The Copernicus of Antiquity Aristarchus of Samos
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: was the real author of these views, Parmenides was the first to state them in public. Pythagoras regarded the universe as living, intelligent, spherical, enclosing the earth at the centre, and rotating about an axis passing through the centre of the earth, the earth remaining at rest. He is said to have been the first to observe that the planets have an independent motion of their own in a direction opposite to that of the fixed stars, i. e. the daily rotation. Alternatively with Parmenides he is said to have been the first to recognise that the Morning and the Evening Stars are one and the same. Pythagoras is hardly likely to have known this as the result of observations of his own ; he may have learnt it from Egypt or Chaldaea along with other facts about the planets. PARMENIDES. We have seen that certai
...n views are alternatively ascribed to Pythagoras and Parmenides. The system of Parmenides was in fact a kind of blend of the theories of Pythagoras and Anaximander. In giving the earth spherical form with five zones he agreed with Pythagoras. Pythagoras, however, made the spherical universe rotate about an axis through the centre of the earth; this implied that the universe is itself limited, but that something exists round it, and in fact that beyond the finite rotating sphere there is limitless void or empty space. Parmenides, on the other hand, denied the existence of the infinite void and was therefore obliged to make his finite sphere motionless and to hold that its apparent rotation is only an illusion. In other portions of his system Parmenides followed the lead of Anaximander. Like Anaximander (and Democritus later) he argued that the earth remains in the centre because, being equidistant from all points onthe sphere of the universe, it is in equilibriu...
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