not have an external reality, yet they are things that are correctly imagined and correspond to what [exists] in actuality".

1, book 4.2.3, pp. 514–15 (1630). However, an immobile stellar sphere was a lasting remnant of physical celestial spheres in Kepler's cosmology.

"Caprarola's Sala della Cosmografi", Renaissance Quarterly 50.4 (Winter 1997:1045-1100). Above, the frescoed vault depicts the celestial spheres and the constellations of the zodiac.

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. Outside all is the Empyrean, the "habitation of God and all the elect".

He maintained that the celestial spheres were "imaginary things" and "more tenuous than a spider's web".pp. 55–57 of His views were challenged by al-Jurjani (1339–1413), who maintained that even if the celestial spheres "do not have an external reality, yet they are things that are correctly imagined and correspond to what [exists] in actuality". Medieval astronomers and philosophers developed diverse theories about the causes of the celestial spheres' motions. They attempted to explain the spheres' motions in terms of the materials of which they were thought to be made, external movers such as celestial intelligences, and internal movers such as motive souls or impressed forces.

The male equivalent of Aeternitas is Aion, the god of unbound time, the celestial spheres, and the Zodiac.Gradel, Emperor Worship and Roman Religion, pp. 310–311.

This book encouraged other astronomers to develop new models to explain celestial movement better than Ptolemy.Dallal, Ahmad (1999), "Science, Medicine and Technology", in Esposito, John, The Oxford History of Islam, Oxford University Press, New York In al- Haytham's Book of Optics he argues that the celestial spheres were not made of solid matter, and that the heavens are less dense that air. Rosen, Edward. (1985). "The Dissolution of the Solid Celestial Spheres".

Key concepts of Aristotelian physics include the structuring of the cosmos into concentric spheres, with the Earth at the centre and celestial spheres around it. The terrestrial sphere was made of four elements, namely earth, air, fire, and water, subject to change and decay. The celestial spheres were made of a fifth element, an unchangeable aether. Objects made of these elements have natural motions: those of earth and water tend to fall; those of air and fire, to rise.

Fourteenth-century drawing of angels turning the celestial spheres Ancient, medieval and Renaissance astronomers and philosophers developed many different theories about the dynamics of the celestial spheres. They explained the motions of the various nested spheres in terms of the materials of which they were made, external movers such as celestial intelligences, and internal movers such as motive souls or impressed forces. Most of these models were qualitative, although a few of them incorporated quantitative analyses that related speed, motive force and resistance.

Attributing souls to the spheres was theologically controversial, as that could make them animals. After the Condemnations of 1277, most philosophers came to reject the idea that the celestial spheres had souls.Grant 1994, pp. 546–7.

From an "aspiration or desire","Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God", in Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), Vol. 2, p. 233 ff. the celestial spheres, imitate that purely intellectual activity as best they can, by uniform circular motion.

The Earth within seven celestial spheres, from Bede, De natura rerum, late 11th century A series of astronomers, beginning with the Muslim astronomer al-Farghānī, used the Ptolemaic model of nesting spheres to compute distances to the stars and planetary spheres. Al- Farghānī's distance to the stars was 20,110 Earth radii which, on the assumption that the radius of the Earth was , came to .Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 29–31. An introduction to Ptolemy's Almagest, the Tashil al- Majisti, believed to be written by Thābit ibn Qurra, presented minor variations of Ptolemy's distances to the celestial spheres.

Chapters seven to seventeen deal with subjects of astronomy: planetary orbits, celestial spheres, ascension, declination, directions and shadows, spherical triangles, ellipses, and parallax correction. The planetary theory described in the book is similar to that later adopted by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe.

Edward Grant, a historian of science, has provided evidence that medieval scholastic philosophers generally considered the celestial spheres to be solid in the sense of three-dimensional or continuous, but most did not consider them solid in the sense of hard. The consensus was that the celestial spheres were made of some kind of continuous fluid.Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 328–30. Later in the century, the mutakallim Adud al-Din al-Iji (1281–1355) rejected the principle of uniform and circular motion, following the Ash'ari doctrine of atomism, which maintained that all physical effects were caused directly by God's will rather than by natural causes.

Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven; from Gustave Doré's illustrations to the Divine Comedy, Paradiso Canto 28, lines 16–39 In Cicero's Dream of Scipio, the elder Scipio Africanus describes an ascent through the celestial spheres, compared to which the Earth and the Roman Empire dwindle into insignificance. A commentary on the Dream of Scipio by the Roman writer Macrobius, which included a discussion of the various schools of thought on the order of the spheres, did much to spread the idea of the celestial spheres through the Early Middle Ages.Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, transl. by William Harris Stahl, New York: Columbia Univ.

Dales 1980, pp. 540–3. Adam Marsh's (c.1200–1259) treatise On the Ebb and Flow of the Sea, which was formerly attributed to Grosseteste, maintained al-Bitruji's opinion that the celestial spheres and the seas are moved by a peripheral mover whose motion weakens with distance.

Ptolemy used and wrote about the geocentric system, drawing greatly on traditional Aristotelian physics. He declared that the stars are fixed within their celestial spheres, but the spheres themselves are not fixed. The rotations of these spheres thus explain the subtle movements of the constellations throughout the year.

He in any case designated the active intellect to be angelic or daimonic, rather than the creator itself. He was also the first philosopher known to have assumed the existence of a causal hierarchy of celestial spheres, and the incorporeal intelligences parallel to those spheres.Davidson p.18 and p.

Although Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) transformed Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian cosmology by moving the Earth from the center of the universe, he retained both the traditional model of the celestial spheres and the medieval Aristotelian views of the causes of its motion. Copernicus follows Aristotle to maintain that circular motion is natural to the form of a sphere. However, he also appears to have accepted the traditional philosophical belief that the spheres are moved by an external mover. Johannes Kepler's (1571–1630) cosmology eliminated the celestial spheres, but he held that the planets were moved both by an external motive power, which he located in the Sun, and a motive soul associated with each planet.

The cosmological model of concentric (or homocentric) spheres, developed by Eudoxus, Callippus, and Aristotle, employed celestial spheres all centered on the Earth. In this respect, it differed from the epicyclic and eccentric models with multiple centers, which were used by Ptolemy and other mathematical astronomers until the time of Copernicus.

In the 9th century, the eldest Banū Mūsā brother, Ja'far Muhammad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir, made significant contributions to Islamic astrophysics and celestial mechanics. He was the first to hypothesize that the heavenly bodies and celestial spheres are subject to the same laws of physics as Earth, unlike the ancients who believed that the celestial spheres followed their own set of physical laws different from that of Earth. In his Astral Motion and The Force of Attraction, Muhammad ibn Musa also proposed that there is a force of attraction between heavenly bodies, foreshadowing Newton's law of universal gravitation. In the early 11th century, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) wrote the Maqala fi daw al-qamar (On the Light of the Moon) some time before 1021.

Aristotle divided his universe into "terrestrial spheres" which were "corruptible" and where humans lived, and moving but otherwise unchanging celestial spheres. Aristotle believed that four classical elements make up everything in the terrestrial spheres: earth, air, fire and water. He also held that the heavens are made of a special weightless and incorruptible (i.e. unchangeable) fifth element called "aether".

The explorer Vasco da Gama is shown the celestial spheres in the form of a mechanical model. Contrary to Cicero's representation, da Gama's tour of the spheres begins with the Empyrean, then descends inward toward Earth, culminating in a survey of the domains and divisions of earthly kingdoms, thus magnifying the importance of human deeds in the divine plan.

The Greeks and Stoics adopted a model of celestial spheres after the discovery of the spherical Earth in the 4th to 3rd centuries BCE. The Medieval Scholastics adopted a cosmology that fused the ideas of the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Ptolemy.Grant, p. 308. This cosmology involved celestial orbs, nested concentrically inside one another, with the earth at the center.

Copernicus proposed the heliocentric universe, which was met with strong resistance, and Tycho Brahe refuted the theory of celestial spheres through observational measurement of the 1572 appearance of a Milky Way supernova. These events directly challenged the long-held notion of an immutable universe supported by Ptolemy and Aristotle, and led to major revolutions in astronomy and science.

Even following the adoption of Copernicus's heliocentric model of the universe, new versions of the celestial sphere model were introduced, with the planetary spheres following this sequence from the central Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth-Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Mainstream belief in the theory of celestial spheres did not survive the Scientific Revolution. In the early 1600s, Kepler continued to discuss celestial spheres, although he did not consider that the planets were carried by the spheres but held that they moved in elliptical paths described by Kepler's laws of planetary motion. In the late 1600s, Greek and medieval theories concerning the motion of terrestrial and celestial objects were replaced by Newton's law of universal gravitation and Newtonian mechanics, which explain how Kepler's laws arise from the gravitational attraction between bodies.

Philosophers were less concerned with such mathematical calculations than with the nature of the celestial spheres, their relation to revealed accounts of created nature, and the causes of their motion. Adi Setia describes the debate among Islamic scholars in the twelfth century, based on the commentary of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi about whether the celestial spheres are real, concrete physical bodies or "merely the abstract circles in the heavens traced out… by the various stars and planets." Setia points out that most of the learned, and the astronomers, said they were solid spheres "on which the stars turn… and this view is closer to the apparent sense of the Qur'anic verses regarding the celestial orbits." However, al-Razi mentions that some, such as the Islamic scholar Dahhak, considered them to be abstract.

A page from Oresme's Livre du ciel et du monde, 1377, showing the celestial spheres In his Livre du ciel et du monde Oresme discussed a range of evidence for and against the daily rotation of the Earth on its axis.Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 114–16. From astronomical considerations, he maintained that if the Earth were moving and not the celestial spheres, all the movements that we see in the heavens that are computed by the astronomers would appear exactly the same as if the spheres were rotating around the Earth. He rejected the physical argument that if the Earth were moving the air would be left behind causing a great wind from east to west.

As the first-person narrator sits in her study, she reads Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy, which cheers her momentarily and, as she falls asleep, prompts a vision in which the Cumaean Sibyl comes to her and takes her on a journey to Mount Parnassus, the abode of philosophers and poets, then to the Holy Land and Asia, and ends at the Earthly Paradise, of which the Christine narrator is offered a vision and explanation. The journey continues through the Celestial spheres, before she is returned to earth. Whilst in the celestial spheres, the Christine narrator witnesses a debate between four allegorical figures (Chivalry, Justice, Wisdom, and Nobility) over the characteristics that the emperor of the world should possess. A fifth allegorical figure, Lady Reason, presides over the debate.

135–48; Linton, 2004, p. 39). His book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) began modern astronomy and sparked the Scientific Revolution. Another notable individual was Machiavelli, an Italian political philosopher, considered a founder of modern political science. Machiavelli is most famous for a short political treatise, The Prince, a work of realist political theory.

Aristotle adopted the geometrical model of Eudoxus of Cnidus, to provide a general explanation of the apparent wandering of the classical planets arising from uniform circular motions of celestial spheres. While the number of spheres in the model itself was subject to change (47 or 55), Aristotle's account of aether, and of potentiality and actuality, required an individual unmoved mover for each sphere.

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus, an astronomer from Toruń, published his epochal work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) and thereby became the first proponent of a predictive mathematical model confirming the heliocentric theory, which became the accepted basic model for the practice of modern astronomy. Another major figure associated with the era is the classicist poet Jan Kochanowski.

An interpreter of Aristotle from Muslim Spain, al-Bitruji (d. c.1024), proposed a radical transformation of astronomy that did away with epicycles and eccentrics, in which the celestial spheres were driven by a single unmoved mover at the periphery of the universe. The spheres thus moved with a "natural nonviolent motion".al-Biţrūjī. (1971) On the Principles of Astronomy, 1.60-62, trans.

Sadr's astronomical writings are found in the third volume of his three‐volume encyclopedia of the sciences, the Ta'dil al-'Ulum (The Adjustment of the Sciences). The first two volumes dealt with logic and kalam. The third volume was called Kitab Ta'dil Hay'at al-Aflak (The Adjustment of the Configuration of the Celestial Spheres). This encyclopaedia starts with logic, proceeds through theology, and ends with astronomy.

To prove the unity of God, Saadia uses the demonstrations of the Mutakallamin. Only the attributes of essence (sifat al- dhatia) can be ascribed to God, but not the attributes of action (sifat-al- fi'aliya). The soul is a substance more delicate even than that of the celestial spheres. Here Saadia controverts the Mutakallamin, who considered the soul an "accident" 'arad (compare Guide for the Perplexed i.

Tetrabiblos I.9 (Loeb: p.59). Ptolemy instructing Regiomontanus under an image of the zodiac encircling the celestial spheres. Frontispiece from Ptolemy's Almagest, (Venice, 1496). Chapter ten returns to the humoral theme more explicitly, clarifying that the zodiac is aligned to the seasons and so expressive of the shifting emphasis through moisture, warmth, dryness and cold, (as brought about by spring, summer, autumn, and winter).

The process continued down through the celestial spheres until the sphere of the Moon, its soul, and a final intelligence. They considered that each sphere was moved continually by its soul, seeking to emulate the perfection of its intelligence.Wolfson 1958, pp. 243–4. Avicenna maintained that besides an intelligence and its soul, each sphere was also moved by a natural inclination (mayl).Wolfson 1962, pp. 82–3.

Objects below the lunar sphere were subject to constant combination, separation, and recombination. This was because they consisted of the chaotic elements of earth, air, fire, and water. The idea of celestial spheres was developed in the cosmological models of Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and others. They believed in a stable cosmos created by God, where distinct realms were subject to different kinds of order.

To preserve the principle of perfect circular motion, he proposed that each planet was moved by several nested spheres, with the poles of each connected to the next outermost, but with axes of rotation offset from each other. Though Aristotle left the number of spheres open to empirical determination, he proposed adding to the many-sphere models of previous astronomers, resulting in a total of 44 or 55 celestial spheres.

Edward Rosen (1985), "The Dissolution of the Solid Celestial Spheres", Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1), pp. 13–31 [19–20, 21]. Near the end of the twelfth century, the Spanish Muslim astronomer al-Bitrūjī (Alpetragius) sought to explain the complex motions of the planets without Ptolemy's epicycles and eccentrics, using an Aristotelian framework of purely concentric spheres that moved with differing speeds from east to west.

Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215–1279) discussed three alternative explanations of the motions of the celestial spheres, rejecting the views that celestial bodies are animated and are moved by their own spirits or souls, or that the celestial bodies are moved by angelic spirits, which govern and move them. He maintained, instead, that "celestial bodies are moved by their own natural inclinations similar to weight".Weisheipl 1961, p. 315.

" Ibn al-Haytham, in his Book of Optics (1021), was also the first to discover that the celestial spheres do not consist of solid matter, and he also discovered that the heavens are less dense than the air. These views were later repeated by Witelo and had a significant influence on the Copernican and Tychonic systems of astronomy. In the 12th century, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi participated in the debate among Islamic scholars over whether the celestial spheres or orbits (falak) are "to be considered as real, concrete physical bodies" or "merely the abstract circles in the heavens traced out year in and year out by the various stars and planets." He points out that many astronomers prefer to see them as solid spheres "on which the stars turn," while others, such as the Islamic scholar Dahhak, view the celestial sphere as "not a body but merely the abstract orbit traced by the stars.

Circular graduations of a scale occur on a circular arc or limb of an instrument. In some cases, non- circular curves are graduated in instruments. A typical circular arc graduation is the division into angular measurements, such as degrees, minutes and seconds. These types of graduated markings are traditionally seen on devices ranging from compasses and clock faces to alidades found on such instruments as telescopes, theodolites, inclinometers, astrolabes, armillary spheres, and celestial spheres.

In ancient Greek mythology, Atlas was the primordial Titan who held up the celestial spheres. His burden, according to myth, would be to forever carry the weight of the universe on his shoulders. Atlas represents the spirit of a battalion that keeps the rest of the effort moving forward. CLB-31 adopted the title of Atlas Battalion in June 2012; Like Atlas, CLB-31 upholds, supports, and gives enduring sustainment to the 31st MEU.

Although the mathematicians differ on the number of movements, Aristotle considers that the number of celestial spheres would be 47 or 55. Nonetheless, he concludes his Metaphysics, Book , with a quotation from the Iliad: "The rule of many is not good; one ruler let there be."Iliad, ii, 204; quoted in Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1076a5.Harry A. Wolfson, "The Plurality of Immovable Movers in Aristotle and Averroës," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 63 (1958): 233–253.

After ascending through the sphere of fire believed to exist in the earth's upper atmosphere (Canto I), Beatrice guides Dante through the nine celestial spheres of Heaven, to the Empyrean, which is the abode of God. The nine spheres are concentric, as in the standard medieval geocentric model of cosmology,C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Chapter V, Cambridge University Press, 1964. which was derived from Ptolemy.

Then, Scipio Aemilianus sees that the universe is made up of nine celestial spheres. The earth is the innermost, whereas the highest is heaven, which "contains all the rest, and is itself the supreme God" (unus est caelestis [...] qui reliquos omnes complectitur, summus ipse deus). In between these two extremes lie the seven spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (which proceed from lowest to highest).Cicero, De Republica 6.17.

According to Aristotle, the Sun, Moon, planets and starsare embedded in perfectly concentric "crystal spheres" that rotate eternally at fixed rates. Because the celestial spheres are incapable of any change except rotation, the terrestrial sphere of fire must account for the heat, starlight and occasional meteorites.Aristotle, meteorology. The lowest, lunar sphere is the only celestial sphere that actually comes in contact with the sublunary orb's changeable, terrestrial matter, dragging the rarefied fire and air along underneath as it rotates.

Historically, the apparent motions of the planets were described by European and Arabic philosophers using the idea of celestial spheres. This model posited the existence of perfect moving spheres or rings to which the stars and planets were attached. It assumed the heavens were fixed apart from the motion of the spheres, and was developed without any understanding of gravity. After the planets' motions were more accurately measured, theoretical mechanisms such as deferent and epicycles were added.

"Tower of Babylon" is a science fantasy novelette by American writer Ted Chiang, published in 1990. The story revisits the tower of Babel myth as a construction megaproject, in a setting where the principles of pre-scientific cosmology (the geocentric model, celestial spheres, etc.) are literally true. It is Chiang's first published work. The story won the 1991 Nebula Award for Best Novelette, and was reprinted in Chiang's 2002 anthology, Stories of Your Life and Others.

This esoteric meaning in turn conceals an > esoteric meaning (this depth possesses a depth, after the image of the > celestial Spheres, which are enclosed within each other). So it goes on for > seven esoteric meanings (seven depths of hidden depth). According to this view, it has also become evident that the inner meaning of the Quran does not eradicate or invalidate its outward meaning. Rather, it is like the soul, which gives life to the body.

Paradiso, Canto III: Dante and Beatrice speak to Piccarda and Constance of Sicily, in a fresco by Philipp Veit. After an initial ascension, Beatrice guides Dante through the nine celestial spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical, as in Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. While the structures of the Inferno and Purgatorio were based on different classifications of sin, the structure of the Paradiso is based on the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues.

In 2006 Albuquerque was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant and lead a team of artists and scientists on a journey to AntarcticaCheng, Scarlet. (11 Sept. 2006) “Fleeting Albuquerque heaven in Antarctica” Los Angeles Times where she created a large scale ephemeral artwork on the continent entitled Stellar Axis: Antarctica.Fox, William (March/April 2008), Celestial Spheres , Orion Magazine Albuquerque has created numerous site specific installations in the past two decades including works in the South Dakota Badlands, Death Valley and the Mojave desert.

It was said that Shu quickly decided that he missed her, but she changed into a cat that destroyed any man or god that approached. Thoth, disguised, eventually succeeded in convincing her to return. The Greeks associated Shu with Atlas, the primordial Titan who held up the celestial spheres, as they are both depicted holding up the sky. According to the Heliopolitan cosmology, Shu and Tefnut, the first pair of cosmic elements, created the sky goddess, Nut, and the earth god, Geb.

But this matter did not exist from all eternity, as the Peripatetics claimed. It is easy to perceive here the growth of the Peripatetic ideas as to substance and form; but influenced by religion, these ideas are so shaped as to admit the non-eternity of matter. In all that pertains to the soul and its action, Gabirol and Bahya are undoubtedly influenced by the "Brethren of Purity." Man (the microcosm) is in every way like the celestial spheres (the macrocosm).

Pr., 1952; on the order of the spheres see pp. 162–5. Nicole Oresme, Le livre du Ciel et du Monde, Paris, BnF, Manuscrits, Fr. 565, f. 69, (1377) Some late medieval figures noted that the celestial spheres' physical order was inverse to their order on the spiritual plane, where God was at the center and the Earth at the periphery. Near the beginning of the fourteenth century Dante, in the Paradiso of his Divine Comedy, described God as a light at the center of the cosmos.

Only the attributes of essence (sifat al-dhatia) can be ascribed to God, but not the attributes of action (sifat-al-fi'aliya). The soul is a substance more delicate even than that of the celestial spheres. Here Saadia controverts the Mutakallamin, who considered the soul an "accident" 'arad (compare Guide for the Perplexed i. 74), and employs the following one of their premises to justify his position: "Only a substance can be the substratum of an accident" (that is, of a non- essential property of things).

When the bodies of those who died in the battle are collected, ten days after his death, Er remains undecomposed. Two days later he revives on his funeral-pyre and tells others of his journey in the afterlife, including an account of reincarnation and the celestial spheres of the astral plane. The tale includes the idea that moral people are rewarded and immoral people punished after death. Although called the Myth of Er, the word "myth" means "word, speech, account", rather than the modern meaning.

Grant 1994, pp. 547–548. In two slightly different discussions, John Buridan (c.1295–1358) suggested that when God created the celestial spheres, he began to move them, impressing in them a circular impetus that would be neither corrupted nor diminished, since there was neither an inclination to other movements nor any resistance in the celestial region. He noted that this would allow God to rest on the seventh day, but he left the matter to be resolved by the theologians.Dales 1980, pp. 547–8.

This combined order of worship and catechism was the first work to include the Keys section of Luther's Small Catechism, of which Osiander is a suspected author. In 1543, Osiander oversaw the publication of the book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the revolutions of the celestial spheres) by Copernicus. He added a preface suggesting that the model described in the book was not necessarily true, or even probable, but was useful for computational purposes. This was certainly not the opinion of Copernicus, who was probably unaware of the addition.

It was republished by MIT Press in 1971 and is still in print. It is one of the sources for the idea - considered erroneous by modern historians - that Medieval Christianity had returned to the pre-scientific notion of a Flat Earth: :"In medieval times there was a return to the concept of a flat Earth and a dogmatism about the crystalline celestial spheres, here epitomized in a woodcut showing the machinery responsible for their motion discovered by an inquirer who has broken through the outer sphere of fixed stars. Sixteenth century." - Science in History, vol.

In Islamic philosophy, angels appear frequently as incorporeal creatures. Al-Kindi and Ibn Sina both define angels as simple substances, which means, they belong to the Celestial spheres comparable to Ptolemaic astronomy, endowed with life, reason, and immortality, in contrast to sublunary entities such as humans and animals, who are endowed with life, and the former also with reason, but are mortal.Seyyed Hossein Nasr An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines SUNY Press, 1 January 1993 p. 236Syrinx von Hees Enzyklopädie als Spiegel des Weltbildes: Qazwīnīs Wunder der Schöpfung: eine Naturkunde des 13.

In contrast to Greek astronomy which was dependent upon cosmology, Babylonian astronomy was independent from cosmology. Whereas Greek astronomers expressed "prejudice in favor of circles or spheres rotating with uniform motion", such a preference did not exist for Babylonian astronomers, for whom uniform circular motion was never a requirement for planetary orbits. There is no evidence that the celestial bodies moved in uniform circular motion, or along celestial spheres, in Babylonian astronomy. Contributions made by the Chaldean astronomers during this period include the discovery of eclipse cycles and saros cycles, and many accurate astronomical observations.

Peter Apian's 1524 representation of the universe, heavily influenced by Aristotle's ideas. The terrestrial spheres of water and earth (shown in the form of continents and oceans) are at the center of the universe, immediately surrounded by the spheres of air, and then fire, where meteorites and comets were believed to originate. The surrounding celestial spheres from inner to outer are those of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, each indicated by a planet symbol. The eighth sphere is the firmament of fixed stars, which include the visible constellations.

Like Homer's æthere (αἰθήρ)the "pure air" of Mount Olympuswas the divine counterpart of the air breathed by mortal beings (άήρ, aer). The celestial spheres are composed of the special element aether, eternal and unchanging, the sole capability of which is a uniform circular motion at a given rate (relative to the diurnal motion of the outermost sphere of fixed stars). The concentric, aetherial, cheek-by-jowl "crystal spheres" that carry the Sun, Moon and stars move eternally with unchanging circular motion. Spheres are embedded within spheres to account for the "wandering stars" (i.e.

During his debate with Avicenna, al-Biruni also criticized the Aristotelian theory of gravity firstly for denying the existence of levity or gravity in the celestial spheres; and, secondly, for its notion of circular motion being an innate property of the heavenly bodies.Rafik Berjak and Muzaffar Iqbal, "Ibn Sina--Al-Biruni correspondence", Islam & Science, June 2003. In 1121, al-Khazini, in The Book of the Balance of Wisdom, proposed that the gravity and gravitational potential energy of a body varies depending on its distance from the centre of the Earth.

The topics discussed are the eight mathematical operations, a certain set of ten problems, arithmetic of fractions, rule of three, Kuttakara (linear indeterminate equations), infinite series and approximations for the ratio of the circumference and diameter of a circle and infinite series and approximations for sines.For more details on contents see Kinokuniya DataBase: Volume II dealing with astronomy is divided into eight chapters. The topics covered are computation of mean and true longitudes of planets, Earth and celestial spheres, fifteen problems relating to ascension, declination, longitude, etc., determination of time, place, direction, etc.

Dodds, E.R. Proclus: The Elements of Theology. A revised text with translation, introduction, and commentary, 2nd edition 1963, Appendix. The word "astral" means "of the stars", thus the astral plane, consisting of the celestial spheres, is held to be an astrological phenomenon: "The whole of the astral portion of our earth and of the physical planets, together with the purely astral planets of our System, make up collectively the astral body of the Solar Logos". There are "seven types of astral matter" by means of which "psychic changes occur periodically".

481f , cf vi.796f), combining poetic and parascientific images, is discussed in P. R. Hardie, "Atlas and Axis" The Classical Quarterly N.S. 33.1 (1983:220-228). A common misconception today is that Atlas was forced to hold the Earth on his shoulders, but Classical art shows Atlas holding the celestial spheres, not the terrestrial globe; the solidity of the marble globe borne by the renowned Farnese Atlas may have aided the conflation, reinforced in the 16th century by the developing usage of atlas to describe a corpus of terrestrial maps.

Geocentric celestial spheres; Peter Apian's Cosmographia (Antwerp, 1539) All the early Gnostics of whose opinions Irenaeus gives an account, in a section (i. 23 sqq.) probably derived from an earlier writer, agree in the doctrine that the world was made by the instrumentality of archons (angels). The brief account given of the teaching of the first two in the list, Simon and Menander, does not state whether or not they defined the number of these archons; but it is expressly told of the third, Saturninus (ch. 24), that he counted them as seven.

As early as Plato, philosophers considered the heavens to be moved by immaterial agents. Plato believed the cause to be a world-soul, created according to mathematical principles, which governed the daily motion of the heavens (the motion of the Same) and the opposed motions of the planets along the zodiac (the motion of the Different).Cornford 1957, pp. 57–93. Aristotle proposed the existence of divine unmoved movers which act as final causes; the celestial spheres mimic the movers, as best they could, by moving with uniform circular motion.

But while Copernicus put the Sun at the center of the celestial spheres, he did not put it at the exact center of the universe, but near it. Copernicus' system used only uniform circular motions, correcting what was seen by many as the chief inelegance in Ptolemy's system. The Copernican model replaced Ptolemy's equant circles with more epicycles. 1500 years of Ptolemy's model, help create a more accurate estimate of the planets motions for Copernicus.Koestler (1989), pp. 579-80 This is the main reason that Copernicus' system had even more epicycles than Ptolemy's.

Dedication Cornerstone dated 22 June, A.L. 5929 Libertas Detail Veritas Detail The facades on Sherbrooke and St-Marc streets and are covered with Queenston limestone. The main facade, on Sherbrooke, has a base made of rusticated limestone and features four openings as well as a prominent central entrance, flanked by two free-standing columns topped by terrestrial and celestial spheres. The main door is made of detailed architectural bronze. A decorative belt course defines the upper part of the base and consists of ornamental carving and words in relief: FIDES, VERITAS, CARITAS, LIBERTAS, SPES ("Faith", "Truth", "Charity", "Liberty", and "Hope" in Modern English).

Peter Apian's Cosmographia (Antwerp, 1539) The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and others. In these celestial models, the apparent motions of the fixed stars and planets are accounted for by treating them as embedded in rotating spheres made of an aetherial, transparent fifth element (quintessence), like jewels set in orbs. Since it was believed that the fixed stars did not change their positions relative to one another, it was argued that they must be on the surface of a single starry sphere.Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, p. 440.

The astral spheres were thought to be planes of angelic existence intermediate between earth and heaven. The astral plane, also called the astral realm or the astral world, is a plane of existence postulated by classical (particularly neo-Platonic, where it originated), medieval, oriental, and esoteric philosophies and mystery religions.G.R.S.Mead, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition, Watkins 1919. It is the world of the celestial spheres, crossed by the soul in its astral body on the way to being born and after death, and is generally believed to be populated by angels, spirits or other immaterial beings.

They (and maybe all the eldila) can manifest in corporeal forms. The title Oyarsa seems to indicate the function of leadership, regardless of the leader's species; when the Perelandran human Tor assumes rule of his world, he styles himself "Tor-Oyarsa-Perelendri" (presumably "Tor, Ruler of Perelandra"). The eldila are science-fictionalised depictions of angels, immortal and holy, with the Oyéresu perhaps being angels of a higher order. (As Lewis implies in Chapter 22 of Out of the Silent Planet, the name Oyarsa was suggested by Oyarses, the name given in Bernard Silvestris's Cosmographia to the governors of the celestial spheres.

Copernicus' major work on his heliocentric theory was Dē revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published in the year of his death, 1543. He had formulated his theory by 1510. "He wrote out a short overview of his new heavenly arrangement [known as the Commentariolus, or Brief Sketch], also probably in 1510 [but no later than May 1514], and sent it off to at least one correspondent beyond Varmia [the Latin for "Warmia"]. That person in turn copied the document for further circulation, and presumably the new recipients did, too..."Sobel (2011), p. 18.

Sosigenes criticized both Aristotle and Eudoxus for their imperfect theory of celestial spheres and also the use of epicycles, which he felt to be inconsistent with Aristotle's philosophical postulates. He pointed out that the planets varied markedly in brightness, and that eclipses of the Sun are sometimes total and sometimes annular, suggesting that the distances between the Sun, Moon and Earth were not the same at different eclipses. Sosigenes is perhaps called "the Peripatetic" only because of his connection with Alexander. Some ancient evidence may be taken to suggest that he was, in fact, a Stoic.

In addition to Galileo's well-known enhancements and use of the telescope and his conviction of the correctness of the Copernican system, he had many other scientific achievements. Dava Sobel claims he discovered and investigated sunspots, which again did not bring him much favor with the Church, which, she claims, held the Aristotelian beliefs of the heavens containing only perfect unchanging celestial spheres. He improved the compass and developed a rudimentary thermometer. He devoted the last ten years of his life to the study of bodies in motion, laying the groundwork for Isaac Newton's laws of motion formalized in the next decades.

Fourteenth-century drawing of angels turning the celestial spheres. British Library Venette had a master in theology from the University of Paris and spent a great deal of his time promoting study among the younger members of the Carmelites, and he gathered information on the earlier history of the Carmelite Order going all the way back to Elijah, its Founder. Venette regarded ignorance as the cause of many of the problems of his time, including the Black Death, and encouraged many of the Carmelites to learn to read and write.Jean Birdsall edited by Richard A. Newhall.

Aristotle responded to these paradoxes by developing the notion of a potential countable infinity, as well as the infinitely divisible continuum. Unlike the eternal and unchanging cycles of time, he believed that the world is bounded by the celestial spheres and that cumulative stellar magnitude is only finitely multiplicative. The Indian philosopher Kanada, founder of the Vaisheshika school, developed a notion of atomism and proposed that light and heat were varieties of the same substance.Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage: In the 5th century AD, the Buddhist atomist philosopher Dignāga proposed atoms to be point-sized, durationless, and made of energy.

For Saadia creation is not problematic: God created the world ex nihilo, just as Scripture attests; and he contests the theory of the Motekallamin in reference to atoms, which theory, he declares, is just as contrary to reason and religion as the theory of the philosophers professing the eternity of matter. To prove the unity of God, Saadia uses the demonstrations of the Motekallamin. Only the attributes of essence (sifat-al- datiat) can be ascribed to God, but not the attributes of action (sifat-al- af'aliyat). The soul is a substance more delicate even than that of the celestial spheres.

Israfel. God created many things that are unknown to the people (Quran 16:8), and a fundamental part of this, with central importance, is God's Throne, His footstool are the angels and the jinn (demons, evil/good spirits). The celestial spheres are inhabited by the angels. The angels are good perfect beings without negative feelings or passion, they are obedient and most importantly, they keep the order of the creation and govern everything on earth; the jinn and devils are bad and imperfect creatures who possess passion and wrath and are disobedient. Qazwini's work contains moreover angelology that has roots partly in the Quran and hadith.

In Umm al-Kitab, an 8th century Ismaili work, Azazil is the first creation of God, the High King. God gave him the power of creation, but Azazil boasted with his loaned power, claiming divinity for himself, describing himself as another God beside the High King. To proof that Azazil's creation only depends on the power of his own creator, God makes a new creation, opposed by Azazil. Every time, Azazil again claims to like God, he and his fellow angels lose colour, becoming darker and inferior, and are thrown into lower celestial spheres until they end up on earth, which is made out of the essence of Azazil's creations.

Celestial objects were described as moving in circles, because perfect circular motion was considered an innate property of objects that existed in the uncorrupted realm of the celestial spheres. The theory of impetus, the ancestor to the concepts of inertia and momentum, was developed along similar lines by medieval philosophers such as John Philoponus and Jean Buridan. Motions below the lunar sphere were seen as imperfect, and thus could not be expected to exhibit consistent motion. More idealized motion in the "sublunary" realm could only be achieved through artifice, and prior to the 17th century, many did not view artificial experiments as a valid means of learning about the natural world.

310 – c.230 BCE) had suggested that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but Copernicus' reasoning led to lasting general acceptance of this "revolutionary" idea. Copernicus' book presenting the theory (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres") was published just before his death in 1543 and, as it is now generally considered to mark the beginning of modern astronomy, is also considered to mark the beginning of the Scientific revolution. Copernicus' new perspective, along with the accurate observations made by Tycho Brahe, enabled German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) to formulate his laws regarding planetary motion that remain in use today.

Around the turn of the millennium, the Arabic astronomer and polymath Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) presented a development of Ptolemy's geocentric epicyclic models in terms of nested spheres. Despite the similarity of this concept to that of Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses, al- Haytham's presentation differs in sufficient detail that it has been argued that it reflects an independent development of the concept.Y. Tzvi Langermann (1990), Ibn al Haytham's on the Configuration of the World, pp. 11–25, New York: Garland Publishing. In chapters 15–16 of his Book of Optics, Ibn al- Haytham also said that the celestial spheres do not consist of solid matter.

In some of their aspects, Varuna is lord of the cosmic rhythm of the sun and other celestial spheres, while Mitra brings forth the light at dawn, which was covered by Varuna the previous evening. Mitra is also independently identified as being force by which the course of the sun is regulated; Savitr (RV 1.35) is identified with Mitra because of those regulations, and Vishnu (RV 1.154) takes his three steps by those regulations. Agni is kindled before dawn to produce Mitra, and when kindled is Mitra. In the Atharvaveda, Mitra is again associated with sunrise, and is contrasted with Varuna's association with the evening.

The publication of Copernicus' model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, was a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution and making a pioneering contribution to the Scientific Revolution.Edward Rosen, "Copernicus, Nicolaus", Encyclopedia Americana, International Edition, volume 7, Danbury, Connecticut, Grolier Incorporated, 1986, , pp. 755–56. Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. A polyglot and polymath, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was also a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist.

Some of them regarded the active intellect as a power external to the human mind, Alexander going so far as to identify it with God. Later, both these interpretations, Neoplatonist ones, and perhaps others, influenced the development of an important Arabic language philosophical literature, using the term 'aql as the translation for nous. This literature was later translated into, and commented upon, in Latin and Hebrew. Jewish and Islamic Al-Farabi and Avicenna, and also the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, agreed with the "external" interpretation of active intellect, and held that the active intellect was the lowest of the ten emanations descending through the celestial spheres.

Mead Bradock, Paradise According to Three Different Hypotheses, 1747 In the 2nd century AD, Irenaeus distinguished paradise from heaven. In Against Heresies, he wrote that only those deemed worthy would inherit a home in heaven, while others would enjoy paradise, and the rest live in the restored Jerusalem (which was mostly a ruin after the Jewish–Roman wars but was rebuilt beginning with Constantine the Great in the 4th century). Origen likewise distinguished paradise from heaven, describing paradise as the earthly "school" for souls of the righteous dead, preparing them for their ascent through the celestial spheres to heaven.Church fathers: De Principiis (Book II) Origen , newadvent.

Humanism and the Renaissance therefore played a direct role in sparking the Reformation, as well as in many other contemporaneous religious debates and conflicts. Pope Paul III came to the papal throne (1534–1549) after the sack of Rome in 1527, with uncertainties prevalent in the Catholic Church following the Protestant Reformation. Nicolaus Copernicus dedicated De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) to Paul III, who became the grandfather of Alessandro Farnese (cardinal), who had paintings by Titian, Michelangelo, and Raphael, as well as an important collection of drawings, and who commissioned the masterpiece of Giulio Clovio, arguably the last major illuminated manuscript, the Farnese Hours.

According to Aristotle's physical interpretation of the model, celestial spheres eternally rotate with uniform motion around a stationary Earth. Normal matter is entirely contained within the terrestrial sphere. De Mundo (composed before 250 BC or between 350 and 200 BC), stated, "Five elements, situated in spheres in five regions, the less being in each case surrounded by the greater—namely, earth surrounded by water, water by air, air by fire, and fire by ether—make up the whole universe". This model was also refined by Callippus and after concentric spheres were abandoned, it was brought into nearly perfect agreement with astronomical observations by Ptolemy.

Isaac Israeli ben Joseph or Yitzhak ben Yosef (often known as Isaac Israeli the Younger) was a Spanish-Jewish astronomer/astrologer who flourished at Toledo in the first half of the fourteenth century. He was a pupil of Asher ben Yehiel, at whose request (in 1310) he wrote the astronomical work Yesod Olam, the finest contribution on the subject in Hebrew literature. The book includes chapters on: geometry and trigonometry; the structure and position of the globe; the number and movements of celestial spheres; the time differences in days and nights in various parts of the Earth; the movements of sun and moon; solstices, neomeniæ, eclipses, and leap-years. It also contains astronomical tables (ephemeris) and a perpetual calendar.

The English almanac maker, Thomas Digges, delineated the spheres of the new cosmological system in his Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes … (1576). Here he arranged the "orbes" in the new Copernican order, expanding one sphere to carry "the globe of mortalitye", the Earth, the four classical elements, and the Moon, and expanding the sphere of stars infinitely to encompass all the stars and also to serve as "the court of the Great God, the habitacle of the elect, and of the coelestiall angelles."Koyre, From the Closed World, pp. 28–30. Johannes Kepler's diagram of the celestial spheres, and of the spaces between them, following the opinion of Copernicus (Mysterium Cosmographicum, 2nd ed.

Consumed by doubt, the narrator is reassured by the appearance of a turtle dove carrying a message, signalling the beneficent quality of his vision. The narrator claims that Fortune kept her promise to him by increasing his wisdom, so that he is now in a state of happiness with his beloved. The poem closes with the narrator offering thanks to all the that, at the end of the poem, brought about his good fortune, and a dedication to the 'poetis laureate' Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. The poem's penultimate verse repeats its first line, 'heigh in the hevynnis figure circulere', so that its structure echoes that of the celestial spheres that it evokes.

The poem begins with the narrator reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis in the hope of learning some "certeyn thing". When he falls asleep, Scipio Africanus the Elder appears and guides him up through the celestial spheres to a gate promising both a "welle of grace" and a stream that "ledeth to the sorweful were/ Ther as a fissh in prison is al drye" (reminiscent of the famous grimly inscribed gates in Dante's Inferno). After some deliberation at the gate, the narrator enters and passes through Venus’s dark temple with its friezes of doomed lovers and out into the bright sunlight. Here Nature is convening a parliament at which the birds will all choose their mates.

1600 years earlier), and thus expected events of great portent, especially regarding the emperor. It was in this context, as the imperial mathematician and astrologer to the emperor, that Kepler described the new star two years later in his De Stella Nova. In it, Kepler addressed the star's astronomical properties while taking a skeptical approach to the many astrological interpretations then circulating. He noted its fading luminosity, speculated about its origin, and used the lack of observed parallax to argue that it was in the sphere of fixed stars, further undermining the doctrine of the immutability of the heavens (the idea accepted since Aristotle that the celestial spheres were perfect and unchanging).

In his work, al-Mu'ayyad explains how the concept of the creation of the physical universe in six twenty-four-hour periods has been misunderstood. Since time is measured and delimited by the movement of celestial spheres and the rising and setting of the sun, it is impossible for time to have been measured before creation occurred. He argues that if creation had yet to occur, and God still had to create the sun, the earth, and the planets, how could these verses about a six-day creation refer to the passage of time? Al-Mu'ayyad also explains how the Qur’anic verse describing the creation of the heavens and the earth taking God six days to complete, with each day spanning a thousand years, is also symbolic.

232 According to Umm al-Kitab, Azazil boasts about himself being superior to God until he is thrown into lower celestial spheres and ends up on earth.Christoph Auffarth, Loren T. Stuckenbruck The Fall of the Angels Brill 2004 page 161 According to a hadith (tradition) mentioned in Al-Tha'alibis (961–1038) Qisas Al-Anbiya, Iblis commands his host of rebel angelsRobert Lebling Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar I.B.Tauris 2010 p. 30 and the fiercest jinn from the lowest layer of hell. In a Shia narrative from Ja'far al-Sadiq (700 or 702–765), Idris (Enoch) meets an angel, which the wrath of God falls upon, and his wings and hair are cut off; after Idris prays for him to God, his wings and hair are restored.

Thomas Digges' 1576 Copernican heliocentric model of the celestial orbs Early in the sixteenth century Nicolaus Copernicus drastically reformed the model of astronomy by displacing the Earth from its central place in favour of the Sun, yet he called his great work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres). Although Copernicus does not treat the physical nature of the spheres in detail, his few allusions make it clear that, like many of his predecessors, he accepted non-solid celestial spheres.Nicholas Jardine, "The Significance of the Copernican Orbs", Journal for the History of Astronomy, 13 (1982): 168–94, pp. 177–78. Copernicus rejected the ninth and tenth spheres, placed the orb of the Moon around the Earth, and moved the Sun from its orb to the center of the universe.

Known today as St. Thomas of the Catholic Church, Aquinas worked to synthesize Aristotle's cosmology as presented in De Caelo with Christian doctrine, an endeavor that led him to reclassify Aristotle's unmoved movers as angels and attributing the 'first cause' of motion in the celestial spheres to them. Otherwise, Aquinas accepted Aristotle's explanation of the physical world, including his cosmology and physics. The 14th century French philosopher Nicole Oresme translated and commentated on De Caelo in his role as adviser to King Charles V of France, on two separate occasions, once early on in life, and again near the end of it. These versions were a traditional Latin transcription and a more comprehensive French version that synthesized his views on cosmological philosophy in its entirety, Questiones Super de Celo and Livre du ciel et du monde respectively.

Qazwini states that it is important that man should exert himself to investigate the wondrous and wisely conceived creation of God, to reflect on it in astonishment and understand it as much as is possible to him. In this way, man will gain the delights in both this world and the hereafter. Next to this Qazwini explains important terminology in his book: 1) marvels are a phenomenon that confuses man because he is not able to grasp its cause and effects; 2) creation is everything except God, it is either essential (body, spiritual substance) or accidental (other); 3) the strange is something which is rare and differs from the known and familiar things and causes astonishment; 4) Creation is divided into several things: it has an unknown cause, man cannot grasp it and it is known in its entirety but not in its details (e.g. the celestial spheres).

In Greek antiquity the ideas of celestial spheres and rings first appeared in the cosmology of Anaximander in the early 6th century BC.See chapter 4 of Heath's Aristarchus of Samos 1913/97 Oxford University Press/Sandpiper Books Ltd; see p.11 of Popper's The World of Parmenides Routledge 1998 In his cosmology both the Sun and Moon are circular open vents in tubular rings of fire enclosed in tubes of condensed air; these rings constitute the rims of rotating chariot-like wheels pivoting on the Earth at their centre. The fixed stars are also open vents in such wheel rims, but there are so many such wheels for the stars that their contiguous rims all together form a continuous spherical shell encompassing the Earth. All these wheel rims had originally been formed out of an original sphere of fire wholly encompassing the Earth, which had disintegrated into many individual rings.

There were also waters above the Earth, and so the raqia (firmament), a solid bowl, was necessary to keep them from flooding the world. During the Hellenistic period this was largely replaced by a more "scientific" model as imagined by Greek philosophers, according to which the Earth was a sphere at the centre of concentric shells of celestial spheres containing the Sun, Moon, stars and planets. The idea that God created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) is central today to Islam, Christianity, and Judaism – indeed, the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides felt it was the only concept that the three religions shared – yet it is not found directly in Genesis, nor in the entire Hebrew Bible. The Priestly authors of Genesis 1 were concerned not with the origins of matter (the material which God formed into the habitable cosmos), but with assigning roles so that the Cosmos should function.

His precise measurements indicated that "new stars" (stellae novae, now known as supernovae), in particular that of 1572, lacked the parallax expected in sublunar phenomena and were therefore not tailless comets in the atmosphere as previously believed but were above the atmosphere and beyond the Moon. Using similar measurements, he showed that comets were also not atmospheric phenomena, as previously thought, and must pass through the supposedly immutable celestial spheres. King Frederick II granted Tycho an estate on the island of Hven and the funding to build Uraniborg, an early research institute, where he built large astronomical instruments and took many careful measurements, and later Stjerneborg, underground, when he discovered that his instruments in Uraniborg were not sufficiently steady. On the island (where he behaved autocratically toward the residents) he founded manufactories, such as a paper mill, to provide material for printing his results.

Among these clerical scholars was Bishop Isidore of Seville who wrote a comprehensive encyclopedia of natural knowledge, the monk Bede of Jarrow who wrote treatises on The Reckoning of Time and The Nature of Things, Alcuin of York, abbot of the Abbey of Marmoutier, who advised Charlemagne on scientific matters, and Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz and one of the most prominent teachers of the Carolingian Age, who, Like Bede, wrote treatises on computus and On the Nature of Things. Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, who is known mostly for his Old English homilies, wrote a book on the astronomical time reckoning in Old English based on the writings of Bede. Abbo of Fleury wrote astronomical discussions of timekeeping and of the celestial spheres for his students, teaching for a while in England where he influenced the work of Byrhtferth of Ramsey, who wrote a Manual in Old English to discuss timekeeping and the natural and mystical significance of numbers.

Buridan also maintained that impetus was proportional to speed; thus, his initial idea of impetus was similar in many ways to the modern concept of momentum. Buridan saw his theory as only a modification to Aristotle's basic philosophy, maintaining many other peripatetic views, including the belief that there was still a fundamental difference between an object in motion and an object at rest. Buridan also maintained that impetus could be not only linear, but also circular in nature, causing objects (such as celestial bodies) to move in a circle. Buridan pointed out that neither Aristotle's unmoved movers nor Plato's souls are in the Bible, so he applied impetus theory to the eternal rotation of the celestial spheres by extension of a terrestrial example of its application to rotary motion in the form of a rotating millwheel that continues rotating for a long time after the originally propelling hand is withdrawn, driven by the impetus impressed within it.

Just as the heavenly spheres receive their motion from the universal soul-- which is a simple substance emanating from God--so man receives his motion from the rational soul--another simple substance emanating from Him. In fact, creation came through emanation, and in the following sequence: (1) The active intellect; (2) the universal soul--which moves the heavenly sphere; (3) nature; (4) darkness--which at the beginning was but a capacity to receive form; (5) the celestial spheres; (6) the heavenly bodies; (7) fire; (8) air; (9) water; (10) earth ("Ma'ani al-Nafs," 72; compare Munk, l.c., p. 201). But as regards the question of the attributes which occupy the Jewish and Muslim theologians so much, Bahya, in his work on ethics, "Hovot ha-Levavot," written in Arabic under the title of "Kitab al-Hidayat fi faraidh al Kulub" (The Duties of the Heart), is of the same opinion as the Motazilites, that the attributes by which one attempts to describe God should be taken in a negative sense, as excluding the opposite attributes.