Music of the Spheres
Landmarks in Astronomy
During the century before Galileo, the three greatest works in astronomy were the Almagest edited by Regiomontanus, Copernicus’ De revolutionibus, and Kepler’s Mysterium cosmographicum, published exactly 100 years after Regiomontanus’ Almagest.
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Kepler's Universe Mitchell, Ron |
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Almagest, ed. Regiomontanus Ptolemy, Claudius (1496) Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaios) lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the second century. Ptolemy’s technical work on astronomy, originally written in Greek, was titled Almagest (“The Greatest”) by its Arabic translators. |
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Almagest, ed. Reinhold Ptolemy, Claudius (1549) Erasmus Reinhold, a professor at Wittenberg who was sympathetic to Copernicus, published the first Greek edition of Ptolemy’s Almagest. |
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Four Books Ptolemy, Claudius (1610) The most popular ancient work on astrology was Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, as it was known in Greek, or Quadripartitum in Latin. Astrology provided the context in which astronomy was pursued. |
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Harmonics Ptolemy, Claudius (1682) Ptolemy’s influential music theory was related to his astronomy. Through sight, we apprehend beauty through astronomy. Through hearing, we apprehend beauty through harmony. |
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On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, 1543 Copernicus, Nicolaus (1543) Copernicus argued that the Sun rather than the Earth lies in the center of the universe. The Earth moves as a planet around the Sun. In 1543 little proof was available that the Earth moves; there were many reasons not to accept it. |
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On the Divine Faculty of Stars Offusius, Johann Franciscus (1570) This work on astrology was written by the leader of a Paris circle of astronomers. That group extensively annotated the OU copy of Copernicus within a decade after it was printed. |
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Sacred Mystery of the Structure of the Cosmos Kepler, Johann (1596) By far the best known 16th-century defender of Copernicus was Johann Kepler. In this work he demonstrated that vast empty regions lying between the planetary spheres, which were required by Copernicus, were not wasted space. |
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