Re: A rotating Earth?

[brian whatcott <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>]

At 16:01 2/4/00 -0500, Joseph Bellina wrote:

> ... Copernicus apparently was not an astrologer.
> The core image of astrology is a geocentric world since the celestial
> bodies focus on the earth...so for him recalling Hericlaetus was not
> such a stretch.  Further, in the neoplatonic Christian tradition, the Sun
> was the image of Christ, the source of all life...where do you suppose
> that ought to be.


Hmmm...a rhetorical question that was answered in a morsel from
Plutarch's Lives [trans. Dryden et al].....

 ...on Numa Pompilius:  "It is said also that Numa built the temple
 of Vesta which was intended for a repository of the holy fire, of
a circular form, not to represent the figure of the earth  as if
that were the same as Vesta, but that of the general universe in the
center of which the Pythagoreans place the element of fire and give
it the name of Vesta and the unit; and do not hold that the earth
is immovable, or that it is situated in the center of the globe,
but that it keeps a circular motion about the seat of fire, and
is not in the number of the primary elements; in this agreeing
with the opinion of Plato, who they say in his later life conceived
that the earth held a lateral position and that the central and
sovereign space was reserved for some nobler body."

Or we could consult another of Plutarch's subjects - but one who
can speak for himself. Archimedes says this [trans, Sir Thomas Heath]:

"His [Aristarchus of Samos] hypotheses are
that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, and that the earth
 revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun
lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed
stars, situated about the same center as the sun, is so great that
 the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a
proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the center of the
 sphere bears to its surface."






brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
Altus OK