Geocentric system is the author of the theory. Geocentric and heliocentric systems of the world: comparison

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World systems are ideas about the location in space and movement of the Earth, Sun, Moon, planets, stars and others celestial bodies.

Already in ancient times The first ideas about the place of the Earth in the Universe were formed. These world systems were extremely naive:

flat earth underneath underworld, and the vault of heaven rises above it.

As observational data on visible movements celestial bodies, the development of science, in particular geometry and mechanics, these views changed. A huge step forward in the development of astronomical knowledge was the idea of ​​the starry sky as a complete sphere and the assumption of the sphericity of the Earth. Ancient Greek scientists and philosophers made serious attempts to develop harmonious, mainly geocentric systems of the world with a spherical Earth at the center of the finite Universe, which was, as it were, enclosed by the sphere of fixed stars.

These systems were based on the assumption that the entire Universe was created for the Earth, the whole world and all the heavenly bodies should serve the Earth.

In its clearest form, the geocentric system of the world was developed by the great ancient scientist Aristotle (IV century BC). His ideas were developed and completed by the Alexandrian astronomer Q. Ptolemy (2nd century AD). Ptolemy outlined his system of the world in the book “Almagest”.

According to Aristotle's world system, the Earth is located in the center of the Universe, surrounded by 8 crystal spheres that control the movement of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the stars.

Ptolemy built a mathematical model solar system, used to explain the movements of the Moon, Sun and planets uniform motion along circles - deferents and epicycles.

Both the Sun and Moon move along the deferent.

But this was not enough for the planets. Therefore, Ptolemy believed that it was not the planet itself that moved along the deferent, but the center of another circle of somewhat smaller dimensions - the epicycle. The center of the next epicycle moves along this epicycle, etc. The planet rotates along the most recent epicycle.

With the help of epicycles and deferents, it was possible to quite accurately describe the observed movements of the planets and pre-calculate the positions of celestial bodies for the future.

The geocentric systems of the world of Aristotle and Ptolemy were in agreement with the religious doctrine of the central place of the Earth in the Universe, and therefore the church for many centuries prevented the development of correct scientific ideas about the structure of the world. Small changes were made to the Ptolemaic system, but its basic principle remained unchanged.

Only one and a half thousand years later, N. Copernicus, who lived during the Renaissance, showed that the geocentric system of the world does not reflect the actual structure of the Universe. True, doubts about the validity of this system arose before, but it was the great Polish scientist N. Copernicus who was a bold exponent of critical ideas regarding the geocentric system of the world. Paying special attention to the correct views of individual ancient philosophers (Aristarchus of Samos, 3rd century BC), Copernicus, in his remarkable work “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres” (1543), outlined the foundations of the heliocentric system of the world. The Earth rotates around its axis every 24 hours. This rotation explains the daily movement of the stars and all other celestial bodies. The earth revolves around the sun and full turn commits within a year. This movement of the Earth explains the annual movement of the Sun among the constellations. All planets also revolve around the Sun, and the orbital periods of different planets are different. Thus, all the visible loop-like movements of the planets received a simple and natural explanation.

The Earth was recognized only as an ordinary planet, and not as the center of the universe. This is the important revolutionary significance of the Copernican system of the world for the entire development of natural science.

In modern times, the Copernican heliocentric system is used to describe the solar system. The Sun is only one of the many stars of the stellar system - the Galaxy, which is also not the only one in the Universe. The world of galaxies is extremely diverse in the shapes of the objects included in it. Theories of the structure of the Universe are developed by cosmology.

First scientific system The world began to take shape in the works of Aristotle, Hipparchus and other scientists of Ancient Greece. It received its completion in the works of the outstanding ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy (2nd century AD). This system is called geocentric system of Ptolemy(Fig. 4) or Pto-Lemaic system of the world.

According to this system, the Earth is located at the center of the world (from the Greek - Gaia, hence the name “geocentric”). The universe is limited by a crystal sphere on which the stars are located (the sphere of fixed stars). Planets move between the Earth and the sphere. The movements of the planets, the Sun and the Moon were described by a complex system of circular movements, which together gave the observed movements.

For many centuries, medieval astronomers made careful observations of the movements of the planets, constantly improving and refining the Ptolemaic system. As necessary, new circles were introduced and the centers of planetary orbits shifted. The world system became more and more complex. It became clear that it was fundamentally false. Material from the site

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Report on Astronomy.

11th grade student “B”

Lomtev Nikolai

Astronomy in ancient times.

It is difficult to say exactly when astronomy began: almost no information relating to prehistoric times has reached us. In that distant era, when people were completely powerless before nature, a belief arose in powerful forces that supposedly created the world and govern it; for many centuries the Moon, Sun, and planets were deified. We learn about this from the myths of all the peoples of the world.

The first ideas about the universe were very naive, they were closely intertwined with religious beliefs, which were based on the division of the world into two parts - earthly and heavenly. If now every schoolchild

knows that the Earth itself is a celestial body, then “earthly” was previously opposed to “heavenly”. They thought that there was a “firmament of heaven” to which the stars were attached, and the Earth was taken as the fixed center of the universe.

Geocentric system of the world.

Hipparchus, an Alexandrian scholar who lived in the 2nd century BC. e. , and other astronomers of his time paid much attention to observations of the movements of the planets.

These movements seemed extremely confusing to them. In fact, the directions of movement of the planets across the sky seem to describe loops across the sky. This apparent complexity in the movement of the planets is caused by the movement of the Earth around the Sun - after all, we observe the planets from the Earth, which itself is moving. And when the Earth “catches up” with another planet, it seems that the planet seems to stop and then moves back. But ancient astronomers thought that the planets actually made such complex movements around the Earth.

In the 2nd century AD. Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy put forward his “system

peace." He tried to explain the structure of the Universe, taking into account the apparent complexity of the movements of the planets.

Considering the Earth to be spherical, and its dimensions are insignificant compared to the distance to the planets and especially stars. Ptolemy, however, following Aristotle, argued that the Earth is the motionless center of the Universe. Since Ptolemy considered the Earth to be the center of the Universe, his system of the world was called geocentric.

According to Ptolemy, the Moon moves around the earth (in order of distance from the Earth),

Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, stars. But if the movement of the Moon, Sun, and stars is circular, then the movement of the planets is much more complicated. Each of the planets, according to Ptolemy, does not move around the Earth, but around a certain point. This point, in turn, moves in a circle, in the center of which is the Earth. Ptolemy called the circle described by a planet around a moving point epicycle, and the circle along which a point moves near the Earth is deferent.

It is difficult to imagine such intricate movements taking place in nature, especially around imaginary points. Such an artificial construction was required by Ptolemy in order, based on the false idea of ​​the immobility of the Earth, located in the center of the Universe, to explain the apparent complexity of the movement of the planets.

Ptolemy was a brilliant mathematician for his time. But he shared the view of Aristotle, who believed that the Earth is motionless and only it can be the center of the Universe.

The Aristotle-Ptolemy world system seemed plausible to contemporaries. It made it possible to calculate in advance the movement of the planets for the future - this was necessary for orientation during travel and for the calendar. This false system has been recognized for almost fifteen hundred years.

This system was also recognized by the Christian religion. Christianity bases its worldview on the biblical legend of God’s creation of the world in six days. According to this legend, the Earth is the “center” of the Universe, and the heavenly bodies were created in order to illuminate the Earth and decorate the firmament. Christianity mercilessly persecuted any deviation from these views. The world system of Aristotle - Ptolemy, which placed the Earth at the center of the universe, perfectly corresponded to Christian doctrine.

The tables compiled by Ptolemy made it possible to determine in advance the position of the planets in the sky. But over time, astronomers discovered a discrepancy between the observed positions of the planets and the pre-calculated ones. For centuries it was thought that the Ptolemaic system of the world was simply not perfect enough and, in an attempt to improve it, they introduced new and new combinations of circular motions for each planet.

Heliocentric system of the world.

The great Polish astronomer gave his system of the world Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)

outlined in the book “On the Rotations of the Celestial Spheres,” published in the year of his death. In this book, he proved that the Universe is not structured at all as religion has claimed for many centuries.

In all countries, for almost a millennium and a half, the false teaching of Ptolemy, who claimed that the Earth rests motionless in the center of the Universe, dominated the minds of people. The followers of Ptolemy, to please the church, came up with new “explanations” and “proofs” of the movement of the planets around the Earth in order to preserve the “truth” and “holiness” of his false teaching. But this made Ptolemy’s system become more and more far-fetched and artificial.

Long before Ptolemy, the Greek scientist Aristarchus argued that the Earth moves around the Sun. Later, in the Middle Ages, advanced scientists shared Aristarchus's point of view about the structure of the world and rejected the false teachings of Ptolemy. Shortly before Copernicus, the great Italian scientists Nicholas of Cusa and Leonardo da Vinci argued that the Earth moves, that it is not at all at the center of the Universe and does not occupy an exceptional position in it.

Why, despite this, did the Ptolemaic system continue to dominate?

Because it relied on the all-powerful church power, which suppressed free thought and interfered with the development of science. In addition, scientists who rejected the teachings of Ptolemy and expressed correct views on the structure of the Universe could not yet convincingly substantiate them.

Only Nicolaus Copernicus managed to do this. After thirty years of hard work, much thought and complex mathematical calculations, he showed that the Earth is only one of the planets, and all the planets revolve around the Sun.

Copernicus did not live to see his book spread throughout the world, revealing to people the truth about the Universe. He was dying when friends brought the first copy of the book and placed it in his cold hands.

Copernicus was born in 1473 in the Polish city of Toruń. He lived in difficult times, when Poland and its neighbor - Russian state- continued the centuries-old struggle with the invaders - the Teutonic knights and the Tatar-Mongols, who sought to enslave Slavic peoples.

Copernicus lost his parents at an early age. He was raised by his maternal uncle Lukasz Watzelrode, an outstanding social and political figure of that time. Copernicus was possessed by a thirst for knowledge from childhood. At first he studied in his homeland. Then he continued his education at Italian universities. Of course, astronomy was studied there according to Ptolemy, but Copernicus carefully studied all the surviving works of great mathematicians and the astronomy of antiquity. Even then, he had thoughts about the correctness of Aristarchus’ guesses, about the falsity of Ptolemy’s system. But Copernicus was not the only one who practiced astronomy. He studied philosophy, law, medicine and returned to his homeland as a comprehensively educated person for his time.

Upon his return from Italy, Copernicus settled in Warmia - first in the city of Litzbark, then in Frombork. His activities were unusually varied. He took an active part in the management of the region: he was in charge of its financial, economic and other affairs. At the same time, Copernicus tirelessly pondered the true structure of the solar system and gradually came to his great discovery.

What does Copernicus’ book “On the Rotation of the Celestial Spheres” contain and why did it deal such a crushing blow to the Ptolemaic system, which, with all its flaws, was maintained for fourteen centuries under the auspices of the omnipotent church authority of that era? In this book, Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the Earth and other planets are satellites of the sun. He showed that it was the movement of the Earth around the sun and its daily rotation around its axis that explained the apparent movement of the Sun, the strange entanglement in the movement of the planets and the apparent rotation of the firmament.

Copernicus simply brilliantly explained that we perceive the movement of distant celestial bodies in the same way as the movement of various objects on Earth when we ourselves are in motion.

We are sliding in a boat along a calmly flowing river, and it seems to us that the boat and we are motionless in it, and the banks are “floating” in the opposite direction. In the same way, it only seems to us that the Sun is moving around the Earth. But in fact, the Earth with everything on it moves around the Sun and makes a full revolution in its orbit within a year.

And in the same way, when the Earth, in its movement around the Sun, overtakes another planet, it seems to us that the planet is moving backward, describing a loop in the sky. In reality, the planets move around the Sun in orbits that are regular, although not perfectly circular, without making any loops. Copernicus, like the ancient Greek scientists, believed that the orbits in which the planets move can only be circular.

Three quarters of a century later, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, a successor to Copernicus, proved that the orbits of all planets are elongated circles - ellipses.

Copernicus considered the stars to be motionless. Supporters of Ptolemy insisted on the immobility of the Earth, argued that if the Earth moved in space, then when observing the sky at different times it would seem to us that the stars were moving, changing their position in the sky. But not a single astronomer has noticed such displacements of stars for many centuries. It was in this that the supporters of the teachings of Ptolemy wanted to see proof of the immobility of the Earth.

However, Copernicus argued that the stars are located at unimaginably vast distances. Therefore, their insignificant displacements could not be noticed. Indeed, the distances from us even to the nearest stars turned out to be so great that even three centuries after Copernicus they could be accurately determined. Only in 1837 did the Russian astronomer Vasily Yakovlevich Struve begin to accurately determine the distances to stars.

It is clear what a stunning impression the book must have made, in which Copernicus explained the world, regardless of religion and even rejecting any authority of the church in matters of science. Church leaders did not immediately understand what a blow to religion was being dealt treatise Copernicus, in which he reduced the Earth to the position of one of the planets. For some time the book was freely distributed among scientists. Not many years passed, and the revolutionary significance of the great book was revealed

fully. Other major scientists came forward - continuers of Copernicus' work. They developed and spread the idea of ​​​​the infinity of the Universe, in which the Earth is like a grain of sand, and there are countless worlds. From that time on, the church began a fierce persecution of supporters of the teachings of Copernicus.

New doctrine about the solar system - heliocentric- it was asserted in the most severe struggle against religion. The teachings of Copernicus undermined the very foundations of the religious worldview and opened a wide path to a materialistic, truly scientific knowledge natural phenomena.

In the second half of the 16th century, the teachings of Copernicus found their supporters among advanced scientists different countries. Scientists also came forward who not only propagated the teachings of Copernicus, but deepened and expanded them.

Copernicus believed that the Universe is limited by the sphere of fixed stars, which are located at unimaginably huge, but still finite distances from us and from the Sun. The teachings of Copernicus affirmed the vastness of the Universe and its infinity. Copernicus, also for the first time in astronomy, not only gave the correct diagram of the structure of the solar system, but also determined the relative distances of the planets from the sun and calculated the period of their revolution around it.

The formation of a heliocentric worldview.

The teachings of Copernicus were not immediately recognized. We know that, according to the verdict of the Inquisition, the outstanding Italian philosopher, a follower of Copernicus, was burned in Rome in 1600 Giordano Bruno(1548-1600). Bruno, developing the teachings of Copernicus, argued that there is and cannot be a center in the Universe, that the Sun is only the center of the Solar system. He also expressed a brilliant guess that the stars are the same suns as ours, and planets move around countless stars, many of which support intelligent life. Neither torture nor the fire of the Inquisition broke the will of Giordano Bruno or forced him to renounce the new teaching.

In 1609 Galileo Galilei(1564-1642) was the first to point a telescope at the sky and made discoveries that clearly confirmed the discoveries of Copernicus. On the moon he saw mountains. This means that the surface of the Moon is to some extent similar to the earth’s and there is no fundamental difference between “earthly” and “heavenly”. Galileo discovered four moons of Jupiter. Their movement around Jupiter refuted the erroneous idea that only the Earth can be the center of celestial bodies. Galileo discovered that Venus, like the Moon, changes its phases. Therefore, Venus is a spherical body that shines with reflected sunlight. Studying the features of the change in the appearance of Venus, Galileo made the correct conclusion that it moves not around the Earth, but around the Sun. ON the Sun, which personified “heavenly purity,” Galileo discovered spots and, observing them, established that the Sun rotates around its axis. This means that various celestial bodies, for example the Sun, are characterized by axial rotation. Finally he discovered that Milky Way- These are many faint stars that are not visible to the naked eye. Consequently, the Universe is much grander than previously thought, and it was extremely naive to assume that it makes a complete revolution around the small Earth in a day.

Galileo's discovery increased the number of supporters of the heliocentric system of the world and at the same time forced the church to intensify the persecution of the Copernicans. In 1616, Copernicus’s book “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres” was included in the list of prohibited books, and what was stated in it was contradictory Holy Scripture. Galileo was forbidden to propagate the teachings of Copernicus. However, in 1632 he still managed to publish the book “Dialogue about two major systems world - Ptolemaic and Copernican”, in which he was able to convincingly show the truth of the heliocentric system, which brought upon himself the wrath of the Catholic Church. In 1633, Galileo appeared before the Inquisition. The elderly scientist was forced to sign a “renunciation” of his views and was kept under the supervision of the Inquisition for the rest of his life. It was only in 1992 that the Catholic Church finally acquitted Galileo.

The execution of Bruno, the official ban on the teachings of Copernicus, and the trial of Galileo could not stop the spread of Copernicism. In Austria Johannes Kepler(1571-1630) developed the teachings of Copernicus, discovering the laws of planetary motion. In England Isaac Newton(1643-1727) published his famous law universal gravity. In Russia, he boldly supported the teachings of Copernicus M.V. Lomonosov(1711-1765), who discovered the atmosphere on Venus, defended the idea of ​​a plurality of inhabited worlds.

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The first global natural science revolution, which transformed astronomy, cosmology and physics, was the creation of a consistent doctrines about the geocentric system of the world. This teaching was started by the ancient Greek scientist Anaximander, who created in the 6th century. BC. a rather harmonious system of ring world orders. However, a consistent geocentric system was developed in the 4th century. BC. the greatest scientist and philosopher of antiquity, Aristotle, and then, in the 1st century. mathematically substantiated by Ptolemy. The geocentric system of the world is usually called Ptolemaic system , and the natural science revolution - Aristotelian. Why do we call this teaching revolutionary?

The transition from initial egocentrism, and then tribal or ethnic topocentrism to geocentrism represented the first step towards its formation as an objective science. Indeed, in this case, the immediate visible hemisphere of the sky, limited by the horizon, was supplemented by a similar celestial hemisphere to the full celestial sphere. Accordingly, the Earth itself, occupying a central position in this spherical Universe, began to be considered spherical. Thus, it was necessary to recognize not only the possibility of the existence of antipodes - inhabitants of diametrically opposite points globe, but also the fundamental equality of all earthly observations of the world . The question of observations and observers is very important from the point of view of forming an objective scientific picture of the world.

It is interesting that direct confirmation of the conclusions about the sphericity of the Earth came much later - in the era of the first world travels and great geographical discoveries, i.e. only at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, when the very geocentric teaching of Aristotle - Ptolemy with its canonical system of ideal uniformly rotating homocentric (i.e. with a single center) celestial spheres was already living out its last years.

Hipparchus, an Alexandrian scholar who lived in the 2nd century BC. e., and other astronomers of his time paid a lot of attention to observations of the movements of the planets. These movements seemed extremely confusing to them. In fact, the directions of movement of the planets across the sky seem to describe loops across the sky. This apparent complexity in the movement of the planets is caused by the movement of the Earth around the Sun - after all, we observe the planets from the Earth, which itself is moving. And when the Earth “catches up” with another planet, it seems that the planet seems to stop and then moves back. But ancient astronomers thought that the planets actually made such complex movements around the Earth.

Great astronomer and mathematician Claudius Ptolemy(87 - 165) made a choice in favor of the geocentric model of the World. He completed the mathematical description of the movements of celestial bodies begun by Hipparchus and brilliantly completed Plato’s program - “with the help of uniform and regular circular movements to save the phenomena represented by the planets.” He tried to explain the structure of the Universe, taking into account the apparent complexity of the movements of the planets. Considering the Earth to be spherical, and its dimensions are insignificant compared to the distance to the planets and especially stars. Ptolemy, however, following Aristotle, argued that the Earth is the motionless center of the Universe.

The Ptolemaic world system is based on four postulates:

I. The Earth is at the center of the Universe.

II. The earth is motionless.

III. All celestial bodies move around the Earth.

IV. The movement of celestial bodies occurs in circles at a constant speed, i.e. uniformly.

Since Ptolemy considered the Earth to be the center of the Universe, his system of the world was called geocentric . Around the earth, according to Ptolemy, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and stars move (in order of distance from the Earth). But if the movement of the Moon, Sun, and stars is circular, then the movement of the planets is much more complicated. Each of the planets, according to Ptolemy, does not move around the Earth, but around a certain point. This point, in turn, moves in a circle, in the center of which is the Earth. Ptolemy called the circle described by a planet around a moving point epicycle , A the circle along which a point moves near the Earth - deferent . Ptolemy built a geocentric model of the World (in fact, a model of the solar system), which made it possible to explain all the observed features of the movement of the planets, the Sun and the Moon, and most importantly, became a powerful tool for predicting (pre-calculating) the positions of these celestial bodies. Main work Ptolemy - "Great mathematical construction", in Greek "Megale mathematics syntaxeos", - became widely known in ancient times under the name "Magiste syntaxeos" ("Greatest construction"). Hence the distorted Arabic version of the name - “Al Mageste”, or "Almagest", by which this 13-volume work is known in modern world. "Almagest" is a genuine encyclopedia of astronomical knowledge of that time, one of the masterpieces of world scientific literature.

5. Heliocentric system of the world(according to Grushevitskaya and Sadokhin)

The founder of scientific cosmology is considered to be Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543, who placed the Sun at the center of the Universe and reduced the Earth to the position of an ordinary planet in the solar system. The great astronomer outlined his system of the world in the book “On the Rotations of the Celestial Spheres,” published in the year of his death. In his In his work, he argued that the Earth is not the center of the universe, and that “the Sun, as if sitting on a royal throne, controls the family of luminaries rotating around it.” The name of Copernicus is associated with a global natural science revolution (the so-called Copernican revolution), which represented a transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism , and from it to polycentrism , i.e. the doctrine of the plurality of stellar worlds. This was a transition from the particular doctrine of the directly observable solar planetary system to the general doctrine of a potentially infinite hierarchical stellar world, with Newton’s law of universal gravitation operating in it.

Copernicus himself was far from a correct understanding of the structure of the world. Thus, in his opinion, beyond the orbits of the five planets known at that time there was a sphere of fixed stars. The stars on this sphere were considered equidistant from the Sun, and their nature was unclear. Copernicus did not see bodies similar to the Sun in them, and, being a minister of the church, he was inclined to believe that beyond the sphere of the fixed stars there was an “empyrean”, or “home of the blessed” - the abode of supernatural bodies and beings.

Copernicus was firmly convinced of one thing - the radius of the sphere of the fixed stars must have been very large. Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain why the stars appear motionless from the Earth moving around the Sun.

Place your index finger in front of your face and look at it alternately with your right and left eye - the finger will move against the background of more distant objects, for example, a wall. This apparent displacement of an object when the observer's position changes is called parallactic displacement. Distance between extreme points observation is called a basis. The larger the basis, the larger the parallactic displacement. The farther the observed object is from us, the smaller the parallactic displacement. Move your finger away from your face and you can easily verify this.

Although the distance from the Earth to the Sun was not known exactly at the time of Copernicus, many facts suggested that it was very large. It would seem that in this case the stars should describe small circles in the sky - a kind of reflection of the actual revolution of the Earth around the Sun. But such parallactic displacements of stars were clearly absent, from which Copernicus concluded that the sphere of fixed stars was colossal.

According to Copernicus, the universe is a world in a shell. In this model it is easy to find many remnants of the medieval worldview. But only a few decades passed, and Giordano Bruno broke the Copernican “shell” of the fixed stars.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the famous Italian thinker, considered the stars to be distant suns that warm countless planets of other planetary systems. Bruno considered anyone a fool who could think that the mighty and magnificent world systems contained in boundless space were devoid of living beings. This is how the idea of ​​the spatial infinity of the Universe sounded, infinitely bold at that time. He believed that the Universe is infinite, that there are countless worlds similar to the world of Earth. He believed that the Earth is a luminary, and that the Moon and other luminaries are similar to it, the number of which is infinite, and that all these celestial bodies form an infinity of worlds. He imagined an infinite Universe containing an infinite number of worlds.

Bruno's ideas were far ahead of his time. But he could not cite a single fact that would confirm his cosmology - the cosmology of an infinite, eternal and inhabited Universe.

J. Bruno, thus, defended polycentrism, leading ultimately to the denial of the center of the universe and the recognition of its infinity.

As you know, G. Bruno died at the stake of the Inquisition, actually at the turn of two eras: the Renaissance and the Modern Age, spanning three centuries - the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The 18th century played a special role in this period, marked by the birth modern science and, in particular, classical mechanics. At its origins were such outstanding scientists as G. Galileo (1564-1642), I. Kepler (1571-1630) and I. Newton (1643-1727).

Only a decade passed after the death of G. Bruno, and Galileo Galilei, through the telescope he invented, saw in the sky what had until now remained hidden to the naked eye. The mountains on the Moon clearly proved that the Moon is indeed a world similar to the Earth. The moons of Jupiter, circling around the greatest of planets, looked like a visual representation of the solar system. The changing phases of Venus left no doubt that this sun-lit planet actually revolved around it. Finally, the many stars invisible to the eye and especially the amazing scattering of stars that makes up the Milky Way - didn’t all this confirm Bruno’s teaching about countless suns and earths? On the other hand, the dark spots seen by Galileo on the Sun refuted the teachings of Aristotle and other ancient philosophers about the inviolable purity of the heavens. The celestial bodies turned out to be similar to the Earth, and this similarity between the earthly and the celestial forced us to gradually abandon the erroneous idea of ​​the Sun as the center of the entire Universe.

Contemporary and friend of Galileo, Johannes Kepler , clarified the laws of planetary motion, and Isaac Newton proved that all bodies in the Universe, regardless of size, chemical composition, structure and other properties mutually gravitate towards each other .

This classic model is quite simple and understandable. The universe is considered infinite in space and time, in other words, eternal. The basic law governing the movement and development of celestial bodies is the law of universal gravitation. Space is in no way connected with the bodies located in it and plays a passive role as a container for these bodies. If all these bodies suddenly disappeared, space and time would remain unchanged. The number of stars, planets and star systems in the Universe is infinitely large. Each celestial body undergoes a long life path. And to replace the dead, or rather, extinguished stars, new, young luminaries flare up. Although the details of the origin and death of celestial bodies remained unclear, basically this model seemed harmonious and logically consistent. In this form, this classical model dominated science until the beginning of the 20th century.

The infinity of the Universe in space harmoniously corresponded to its eternity in time. Now, a billion years ago, billions of years in the future it will remain essentially the same. The immutability of the cosmos seemed to emphasize the frailty and impermanence of everything earthly.

Differentiation (lat.) - division, dismemberment

Cosmology is the physical study of the Universe as a single whole, which includes the theory of the entire region covered by astronomical observations as part of the Universe.

Geocentric - with the center coinciding with the Earth

Topocentrism (<гр. topos место) – представление о центре мира, находящемся в месте обитания племени, народа.

It is well known that in Ancient Greece(and Rome) the geocentric system of the world dominated. In the descriptions of different philosophers it differs in detail. The most famous is the system of Aristotle, who apparently generalized the data known before him. Ptolemy also used this system (adding it with trims and epicycles). In this form, it was accepted by the Christian Church and medieval science and had a significant influence on the entire European culture. Figure 1 shows a diagram of Aristotle's geocentric system. Below we give its description according to A. Pannekoek.

Fig.1. Geocentric system of Aristotle-Ptolemy

“In the system of Aristotle, who united physics and astronomy into one harmonious system of the universe, all heavy elements tend to the center of the world and accumulate around it, forming a spherical mass of the Earth; lighter elements (water, air, fire) are collected in layers successively located one above the other. The word "down" means to the center of the world, the word "up" - to the surrounding celestial sphere. In addition to the four earthly elements, there is a fifth - perfect ether, from which the heavenly bodies are composed. Where the earth's elements end, there, according to Aristotle, is the orbit of the Moon. The planets and the Sun rotate behind the orbit of the Moon. The sphere of the Sun rotates throughout the year, the spheres of the planets each have their own rotation period. The celestial sphere, carrying the stars, rotates around the axis of the world per day. It carries with it all the internal spheres, and this explains the daily setting and rising of all the luminaries.”

I have always been surprised by the naivety and at the same time complexity of this system, reminiscent of the gears of a clock mechanism. The rotation of the firmament can be considered an observational fact, and the explanation for the daily movement of the luminaries seems quite natural. But to represent the annual movement of the Sun and the angular movement of the planets, it was necessary to introduce additional spheres - each luminary had its own sphere, and it was also necessary to link them all with the rotation of the sphere of the fixed stars (not to mention the trims and epicycles that appeared later). Apparently, some ancient philosophers felt this artificiality. Thus, Heraclides of Pontus explained the daily movement of the luminaries by the rotation of the Earth around its axis; Venus and Mercury in his system revolved around the Sun, but he still placed the Earth at the center of the universe. But Aristarchus of Samos, whom F. Engels rightly called the Copernicus of the Ancient World, taught that the Sun is in the center of the universe, and the Earth and planets revolve around it.

This means that the heliocentric system was already known in ancient times, but it was not widely used. As H. P. Blavatsky notes in “Isis Unveiled,” the heliocentric system, as well as the sphericity of the Earth, was known to the Egyptians from time immemorial.