Free Essays, Term Papers, Research Papers at Anti Essays

Since the beginning of time man has looked

to the sky to observe what he saw there. Some

have even tried to reason the patterns that

were visible. The ancient Babylonians mostly

ignored how it worked and merely followed

and studied the paths the heavenly objects

took. The ancient Greeks took that a step

further. They wanted to know how the universe

actually looked. Pythagoras was the first to set

a blueprint to the extraterrestrial forms. He

was followed by Plato and Aristotle. Finally,

Ptolemy wrapped it up neatly to complete the

model that stood for many years. Although his

model is incomplete, Ptolemy based his

ideas on the information and aesthetics of the

time in which he lived.

Pythagoras paved the way for astronomy by

describing the universe and how it all fit

together. In about 600 B.C.E., Pythagoras

created possibly the first model of the

universe. It was geocentric which meant the

objects in space revolved around the earth. In

the model the earth and all the ethereal

bodies were perfect spheres. They also

traveled in perfect spheres. These beliefs

stemmed directly from the idea of beauty in

this time period. To account for the retrograde

motion of the planets, Pythagoras devised that

the planets also orbited an epicenter that

sometimes made them appear to be going

backwards in the sky. The stars themselves

were embedded in a perfect sphere that

encompassed the entire universe as the

ancient Greeks knew it. Aristotle added his

own view to the geocentric representation in

the third century...